Avant-garde artists Eiko & Koma have gained international acclaim with audiences for nearly fifty years. Despite receiving prestigious awards and fellowships and amassing hundreds of reviews, their breadth of work is rarely the subject of academic research. Rosemary Candelario's 2016 Flowers Cracking Concrete: Eiko & Koma's Asian/American Choreographies fills this void by thoughtfully examining why Eiko & Koma continue to be undertheorized and often misread by reviewers preoccupied with Orientalist ideals. Using choreographic analysis, participant observation, interviews, and archival research, Candelario reveals how Eiko & Koma's movement practice, teaching, choreographic process, and performances explore social issues and offer methods for sustained political engagement. In seven chapters, Candelario provides meticulous choreographic description to theorize Eiko & Koma's relationship to time, nature, violence, mourning, renewal, and intercultural exchange. Focusing on their concerns as transnational artists, Candelario demystifies and de-exotifies Eiko & Koma and underscores the performers’ rigorous examination of their racialized and gendered bodies in relationship to the physical and political environment. As the title suggests, just as a growing flower can slowly, with persistence, push through the weight of concrete, Eiko & Koma in each performance and in their long-standing career as working artists have achieved “gradual but profound transformation” that has affected the dance community and beyond (4). Candelario, too, bolstered by the works of Asian American dance studies scholars like Yutian Wong, SanSan Kwan, and Priya Srinivasan, makes fractures in the sedimentation of Orientalist discourse that has denied rigorous analysis of Asian/American bodies.
Through a discussion of their biographies and an examination of over thirty of their works, Candelario makes an argument for Eiko & Koma as both Japanese and Asian American artists. They are Japanese not only because of their upbringing, but also as citizens influenced by the nation's postwar political climate and innovative art scene. Eiko and Koma were among the many student activists of the early 1970s angered by the Japanese government's efforts to suppress dissent and sanitize the image of the distressed nation. As activists-turned-artists, Eiko & Koma met as residents in Tatsumi Hijikata's live/work space, Asbestos Hall, in Tokyo. Uncomfortable with Hijikata's controlling methods the two left after spending less than a year under his tutelage. They took improvisational classes with butoh pioneer Kazuo Ohno, whose approach to movement was to allow the individual to “find their own dance” (37). Despite Eiko & Koma's lifelong friendship with and admiration for Ohno, their time with him was also limited. The two soon left for Europe, landing in Germany in 1972, where they trained under the mentorship of Mary Wigman's assistant, Manja Chmiel.
Eiko & Koma's choreography is also rooted in their Asian American identities. In 1976, after two years of performing in Europe and North Africa, they were invited to perform in New York. A year later, Eiko & Koma moved to New York City where they refined their style through their involvement in the downtown dance scene in the 1970s and 1980s. As artists of color, their experiences navigating life in the United States (raising a family, seeking funding sources, establishing collaborative projects, teaching in universities) heavily inform their work. Candelario cites David Palumbo Liu's use of a solidus between Asian and American to represent Eiko & Koma's identities as a part and apart of US culture (1999). This marker points to the history of Asian exclusion, practiced through restrictive immigration policies and extended through acts of violence, incarceration, and discrimination. Such actions, however, coexisted with efforts to increase cheap labor, exploiting Asian bodies to build the nation's transportation and agricultural infrastructure (see Lowe Reference Lowe1996). As these histories repeat, the solidus indicates the irresolvable tensions that continue to inform dynamics of race in the United States. Candelario positions Eiko & Koma in this history to further emphasize their activist approach to dance.
More than a turn toward cultural specificity, this assertion of Asian/American identity calls for broader discourse analysis. Candelario draws from Asian American studies, Japanese studies, and dance studies to examine Eiko & Koma's marginality and grapple with how Eiko & Koma confront complex issues of identity, nationalism, transnationalism, and imperialism in their repertoire. Her argument builds on Yutian Wong's 2010 research that articulates how Orientalist consumption of Asian physical practices diminishes Asian American bodies “by associating them with an imagined past that is both temporal and spatial” (Wong Reference Wong2010, 13). Citing the appropriative use of Asian dance forms by white artists, such as Ruth St. Denis, Merce Cunningham, and Steve Paxton, Wong argues that Asian Americans have been excluded from performance, rendering their bodies unnecessary in the expression of culture. Reviewed under these Orientalist standards, Eiko & Koma are often illegible or misread as butoh by viewers that desire to affiliate their Japanese bodies with a “traditional” or “primitive” Japanese, or any Asian, form. Eiko & Koma's sequence of incredibly slow movements is often compared to meditation or Noh theater, ignoring the intentional political efficacy of the choreography to alter time and space (90–100). American audiences also misjudge Eiko & Koma as foreign or otherworldly, so as to deny their critical works that derive from their experience as Asian Americans confronting racial discrimination and xenophobia.
Unable to be recognized as contemporary, political, and innovative, Eiko & Koma exist along the margins of American dance history. Candelario counters these histories of invisibility and recuperates Eiko & Koma's Asian/American bodies in order to focus in on their choreography and their committed efforts to question and challenge hegemonic norms. She theorizes their slowness as a resistive exercise—what she terms, adagio activism, “a decelerated, durational process compelled by a deeper searching” (7). Their slowed movement may be barely visible but their bodies are still in motion. Their bodies reveal an alternative way to remain present, endure time, and enact change. As Candelario explains, slowness is utilized to different ends. In River, Eiko & Koma submerge themselves in water; their bodies sway with man-made and natural debris. As the movement of the sun marks the passage of time, their bodies remain afloat, dissolving boundaries between human, nature, and technology. Presented in partnership with local environmental organizations, River, performed in ten different locations, also brings attention to these neglected waterways. Candelario contends that slowness also facilitates sustained mourning. In their choreography, Eiko & Koma allow their bodies to remain in grief as both perpetrators and victims of violence. In an unresolved and unsettled state of loss, their commitment to mourning with the public allows grief to be shared as a social act. Repeated over several decades, the bodies that suffer are mourned and respected collectively. Slow and methodical movement also enables Eiko & Koma to face devastation and enact renewal, transforming mourning into acts of reparation.
Candelario's analysis privileges the body to reveal how Eiko & Koma's choreography grapples with the fragility and resilience of the (Asian/American) human spirit. As Eiko & Koma enter their fifth decade of performing, they continue to make new works and revisit themes from their past. Through their persistence, they aim to further nuance their understandings and generate new knowledge through their bodies—in motion, in stillness, and in contact with each other and their environment. They remain present, ready to resist reductive readings that narrow their reach and obscure their aims for social change. Bringing attention to their creative strategies to navigate their abjection, Candelario determines that Eiko & Koma's dancemaking offers a necessary Asian Americanist cultural critique.
