East Meets West - COAST - Eiko, Koma, Anna Halprin collaboration - related article: Halprin's Expressive Arts Therapy at Tampala Institute

Dance Magazine, Oct, 2001 by Wendy Perron

Eiko & Koma Meld Styles with Anna Halprin

A REVOLVING PORTABLE CAVE with stringy stalactites is lit from below as though from bubbling lava. The dancers Eiko and Koma fade into view, each in a separate hollow of this dreamlike environment. They are survivors, victims of a natural or unnatural disaster. Wearing a swath of rag or maybe nothing, ashen faced, bereft, their genders can barely be discerned from a distance. Existentially alone in this fire-and-ice, end-of-the-world scenario, they inch toward each other. The audience waits, with schooled patience, for the next small thing to happen. Depending on your inner resources, the wait can seem like mere forbearance, or it can be an opportunity to meditate on life and death, living and dying. Eons later, they finally make contact, skin touching skin. Without changing their demeanor, they suddenly seem ecstatic. Their relationship turns romantic, erotic. They seem to be in pre- or post-lovemaking embrace, damn the world outside. During the hourlong When Nights Were Dark (2000), audience members undergo the most extreme emotions while watching the most minimal action. Welcome to the mystery of Eiko & Koma, masters of their unique form of dance. [] Into this mystery steps another mystery: the phenomenon that is Anna Halprin. At the age of 81, Halprin joins Eiko & Koma in a world premiere, Be With, at the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts October 16 to 18.

Halprin, widely acknowledged as a visionary in dance, community ritual, and the healing arts (see "HALPRIN'S EXPRESSIVE ARTS THERAPY AT TAMALPA INSTITUTE"), has been helping plan this collaboration, entitled Be With because of its merging of generations and styles, for the past year. The fourth collaborator is experimental composer/cellist Joan Jeanrenaud, formerly of the Kronos Quartet.

In their apartment in Manhattan Plaza, a midtown housing complex mostly for artists, Eiko and Koma spoke about the development of their work. They met in Japan in a workshop given by Tatsumi Hijikata, founder of the Japanese contemporary form butoh, which means "dance of darkness." Each time Koma named a dancer they studied with--Hijikata, Kazuo Ohno, Manja Chmiel (a disciple of Mary Wigman), and Lucas Hoving--Eiko chirped, "Very briefly, very briefly." They wanted only to taste, not to submit to, a master. They claim they were ready to quit dance, but Hoving told them, "You can stop any time. But before you do, go see New York." They arrived in the United States in 1976. Within a few years, they earned a name for themselves as two of the most riveting postmodern, post-Hiroshima performers and image-makers, For their stark, sometimes hypnotic works, they've won numerous commissions and awards, including a MacArthur "genius award" in 1996. Gus Solomons jr, writing in Dance Magazine (see Reviews, March 1994, page 98), pronounced their performance of Wind (1993) "sacred," "life-affirming," and "sublime."

Halprin first saw Eiko and Koma dance in San Francisco in 1977. A mutual friend, the choreographer Kei Takei, had urged them to meet. Halprin was so struck with their artistry that she went backstage and gave them the key to her studio on Divisadero Street. "You can come any time," she told them. Since then she has seen many of Eiko & Koma's thirty-some works, has kept up an email relationship with them, and sends them videos of her work. The Japanese-born couple regard her as a friend and mentor, and more--as part of the family. She is pen-pal to their two teenage sons (who performed in Wind), and keeps photos of the boys next to her computer.

Last year Eiko and Koma flew to San Francisco to see Halprin's eightieth-year retrospective (see Presstime News, Dance Magazine, June 2000, page 34). During her talking solo, Memories from My Closet, she says the line, "And now that I am 80, I am just beginning to understand the plants and animals, the ocean, the creepy-crawlies, the stars and the moon." Koma immediately felt the connection to their work, which strives for the elemental, the most basic unit of life.

As Eiko says, "We always have the notion of dancing like plants and animals, because part of our desire to dance is to free from what is being human. We never wanted to express..." Koma finishes her thought, "... human emotions." He continues, "We are same: plants, animals, mountains. We are same." Adds Eiko, "The image I often use with my students is an amoeba. It's not about studying the outside look of it, but to allow yourself to say, `I'm related.'"

THE IDEA FOR THE collaboration was ignited by Charles and Stephanie Reinhart, who have commissioned fifteen works by Eiko and Koma and had presented Halprin with the 1996 Samuel Scripps Award at the American Dance Festival, which they co-direct. The Reinharts, also the artistic directors for dance at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, posed the question to the creating couple: "How about dreaming of something that you would like to do above and beyond what you've already been doing? In terms of outside influences, working with someone else, what would attract you; what would entice you?" The answer was working with Halprin. Charles Reinhart's immediate reaction, he recalled recently, was, "This rings the bell! It couldn't be better!" He knew how much both parties respect each other, and he sensed the possibility for an exciting collaboration. "I always feel that somehow when I'm watching Eiko and Koma that I'm going back to my prehistoric roots. With Anna, I am very much in my present roots. So this combination, these `rooting togethers' are going to bring up something--who knows?"