Art Work Talk with Eiko & Koma

“When you go see Eiko and Koma, you get the permission to be free. Your mind is rinsed. It is very slow, heightened melodrama. You are very free to not look. You are very free to think. [Watching them] becomes a time for you to be quiet with yourself,” said an audience member at the Art Work talk given by Eiko and Koma on March 8 at Eugene Lang College.

[Eiko and Koma at Art Work talk on March 8, 2011; photo by Emily Katz]

The artists spoke briefly about their partnership history and endorsed their “Retrospective Project” (2009-2012). Eiko clicked through their website http://eikoandkoma.org/home, showing the audience the resources available to them, which includes videos of all their works (either in their entireties or excerpts), photographs from original performances, articles written by or about the duo, and their teaching manifesto for the workshop I am taking—Delicious Movement. Their website embodies the “nakedness” in that exhibit in their work. Not many artists are as willing and open as Eiko and Koma in terms of sharing their work on the Internet. “I didn’t want to hide it,” said Eiko. I think it would be an interesting contrast, either seeing them perform live then revisiting their work online, or vice versa.

Here is a preview of "Naked" from the Walker Art Center:

According to Eiko, they have a very small pride of being naked in most of their works.“We’ve always liked to expose skin. I just became 59 and Koma became 63, not many couples have danced naked for 30 years.”

Their creative partnership seemed to stem out of the mutual desire to experiment and experience. Eiko and Koma insist on always appearing as a duo and also in making their own sets (or as they call it, “environment”). According to Koma, they set up the mood and the movement comes out of the mood rather than from choreography. The concept of a living installation is different from a performance (which has a prescribed starting and ending point), so each person is free to come and go as he wishes. Eiko and Koma have an interesting attitude on being the installation—they want the audience to sympathize and feel compassionate towards their work.

One could see how they feed off each other through the way they talk in “real life.” On stage, they seem so aware and trusting of each other, which reveals something about how their creative partnership has affected their work and, at the same time, how their work has affected them.

A recent article from the LA Times about Eiko & Koma:

Eiko and Koma share a lifetime of choreography

By Valerie Gladstone

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