Eiko & Koma
Since 1972, Eiko & Koma have worked as co-artistic directors, choreographers, and performers, creating a unique theater of movement out of stillness, shape, light, sound, and time.
They started to work as independent artists in Tokyo in 1972 and at the same time began to study with Kazuo Ohno, who, along with Hijikata, was a central figure in the Japanese avant-garde theatrical movement of the 1960s.
New Moon Stories (1986) at the Brooklyn Academy of Music’s Next Wave Festival marked their 10th anniversary in the United States and the first of five commissions from BAM.
[2][1] Eiko & Koma have toured to England, France, Germany, Finland, Switzerland, Netherlands, Austria, Israel, Portugal, Russia, Poland, the Baltic countries, Tunisia, Colombia, Brazil, Argentina, Korea, China, Taiwan, Cambodia, and Japan.
[1] Eiko & Koma’s iconoclastic work combines slow and nuanced movement vocabulary with bold theatrical design.
Eiko & Koma’s movement and choreography often progress in a scale of time that is radically different from everyday life or other theater productions.
Why not us?”[2] In 1996, Eiko & Koma were named MacArthur Fellows—the first time in the program’s fifteen-year history that the foundation awarded a fellowship to collaborators.
[2] Eiko & Koma’s noted stage collaborations include Mourning, (2007, with pianist Margaret Leng Tan), Cambodian Stories: An Offering of Painting and Dance, (2006, with young artists who graduated from the Reyum Art School), Offering (2003, with the clarinetist David Krakauer), Be With (2001, with Anna Halprin and cellist Joan Jeanrenaud), When Nights Were Dark (2000, with composer Joseph Jennings and a Praise Choir), the proscenium version of River (1997, with the Kronos Quartet, who performed Somei Satoh’s commissioned score live), Wind (1993, with Chanticleer and its music director Joseph Jennings) Land (1991, with Native American flutist/composer Robert Mirabal, American visual artist Sandra Lerner), By The River (1986, with visual artist Clayton Campbell) and Fluttering Black (1979, with Glenn Branca).
Dancing in the Street produced Offering in parks, plazas and gardens throughout Manhattan and Eiko & Koma later toured the work across America and internationally.
The project included performative and non-performative aspects, including new commissions of a living installation and a stage work, reworking of older pieces, outdoor performances, photo exhibitions, video installations, showings of their media dances and documentaries, the publication of a retrospective catalog, workshops and other educational activities such as panel discussions and lectures.
By applying the tools and concepts traditionally used in creating a visual art retrospective, Eiko & Koma had both a broader and deeper framework with which to engage audiences in their work.
[5] In 2016, Eiko was named Dignity Initiative Artist in Residence at The Cathedral of St. John the Divine in New York, where A Body in Fukushima photographs were exhibited for six months.
A book, A Body in Fukushima, will be co-published by Wesleyan University Press and Philadelphia Contemporary, and include 300+ images curated from a repository of tens of thousands of photographs created by Eiko and William Johnston during their four visits to Fukushima, as well as a series of writings by the artists on their time in an abandoned, irradiated landscape and their experience of expanded collaboration.
[5] Also in 2017, during a Rauschenberg Residency on Captiva Island, FL, Eiko inaugurated The Duet Project, an open-ended series of cross-disciplinary, cross-cultural, and cross generational experiments with a radical diversity of fellow artists both living and dead.
[2] Eiko is the founding fellow of the Center for Creative Research (CCR), an eleven-member think tank of choreographers who designed and implemented interdisciplinary study at U.S. institutions of higher learning.
During the 2017-2018 academic year, Eiko was a think tank fellow in Wesleyan University's College of the Environment on the theme of "From Disruptions to Disasters: A Lens on the Human-Environment Relationship.
