EIKO & KOMA

 

For over thirty years, the Japanese-born choreographer/dancers Eiko & Koma have created an influential theatre of movement out of stillness, shape, light, and sound. In tribute and collaboration, acclaimed American poet Forrest Gander has written a mesmerizing series of poems—hinging around a dance schematic—that captures and extends the dancers’ performance with lyrical intensity and vividness. An excerpt of his expansive, liquid lines was threaded through Eiko & Koma’s retrospective catalogue of dance works, Time Is Not Even, Space is Not Empty.


Two larval bodies naked with faces
and seared straw in their hair hold our looking
to the dark back of and beyond

 

“In all, five of the first dozen books of the New Directions Pamphlet Series fall, in one way or another, into the project of documentary poetics. Forrest Gander’s Eiko & Koma (#8) consists of poems inspired by these masters of modern performance. Most of the poems take their titles from specific dance pieces and describe their movements so viscerally—’articulate (fanfingered) / imploring / first figures / spent and mutual with a world / two bodies / releasing the event’—that Anna Lee Campbell’s accompanying photographs, while beautiful and welcome, are almost superfluous.” —Benjamin Paloff, Rain Taxi

Poems from Eiko & Koma set to music by composer Alice Nakamura

Performed at Kioi Hall in Tokyo / June 2023

Buy

“Pulitzer finalist Gander’s mesmerizing series of poems— hinging on a dance schematic—captures and extends Eiko & Koma’s performances with lyrical intensity and vividness.”
— Publishers Weekly

Video Poems

Click image to view

Photograph: Jay Anderson

Photograph: by Anna Lee Campbell

 
 
Nancy Campana