Interview with Eiko and Koma
March 3, 2006

What art forms have you been influenced by?

Koma: First, our teacher is Kazuo Ohno, he is the most influential person in our life. Kazuo Ohno started the so-called Butoh movement in Japan. He is 100 years old now. He performed here actually many, many times. His last concert in New York was when he was 87!

We met him when we were very young. I was 21, Eiko was 19.

So would you say that butoh as a form has been a big influence on your work?

Eiko: Well, Kazuo Ohno was one of the founders of the form, but we do not call our work that. I would make a distinction.

Koma: As a human being, as an artist, clearly we were deeply influenced by him.

How would you characterize your own work?

Koma: It is still called dance. We don’t say performing arts, we say “dance”.

Eiko: Dance in the most widest definition of dance. Many people do not see it that way, and that’s fine too.

Koma: I think that artists should have some liberty to change to another direction or to another school. I don’t want to put a title on it, saying butoh, or Martha Graham, or postmodern, or any such thing. We just say, simply, “dance”. People ask us, “What is your occupation?” Obviously, the answer is dancer and choreographer.

Eiko: As for other things, we clearly come from postwar Japan, where we were born and where we grew up. So all the things that had happened before we were born, and while we were children, we must have been influenced by them.

I want to make a point of saying that we have never studied traditional dance, Japanese or anything else. We have had many colleagues, in Germany, in America, so we usually try to make a point of saying that we are influenced by many people. That is another reason we do not want to box ourselves in. Just as we are influenced by colleagues from other fields, the McGraw School is a great influence to us. Our influence can be quite wide: Georgia O’Keefe is a very strong influence.

Koma: But obviously if you ask who has influenced us the most, then clearly we say Kazuo Ohno, because if I did not see him, I would not have started dancing.

Why did you choose to work in Cambodia for your latest work?

Eiko: We did not actually choose, it so happened. That is usually the case. Koma and I live together and we work together, so many things come along just like that.

In this particular case, we happened to be in Cambodia as visitors and we met those wonderful people and we wanted to go back. So we had to find a way to go back. This project is an excuse for us to have a longer relationship with people we like very much.

Koma: We are not working with them because they are Cambodian, but because they are art students. It is different.

Eiko: But it so happens that they are Cambodian and that, as such, with Cambodia’s history of hard times, there are things that bring us a certain sense of compassion towards them, but that is not about sympathy. It really is about compassion.

I do not want to be taken wrong in saying this but it is true in many ways sometimes that they remind us of our own childhood. Just the way they live their lives, in a kind of little chaos. You have some dreams, it is in the same sense as any other children of any other country. They are just young people, and the young are ambitious in the most wonderful ways, an elementary kind of ambition.

But it just so happens that they are the people we met in Cambodia.

So you would rather say that you were working with the students at the Reyum Arts Institute?

Yes.

What would you say differentiates Cambodian Stories from other work you have done?

Koma: Most of the time we are dancing.

Eiko: Not only that, we usually don’t dance with other people. This is the first time we dance with so many others. We have only had three exceptions to this in our 30-year career. We have had a lot of collaboration with musicians and visual artists, but really we have had only two other occasions in our career when we have danced with others. So this is essentially a very big difference.

Koma: Ten other performers! So my role is more like a director. Also because these students had never performed before so they needed a lot of attention. That is the biggest difference.

Were there other differences?

Eiko: Certainly the fact that they are all very young makes us feel much older! The exception I made when we danced with someone else was with an 85 year old person so that made us feel very young! Everything is relative, right? So this particular project makes us feel like we are seniors. And of course we are of that generation that feels forever young, coming from the ‘60s, so this is the first time that we are actually trying to be responsible towards younger people!

[laughs]

Otherwise we were always rebels, being radical in front of older people, but now somehow the roles have changed.

Koma: Particularly in the last two months I have come to understand how Paul Taylor or Merce Cunningham, when they get to a certain age, they try to retreat, giving room to the younger generation of dancers. It’s that kind of feeling I have been having. These young people are just so beautiful.

Eiko: However again we are feeling like a little bit of a senior relating to them, yet it is our youth that is relating to them too. As I said, it reminds us so much of how we used to be, this is how we used to feel. So it is both about our being older yet somehow about the younger us. So in a sense it is both: our youth relating to their youth, and our old age relating to them as a senior.

Koma: Also we are sharing a lot of common things: Asian-ness, being Asian. That is a big asset. Otherwise it would have been very difficult.

Eiko: So even though we said it just happened to be Cambodia, it does carry a weight that we are both Asian. We all eat rice. We sit on the ground and eat. We sleep in the same way. The way we relate to each other without much regard for names, putting names on artwork, or competition among us, everything is more a collective work.

It is an agricultural culture. And it is an old culture. No matter how distracted already they were, the Japanese in the same way, even when there was violence, even when there was defeat, that is still carried, the older culture. And they have that too. They still carry the older culture.

You said a little bit about this, but what was it like to work with artists in this Institute? These children are learning to paint. What was it like to try to train them to dance?

Koma: They paint mainly traditional figures, dancers, Buddha figures. So we told them that if they can draw such nice figures on a canvas maybe they can also pretend that they are those figures. So they started to imitate the figures by putting their bodies on top of their canvas paintings.

