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A Letter to DonChristian

in response to “On Boundaries” by DonChristian

May 25, 2020

Hi DonChristian,

The Kitchen invited you to write about the archival footage of Eiko & Koma’s 1981 performances of Trilogy and Nurse’s Song for its Video Viewing Room.

You were excited. The curatorial idea of this time warp also intrigued me. 1981 was nearly a decade before you were born. Had you ever been obliged to engage with works that did not assume you yet as an audience member? 

My immediate memory of this show is of embarrassment. I remember a clear sense of failure. Especially in Nurse’s Song. 

But with you involved, I was curious. How would you travel nearly 40 years back and meet Eiko & Koma, me at 29, younger than you are now. I felt it was the next step of our collaboration that neither of us knew was coming. Before you even wrote a word, you had already pushed me to a place of discomfort through remembering.

Remembering 1. Friends.

Because of the artists whose work we saw and whom we became friends with, our 1976 visit to New York became a move to New York. We had collaborated with Glenn Branca—we and his band members wearing earmuffs and blindfolds. We became close to Charlotte Moorman and many more. We loved these artists who were driven excessively by their desires and creativity. Their vulnerability was intentional. 

Bob Carroll and Allen Ginsberg were radical for their being so available. Their funkiness was a construct, a cross between their aesthetic and their politics.

In seeing Bob’s Salmon Show many times, I saw that a performer grows without being beautiful. I wanted to be like him. That desire drove us during that period. With Bob, we formed Dirt Shop, which we termed as “a coalition of concerned artists for information exchange and world survival.” Wanting to build our own center, we looked around many loft and storefront spaces only to find we could not afford any. 

We were smitten with adoration not only for Bob but also for Allen. We heard Allen sing William Blake’s poems. It was not the song itself but Allen’s proclamation of his being directly connected to Blake that moved us. We proposed to work with songs Allen composed from poems in Blake’s Songs of Innocence. He grinned. The first try was Nurse’s Song. 

When the voices of children are heard on the green
And laughing is heard on the hill,
My heart is at rest within my breast
And every thing else is still

Then come home my children, the sun is gone down
And the dews of night arise
Come come leave off play, and let us away
Till the morning appears in the skies

No no let us play, for it is yet day
And we cannot go to sleep
Besides in the sky, the little birds fly
And the hills are all cover’d with sheep

Well well go & play till the light fades away

And then go home to bed
The little ones leaped & shouted & laugh’d
And all the hills echoed. 

Years after the show at The Kitchen, Allen called my name loudly from across the street in the East Village. He hurried to me and said, “Now I have a better recording of ‘Songs of Innocence. I will send it to you.” A cassette with his messy handwriting arrived within a few days. I regretted that we never touched another poem since that first try. Decades later, I invited Allen into a small dressing room of the Japan Society where my teacher Kazuo Ohno was taking a shower after his remarkable performance. Allen and I, both deeply affected by Ohno’s dance, sat together without talking. Ohno’s soaped and wet body was visible through a shower glass door. It was intimate. I was grateful to have known these men for a long time,

I am writing these things to you because when I talk to you, I am looking at you. But The Kitchen’s archive video makes me also see the other way—toward these now dead, remarkable friends. It is my task to remember them.

Remembering 2. Post Kitchen.

The program note reads, “This work is one section from a full-evening work-in-progress which Eiko & Koma will call Songs of Innocence and which will have its premiere in August, 1982, when they present a comprehensive retrospective of their work at P.S. 122.” This never happened.

Nobody liked our show except two friends. John Bernd said, “Because I know you guys, I could enjoy. It would be difficult if I did not know you.” Reviews were bad. One full-page with headline said “Eiko & Koma. Pretenders.” We wanted to disappear.

Koma and I moved to the Catskills and lived there for two years alone with five chickens. Winter nights were long. We made Grain with rice and Gamelan music and Beam on top of a large mound of dirt. We also made Elegy and Night Tide, our first naked pieces.

