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Flowers Cracking Concrete
Eiko & Koma’s Asian/American Choreographies
Wesleyan Dance
Sales Date: 2016-07-05
A long overdue study of two dance artists central to the American avant-garde dance scene since the 1970s
Flowers Cracking Concrete is the first in-depth study of the forty-year career of Eiko & Koma—two artists from Japan who have lived and worked in New York City since the mid-1970s, establishing themselves as innovative and influential modern and postmodern dancers. They continue to choreograph, perform, and give workshops across the United States and around the world. Rosemary Candelario argues that what is remarkable about Eiko & Koma's dances is not what they signify but rather what they do in the world. Each chapter of the book is a close reading of a specific dance that reveals a choreographic theme or concern. Drawing on interviews, live performance, videos, and reviews, Candelario demonstrates how ideas have kinesthetically and choreographically cycled through Eiko & Koma's body of work, creating dances deeply engaged with the wider world through an active process of mourning, transforming, and connecting.
Hardcover is un-jacketed.
Acknowledgments
A Note About Japanese Names and Words
Introduction
From Utter Darkness to White Dance
"Good Things Under 14th Street"
Japanese/American
Dancing-with Site and Screen
Sustained Mourning
Ground Zeroes
"Take Me to Your Heart": Intercultural Alliances
In Lieu of a Conclusion: "Step Back and Forward, and Be There"
Notes
Bibliography
Index
ROSEMARY CANDELARIO has published work in the Journal of Theatre, Dance and Performance Training, International Journal of Screendance, The Oxford Handbook of Dance and the Popular Screen, and The Scholar & Feminist Online. She is Assistant Professor at Texas Woman's University.
"[D]istinctive for its extremely slow, minimalistic movement and their collaborative, hands-on approach to every aspect, from movement to costumes to sets ... site-specific works aimed to convey a message about the spaces they were performed in."
~Rachel Caldwell, Dance Teacher Magazine
"Clearly written, Flowers Cracking Concrete offers both a comprehensive, invaluable analysis of Eiko and Koma's work and a compelling, insightful examination. This book is indispensible reading for those interested in the histories and practices of contemporary concert dance, and in the luminous works of these internationally renowned artists."
~Judith Hamera, professor of dance, Lewis Center for the Arts, Princeton University
"Eiko & Koma have been staggeringly creative pillars of American dance for decades. Now, Rosemary Candelario has given them their due in this rich picture of them as politically active avant-garde performers with complex Japanese/American identities who address intercultural contact, interfacing with nature, and communal mourning."
~Bruce Baird, author of Hijikata Tatsumi and Butoh: Dancing in a Pool of Gray Grits
"Flowers Cracking Concrete contributes a vital perspective to the growing scholarship on the groundbreaking artists Eiko & Koma. Professor Candelario's detailed examination of their artistic development over half a century situates it in relation to discourses of orientalism and Asian American identity in a way that is critically illuminating. It allows us to see the work of Eiko & Koma beyond the dead-ends of (orientalist) "identity" and deracinated aesthetics, while staying firmly grounded in Eiko & Koma's deeply personal and deeply political oeuvre."
~Karen Shimakawa, New York University
"Clearly written, Flowers Cracking Concrete offers both a comprehensive, invaluable analysis of Eiko and Koma's work and a compelling, insightful examination. This book is indispensible reading for those interested in the histories and practices of contemporary concert dance, and in the luminous works of these internationally renowned artists."
~Judith Hamera, professor of dance, Lewis Center for the Arts, Princeton University
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