Eiko: We are also friendly with traditional court dancers. Cambodia has a strong tradition of court dance. They are beautiful but they are trained in their traditional work just like Japanese dancers are trained in traditional work. And as such, we can’t really work with them because our work is so different from some traditional movement so I don’t want to have a conflict. But with the painter children, they have no previous dance training. So it means they are very open to what we do and because they are teenagers, more or less, they are insecure without paintings but when we remind them of being painters, they are secure, because they have been painters. Their own training as painters rather than dancers actually helps them to feel their body without making so much of their own expression. They have been painting other people’s figures so they can find the ways to see the movement without asserting ownership, saying this is my dance. So it is easier for them in a way to merge into the painting, merge out of the painting, because the painting is their training.

We do remind them though that their ancestors’ voices speak through the archetypes they paint. The ancestors’ voices are in their bodies because they are Cambodians. So once they are reminded of that, it is easier for them to relate to their history and the figures they have been painting. So that is not a design, it is the lives of real people, the movement of real people.

What would you like audiences to learn from this work?

Eiko: The beauty. I very much want this piece to be absolutely beautiful. Not in a stereotypical way of what beauty is, just like anything we do, we like to expand the notion of dance and the notion of beauty. We would like to expand the notion, or at least question, what it means to be “professional”. I am not hiding the fact that they have never been trained as dancers. Is that wrong? But they are committed to this project. And we are committed to this project.

Koma: There is also a sense of collaboration, of collectivity, a lack of ego. A few of the children sometimes sleep in the school for financial reasons. They have no place to stay, some of them, they have no house, no parents.

They are really trying to imitate painting, not only performing, they do not have too much ego, like we see in Western art schools: “This is my painting”, putting their names on it and so on. For them in Reyum, some friend sees what you are doing, and comes and says, “No not this way, this way” and changes it. Unlike in America or elsewhere, none of these students sign their name to the paintings; instead they simply write “Reyum”. They have no ego-sense.

In Angkor Wat, it crossed my mind too, because they don’t put individual signatures on the crafts there either. Even with dancing, they tell each other what to do, they have this very strong collective sense, they know already how to collaborate, helping each other, advising each other. It is the same as their collective standards of painting. It is so easy, it is so relieving to work with them, to see how they work collectively.

Eiko: So we are working with the spirit of collectiveness, with the beauty of collective work. The students’ devotion to art comes through, not only through their bodies, but also through their culture and through their tradition. Because as Koma mentioned, all the sculptures in Angkor Wat are part of the collective beauty, even though it is each person doing the work. It serves the larger sense of culture. And they all do it collectively.

Because Koma and I work together, we don’t really have a sense of ownership either. I am joking to say this is Koma’s project because he has been in Cambodia much more than I have been. But still we work collectively together. So in a sense the collectiveness of Eiko and Koma now gets expanded and we meet with the collectiveness of Reyum. And it is also an exercise: when we say “we”, who are we? So we are expanding the sense of “we” to the point where I kind of hope that the audience starts to feel themselves as “we” or at least connected, not so much as “the other” but as an expansion of “we”.

So I hope that this collectiveness will be a celebration of humanity, and of the experience of being human.

Koma: One more thing: there is something different in Cambodia. Khmer culture, today’s Khmer people, is a big asset. For motor taxi drivers, with no money in their pockets, culture is very important, they still dearly own their cultures. It is very strong.

Eiko: Culture is a savior. Khmer people are different from Vietnamese people and vice versa, and I think that difference is as important as our common understanding of being Asian. In that sense, we are all Asian, we are very strongly connected, but that does not work well unless we also know the differences.

Koma: Because if they are believing that in their blood they have their ancestors, that is their heritage. Even the poor believe they have their ancestors’ and great-ancestors’ blood in their bodies. So they create such a beautiful work.

Eiko: Financially the country is not a success story. Especially in comparison with neighboring countries. It is not easy to be a lesser success. Yet once they had been a very important culture of that peninsula, the Khmer used to be a very major kingdom, and recognizing their own culture and heritage in their own body is giving them a sense of dignity and pride, which I think is very important. It is important for them to recognize their own value.

Is there anything else you would like to add about the piece?

Eiko: Well, the piece is definitely multi-dimensional. Every painting, every set is designed and painted by them in collaboration with us. If the audience would like to, they can also buy the painting and all the profits will go to Reyum. I don’t know how exactly we will do this in New York, but they can definitely log into our website and they can get the information from there. All the profits for the paintings go to Reyum.

This whole project was started with our desire to be with them and with our desire to be able to help the school because the school doesn’t really have a good budget. The school exists only by the people’s help. The school is funded by Rockefellers and such foundations, but definitely we do feel it is very important that school gives what it gives now to the future generations of Cambodians.

Koma: The school director and the art institute director, Ly Daravuth, is the founder of the institution as well. If he did not start this school, this project would not exist.

Eiko: Reyum is really proof of what an individual can do with the help of others. But help only comes if the individual starts something. And Daravuth, and Ingrid Muan, together they started this institution, which is quite heroic. This is a kind of word that I reserve for those people.

Koma: Still now they are not getting any help from the Cambodian government.

Eiko: They are the first contemporary gallery that is not for commercial purposes. It is a non-profit, contemporary gallery. They have a printing division, they have the school division, they have also a research division. This is a small organization but it has tremendous achievements. Just like any place else, if you are the first one to do anything, you are the pioneer. So we have tremendous respect for those directors, for Daravuth and for Ingrid, too, who unfortunately passed away. We have a lot of respect for both.

Koma: They have 150 students, they are giving education for free to all of them for four years. I don’t know how they do it, but I really admire and respect what they are doing.

Eiko: But this project gave the students a chance, many of the performers are graduate students, or seniors of the school, it gives them the chance to return something back to the school. So we are not engaging them as individuals but we are engaging them as Reyum.

Interview conducted by Nermeen Shaikh.