For all of these, I made the sound design, played harmonium, and mixed layers of slowed down sound from Mongolia, Tibet, Indonesia, and Japan. Considering our use of Bach, Shubert, Beatles, Bob Dylan, Sicilian folk, and belly dance music for earlier pieces, this journey of using Asian sound seemed to align with our shifting identities from being Japanese living in New York to becoming Asian-American immigrants. I never thought about the trajectory of that time in relationship to music until now.

Don, I think you are right in saying that moving to Catskills was another beginning for Eiko & Koma. Wanting to be relentless and unapologetic. Returning to the city, we made Thirst, our first work with no soundtrack that made us feel more naked. Audience members nervously coughed and more people left during our show.

Bob came to visit us in the Catskills several times. He came to see our show in San Francisco in 1987 and we reminisced. He was already sick. When we talked on the phone he told us he was blind. He died of AIDS on April 7 in 1988 in San Francisco, his hometown. I asked The Kitchen to re-edit Nurse’s Song so as to include the ending—Eiko and Koma on Bob’s lap and Dirt Band humming.

I wrote for 2016 Danspace Project Platform about Bob: “When I perform I think of Bob, who so loved performing.” Don, one day you might remember me as someone who “so loved performing?”

Remembering 3. Entropy.

We had performed Cell and Fission in other venues. Only Entropy, the last section of Trilogy, was new along with Nurse’s Song. Usually, our titles were more straightforward, things everyone knows and could relate to: Tree, Rust, Wind, etc. What is Entropy? After performing Fission at anti-nuclear benefits—there were a number of them back then—we thought of the chaos after nuclear fission. How can a human body get closer to chaos? Since we could not blow up our bodies, we danced toward absurdity.

We sang two old children’s songs written by the poet Yaso Saijo. We post-war children sensed these songs were from a more hungry Japan. It seemed to me that all of the books, pictures, and songs available to us in our childhood came from sadder times.

Only by forcing myself to see Trilogy and Nurse’s Song again, I understood why we sang these Japanese children’s songs in Entropy. We made Entropy and Nurse’s Song specifically for The Kitchen and these songs were our “Nurse’s Song”.

Our older pieces, White Dance and Fur Seal, were based on poems by Mitsuharu Kaneko “Moth” and “Seal”, which I translated and printed on our programs.  But The Kitchen program only offered “Nurse’s Song”. I wondered why?

We did not have to—did not want to—reveal everything to the audience. We needed some secrets that the audience did not have access to. As immigrant artists, such secrets created a bond between Koma and myself. These secrets grounded certain movement phrases for us and made our working together necessary.

But now I want people to know about these Japanese children’s songs and for these secrets to be shared.

I sang “Seven Children”:

Crow, why do you squawk so?
Because up on the mountain
I have seven lovely kids

Lovely, lovely, the crow sings
Lovely, lovely, she cries

Go to the mountain and visit its old nest
There you'll see round-eyed, good kids

Seeing a foreigner as a complete “other” was our childhood condition. Crows were omens but attractive for that reason. Because we sang two separate songs together, a mother crow and a girl with red shoes got mashed up. We thought we were bringing back the post-war landscape of our childhood that came after (Nuclear) Fission. 

Soon after I arrived in Japan, I happened to see a documentary on TV about poet Yaso Saijo. I learned he was a radical, scorned spirit. Often leaving his family in dismay for years at a time, he travelled far and wide, making hundreds of songs that every person growing up in Japan knows by heart. Saijo often sang these songs himself to children in the poorest neighborhoods. I cried. I had just come from New York exhausted. I was touched by what I had learned about the trembling life of this poet but more so because that learning was not planned. And I remembered how my childhood memories were directly connected to the old Japan, before my life.

Allen sang Blake. Koma and I sang Saijo.

Don, do you have such songs from your childhood, or way before then, that you find yourself humming? How does your current music relate to that? I wonder if you were ever tempted or might in the future make songs that children sing and remember?

I loved when you sang alone in our three different performances. Songs and bodies are our frail ancestors.

