Beyond Human

The performance duo Eiko and Koma performed at ADF this week.  They have been performing together for 40 years, and are in the middle of a multi-year Retrospective Project.  As they tour for the next couple of years, they will be performing selections from their repertory (usually abbreviated from the original length) and a new work, Raven.  I had seen works of theirs (or excerpts, really) on video, but nothing live.  I had thought their work to be primarily site-adaptive, often in outdoor, natural environments, and so was curious how they would transform a standard, proscenium theater for their performance.  In some sense, they brought something of the outside world into the theater, using natural materials like feathers and straw, but also created a sort of in-between space with a canvas backdrop and floor covering; the theater space was clearly still a theater, but made into an environment that suggested a natural setting.

I was really struck with a certain quality of their work, almost a paradox of human vs. beyond human.  In a sense, the very essence of human nature and human needs seems to be at the center of their work.  They often perform with minimal costumes, and sometimes no clothes at all, so that the human body in its entirety (in its "natural state"?) is visible.  And yet, the two do not draw or pay any attention to their nakedness, seeming not to even notice.  This attitude, plus the white paint that covered their skin in this performance, made them seem almost inhuman.  Separate from human.

The work also reaches beyond human scale, where human desires and needs meet the natural world, with its internal and external cycles, development and death, regeneration.  They don't just link the human and natural world, but show them to be indistinguishable, inseparable.  I'm still wrapping my mind around how to make sense of it, in words or in feeling.

Here is the beginning of my review:

 “To live is to be fragile,” reads the poem, “A Moth,” adapted from Mitsuharu Kaneko, which is printed in the program for Eiko and Koma’s Retrospective Project.  Certainly, Eiko and Koma’s work reveals the fragility and desperation of human life, but also the fierceness and determination.  The duo presented three works this week (June 28-30) at the Reynolds Industries Theater: “Raven,” a new work, “Night Tide” (1984), and an excerpt from “White Dance” (1976), their first choreographed piece. 

 It is impossible not to think about the passage of time with respect to Eiko and Koma’s work.  Their Retrospective Project intentionally emphasizes this; displayed in the lobby of the theater are set pieces, props, and videos from their work together over the past 40 years.  Detailed program notes about their habits of recycling performance ideas, props, costumes, and music, and the literal regeneration of past work on the program reinforces the awareness of evolution through time. 

 But this awareness is also embedded in the performance work itself.  The notoriously slow pace of the pair’s movement allows the passage of time to be felt and consciously seen as we notice how their bodies move, work, and balance, creating striking movement images; we watch the evolution—development and decay—of each gesture, each step.  We have time to take in how their bodies relate to the performing environment, to consider the way time works on the environment, and by extension, the human body.

Read the rest of the review here.