LOVE-HATE RELATIONSHIPS.

LOVE-HATE RELATIONSHIPS EIKO & KOMA BROOKLYN ACADEMY OF MUSIC, HARVEY THEATER BROOKLYN, NEW YORK NOVEMBER 29-DECEMBER 2, 2000

Responses to the work of Eiko & Koma generally fall into two camps. There are those who think that the husband-and-wife team has been doing the same dance for the last twenty-five years, writhing with excruciating slowness on the floor or ground in various organic substances from rice (Grain of many years ago) to, more recently, a murky riverbank (River). In the other camp are those who find the couple's butoh-associated work high art--finely honed, distilled pieces that depict primal human struggles and longings.

Those who think of the work as art worth watching were clearly in the majority at the couple's latest piece, When Nights Were Dark. While a few audience members deserted during the dance's one hour and twenty minutes, most stayed.

Central to the success of the work was the ingenious, ever-changing set, a small caravan fitted out with tied fabrics and fir branches that revolved slowly for the entire piece, coming full circle by the dance's end. Depending on the angle of view and the brilliant lighting (by Scott Poitras, with input by Jeff Fontaine), the overhead fabric suggested Spanish moss, the lower fabric seemed to be smoldering embers and the fir boughs were almost featherlike. The set read variously as bed, raft, coffin, cave.

The action of the piece was that in this angled landscape of shifting textures, the two nude figures moved slowly and separately for almost the entire work. They rendered images of primitive figures, caveman and woman--she with hair cast over her bare breasts, a mermaid beached or a woman emerging from the primordial ooze, pulling away from an underground cavern. The two yearned toward one another, but came together only in the last few minutes, chest to chest, her head thrown back ecstatically. Once, Eiko arched backwards over a branch; it broke and fell to the floor, the crack shocking in the tightly controlled environment of image and sound.

It was the combination and balancing of elements that made When Nights Were Dark a satisfying work. Integral to its artistic success was the accompaniment: the Praise Choir Singers, five miked a cappella singers who sat facing the stage, performing a sustained, mesmerizing drone from a score by Joseph Jennings. Eiko has said that for her the music suggests the hum of the human body. This was their equivalent of the grand Strauss waltzes that accompany views of the spacecraft gliding through space in Stanley Kubrick's classic film 2001: A Space Odyssey. There, it was elegant musical simulation of the cosmic; here, musical simulation of the pulse of life. That has been Eiko & Korea's theme all these years: the persistent pulse of life itself.