‘Wind’ weaves relation between nature, life
Performance team Eiko and Koma appear at Schoenberg Hall
tonight
By Rebecca Zell
In the late 1960s, two Japanese university students followed the
credo of the times and dropped out of school to express
themselves.
They were Eiko and Koma, man and woman artists, and they were
interested in anything anti-organization, anti-capitalist; they
sought the unplanned. These two students questioned authority and
craved experimentation with new ideas.
Today, Eiko and Koma are a performance team that tours the
world, showcasing what began as an avant-garde theatrical movement
and art: neither dancing nor acting alone, but creating a haunting,
beautiful combination of these forms.
The duo will make its West Coast premiere of "Wind" tonight at
Schoenberg Hall.
In pieces like "Land" and Eiko and Koma’s latest performance
"Wind," the dancers do not play specific roles, but rather
symbolize life forces joining together, separating and searching.
Neither artist has studied traditional dance or theater, yet
together they choreograph and perform only their own work.
Throughout the 1970s and ’80s, this pair worked with the leaders
of dance and avant-garde performance in Germany, and toured
extensively through the Netherlands, Switzerland and Tunisia.
The duo’s choreography has developed out of "dreams about rivers
and stones. We dance about moving aspects of lives, but not just
human lives," explains Eiko, now a 42-year-old resident of New York
City.
When asked to describe her style of movement, Eiko enigmatically
says, "It is not human, it is not theater, it is time and space. We
dance the connections between lives of the present and those of the
past, of our ancestors. We dance the plants growing and dying."
Eiko and Koma have received such emphatic praise from
international critics during their many years of performing that
UCLA is truly fortunate to host this celebrated pair. Not only did
they dare to break away from traditional education and society, but
today their programs deal with issues and ideas that are very
important to all of us.
The artists treat everything on Earth as alive and important.
They feel that all things, human and otherwise, are connected and
constantly shifting.
"In everything they do, you sense the absolute and mysterious
beauty of the body," says the San Francisco Chronicle. The Boston
Globe raves that Eiko and Koma "invoked a world so exquisite in its
detail and so ferocious in its impact that it left the audience
reeling."
For their innovation and sometimes outrageous imagination, Eiko
and Koma have won several awards, including the Guggenheim Memorial
Foundation Fellowship for 1984, and the New York Dance and
Performance Award in 1984 and 1990.
PERFORMANCE: Eiko and Koma "Wind." Friday, Jan.13., 8 p.m. at
Schoenberg Hall. $8 student tickets. For more info call (310)
825-2101.