On Dance
JACOBS, LAURA A.
On Dance HARROWING COMMUNICATION BY LAURA A. JACOBS LIGHT SEEPS CAUTIOUSLY Onto the stage. It caresses, irradiates and modulates the carved-ivory shapes formed by Eiko and Koma. Apocalypse...
...Wilson's stages are, however, lush with symbols and historical allusions onwhichto hang meanings...
...In NMS they may be linked as mentor to novice, female to male, living to dead...
...Whereas Wilson creates an image-theater based on a Wagnerian coalescence of elements (hardly a new idea), Eiko and Koma go in the other direction, coaxing the fantastical out of the minimal...
...In "Shadows," given its world premiere at the bam ,Koma(theman) holds a lifeless Eiko on top of a dirt mountain center-stage and then lets her slip over the side, as if into the void...
...Eiko and Koma distill tendencies shared by many Next Wavers...
...The whole puts one in mind of an underworld as envisioned by Browning or Tennyson: It's all gloamy landscape and isolation verging on nothingness...
...In "Night Tide" thedarkness recedes to reveal two abstract shapes, smooth as the polished stonework of Henry Moore or long-weathered pieces of bone...
...Similar concentration of movement can be detected in Robert Wilson's multi-media "operas," notably Einstein on the Beach and, more recendy, the CIVIL warS: a tree is best measured when it is down...
...Performing their own works exclusively since 1972, the two have become bound in a sort of mythic complicity...
...Elegy" sees the two naked on opposite sides of the stage, the mountain that separates them reflected in the shallow waters they stand in...
...If you're not in the mood for such a sustained conduction of mental and physical energy this can be maddening...
...In the CIVIL warS' Act V, "the Rome Section," also presented in the Next Wave Festival (the entire work, so far performed only in sections, takes 12 hours), we see Hercules, Garibaldi, Abe Lincoln on stilts, and Robert E. Lee in outer space babbling word salad...
...Is this a place or a state of mind...
...For all his epic proportions Wilson deals in the finite, wringing maximal poetic value from myths, legends, collective assumptions, even cliches...
...Or maybe everything happens...
...For Eiko and Koma not even existence is a given...
...Moments later they creep across the stage in diaphanous white shifts and cradle each other...
...With their long hair, worn loose and unruly, we rarely see theirfaces...
...So do lack of climax and of fixed external reference...
...In New Moon Stories(NMS), the haunting hour-long program these two Japanese artists presented as part of the Brooklyn Academy of Music's (bam) Next Wave Festival, nothing happens...
...As they lie on their sides the deep muscular wave caused by a lifting shoulder could as easily imply spiritual progress as it does some elemental physical reflex...
...Silence, slowness, stillness all figure prominently in their dynamic...
...Meticulous and elastic, form comes to seem a mysterious, evolving phenomenon, and its link with knowable meaning grows ever more tenuous...
...Watching any one of the four works that make up the NMS—"Night Tide," "Beam," "Shadows," and "Elegy"—you could be at the dawn of creation or the end of time, in a primeval tidepool or on the bank of the river Styx...
...Like an Adam and Eve transported to an undefined cosmos, the two are vulnerable yet equal to the surrounding strangeness...
...Apocalypse pervades the atmosphere, and journey seems to be the unifying theme...
...Practically turning themselves inside out, they seem to tell us that the key to the universe is lodged not in received knowledge, but somewhere in the bone...
...And yet in concentrating on the egg-like line of a thigh as it widens into the buttock, or the changing, glacial plane of the breast as the spine arches, your own sense of time begins to dilate: Things move at the speed of evolution, of decay, of epiphany...
...The shapes change at an almost imperceptible rate, and one realizes with surprise that they are indeed human figures...
...At such moments Eiko and Koma seem more Uke expressionists than minimalists...
...It is their bodies that communicate— and what harrowing communication...
...Eiko and Koma undermine all that...
...Perhaps they are ghosts who mourn their lost physical selves...
...Working on stages that are bare or simply set, they can take five minutes to move an apparent inch, 10 minutes to raise their heads off the floor...
...or they may simply be of the same put-upon species...
...Glints of golden light swim in the glassy black waters and the cavernous Lepercq Space looms high above...
Vol. 69 • December 1986 • No. 19