Regarding “Savings”

When you showed me the footage from Captiva with your music, “Savings”, I said music was too foreign and too full to me. I did not feel it was particularly connected to your nakededness (though I realize this might reveal my projection of nakedness more than your own), my body in the background, or the visibly moving clouds I loved. But we do not always have to understand everything about each other.

Many audience members have told me that music makes it difficult for them to see my work because a specific song or genre of music imposes a particular reference and evokes personal memories.  For a very long time, I have gravitated towards ambient sound or no sound. Exceptions to this were special collaborations, such as with Robert Mirabal in Land, Chanticleer in Wind, Kronos Quartet in River and Fragile, David Kraukauer in Offering, and Margaret Leng Tan in Mourning. These collaborations were all proposed by us because we thought the contents of each work made them necessary. Each took more than a year to make and longer to recover from. We always came back from these extravaganzas to making minimal sound by ourselves.

This time with “Savings”, you were enthusiastic in saying how my Asian old body adds something surprising to your video with music, which is seen by many young people who are unlikely to come across my work. I agreed. But my invitation to you to collaborate was based on our conversations and my experiences of your paintings from your time in Wesleyan. Your videos with music you shared with me felt foreign. So I proposed to appear with no name. That way I did not have to think of Savings as a part of the several works we have collaborated on. I wanted to be a Madam X in the background, nonchalantly (but willingly) supporting your composition. So I was surprised that this video showed up in your essay. I am no longer a mysterious Madam X. Putting it in our “code words,” you betrayed my choreography with the sense of urgency for which you were willing to talk to me for hours.

On my end, I feel that these days I hardly need music in my work or in my daily life. When I listen to music, it takes all my attention. I cannot read, see, or think away from music. So I hardly listen or use it. When I go to dance concerts, I get irritated because so much is driven by the music. As you know, when I teach, I never use music. In my solo performance, I work with the sound of places. In Rauschenberg Residency we never used music. In The Duet Project, your singing is the only music. That has been my commitment.

It is not that I do not see myself in your video with music. It is the contrary.  I remember the heat, the harsh surface of the wall that hurt my back as I tried to slide down as slowly as I could. That small body in the background has all my intentions and commitment. But music is dangerous to me. It carries something beyond and betrays my intention of being miserable and commanding attention for its own sake. That is why I asked you to not use music if you are to show the video in an installation as part of our collaboration.  I want to be a performer the willing viewer can trust. Trust has to be earned. And in terms of making their own spontaneous decisions to “betray  choreography”, I tend to not quite fully trust bodies driven by music unless it is the body of a musician. Thus, I myself am less inclined to work with elaborate music unless I feel necessary.  And on this, I am stubborn.

In my youth, my parents told me all the music I ever played was too loud. Like they were to me, I am from a different generation and place from yours. For me, your music is like food I have not really learned to taste or a costume I feel like someone else just put on me. So when I say I am not connected to it, I do not mean to put it or you down. It might be smart to say I would be open-minded to all possibilities, but at this age, working on my LATER WORK, I have to be instinctively selective. Perhaps because I am in Japan now, far way from you, I feel I can better re-examine my core in revisiting what had fed me. I just want you to know where and when I am in our phone conversations—which in different times have kept both of us awake all night. 

Here I will also be engaged in things that I do without my artist name, which by the way has always been important to me. Rendering a body without a namesake is a commitment. 

In closing, I want to add I loved when you sang alone in our performances. You sang walking away from the audience in a huge cathedral. You sang crawling towards me on 125th Street plaza. As you sang, I crawled too in North Carolina.

Your voice expanded space. And I just made another exception. I tried using very Catholic, full music for a duet with Iris over Zoom, “Your Morning is My Night”. It was a way for me to reach out to particular friends. I too betray my choreography.   

We put in effort in listening to each other. We will continue. But we are not obliged to agree.  I am grateful for your willingness to not only work with me but to also push me and bring me to your audiences. You also show me your perspective. That is absolutely necessary and affects me. We do not betray each other. 

To be continued…

With much love,

Eiko