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Conversation with Bill T. Jones

Marking the passing of Dora, Bill T. Jones’ mother-in-law, he invited Eiko to have a Zoom conversation on April 8. Born one day apart from one another in 1952, Bill T. (with Arnie) and Eiko (with Koma) began showing their work at about the same time, often performing in similar venues. Though their careers took different directions, they reconnected in 2015 after the American Dance Festival presentation of Dora/Tramontane. View the full video of the conversation on the New York Live Arts website.

Bill T. Jones 
Dora died on April 1, and it was another opportunity for me to think about the passage of time and space. I was wondering why did I want to speak to Eiko? There's something about your work, you seem to have always understood these questions of time and space and the inner world and the outer world. And you've chosen a rather peculiar persona to evoke it. When I look at your work, I often think that I’m looking at a ghost, that there is a consciousness that this artist is able to conjure, evoke, that comes from elsewhere.

Eiko Otake 
My idea of “ghost” is not afterlife, after death kind of a ghost, but ghost in a way it is not our everyday life, maybe? So this is my glass or my tea, but what if this was my imagination or if this was my memory I'm holding?

Bill T. Jones 
Can you remember the time when you saw Dora/Tramontane at the American Dance Festival and the impression that you had?

Eiko Otake 
It was very clear you are so intentional. It's not like we just dance and we talk about things. No, you're really practicing the distance and direction to the mic, the dancers. Dancers are passing the microphone, so this thing is not one person was Dora, it really is the voice and words are the main character, and different dancers can come in and take it on. Not only are you giving to the audience Dora's...epic story, but it's a very personal...like history, time, and Dora…She works with it, it was intentional, but also she finds herself in that place. And then you're coming in much later hearing the story, you are editing it very clearly. And you were actually giving each performer a relationship because by performing, they get to have a very special relationship to this content.

Bill T. Jones 
At that time, I wanted my young dancers to encounter someone who came from another world, another time, and who was almost not there. Almost. Now, she is no longer there. Or to use your metaphor of the glass, where is she? Because everybody that she touched, everybody who came in contact with her is carrying a feeling of Dora.

Eiko Otake 
I felt Dora's—not the body because Dora's body then was in France—Dora's words and your concept, it was very new to me because I was just beginning my solo career, and I was seeing this group piece which carries one person's life but they're weaving into that one person's life, and Dora wove her life into the history and around that, she was helping many people so I'm seeing her life is already woven with many people and then you take it out in a very articulate manner. I know we are the same age, so our distance to the war is the same.

Bill T. Jones 
Yes, and that's when you mentioned the hibakusha, you call them, the survivors of Hiroshima.

Eiko Otake 
Yeah, hibakusha. So I kind of thought, "Oh, I've been also working with my friend who was a hibakusha, and he was younger than Dora because my friend was 14 when the war ended…what I was trying to say here is nobody grew up reading our own generation’s work. We grew up reading the generations before us.

Bill T. Jones
But the phenomena of pop music, which came into its own in the mid-20th century, the idea of a teenager—we did start listening more to people our own age, and we were not really paying attention to the people before.

Eiko Otake
I didn’t go through that because at 14—you start to read on your own choice maybe early teens—so when I was that age I was reading lots of work I was seeing a lot of things about the people who took part in a war. Many older writers were abroad killing people or nearly being killed...In Japanese army, more people, more soldiers died of starvation than fighting. I was reading those things in my teens and thought. I'd never know the worst of the worst.

Bill T. Jones 
So you felt that we were a bit more innocent and that the people before us knew more about the truth of the world? Is that what you're saying?

Eiko Otake
Misery, not necessarily truth of the world, but misery or the violence or the survival or the hardship or being on the wrong side.

Bill T. Jones 
One reason that I had wanted to do it with my young company because Dora was roughly 19 when this was happening to her, and my dancers were not much older, and yet I felt that they didn't really know what this was, and I wanted them, by encountering Dora, putting Dora to their cheek or to their heart, would in fact help them understand, close the distance between that misery that she lived and the misery of their understanding of life. The COVID/coronavirus is doing something similar now or potentially do you think?

Eiko Otake 
Yes, because the number of the people we're now talking about is huge. Even though this is not nearly as big as the Spanish flu, but for our generation, this is big. And when too many people suffer, and when too many people get killed, personal dying is lost.

Bill T. Jones 
The ability to feel the loss of one person is lost. Everything becomes a statistic.

Eiko Otake 
Yeah, that's why it was very important for me that I became friends with Kyoko Hayashi, my writer friend. When the massive people die nobody knows the exact account, but if you know one person, then a window, it's an entry point, that's where you can connect. As of August 9, she was just one of the numbers. But she survived, she became a writer, we became friends, and then she's a totally whole person. On 9/11, many people were killed. Each dying is hard, does it matter how many people are killed? Yeah, it does matter because it's upset. Each death is upset, but when that many people die together, it's a huge upset. And dying your own death in upset, I feel is very upsetting to that person because not only you are upset because you're losing your biological self, but everyone is losing, screaming, or vanishing the same time together.

Bill T. Jones 
A friend of mine once said to me when I was doing solo, she said, "You know, Bill, if you insist on doing solo work, you will make the same solo for the rest of your life." Now, I look at your body piece, this body of work that you're doing right now, and that character, she is always as if she is the same, but something about her environment changes. Although you've seemed to make a strength of the fact that she does not change, she moves a certain way, she dresses a certain way, she has a certain kind of aura about her that you have cultivated over the years. Now, is that because you would like to look at something that doesn't change in the context of a world that is changing?

Eiko Otake 
"A Body in Places." It's my first solo project, and I started it in 2015 when we talked at ADF...the piece I just sent you was shot in 2017, so I'm still very much in that project. And I wear certain clothes that I took to Fukushima after nuclear...I was determined to wear costumes that I wore in Fukushima, and I was doing lots of photo exhibitions about me wearing that costume in Fukushima and addressing this place, I'm also carrying the same person who went to Fukushima, who had also gone to perform everywhere else. So right now, I don't wear a kimono anymore. In my project right now, I'm making lots of different duets. Most of them younger. And then sometimes I also duet with a dead person.

Bill T. Jones 
This moment that I'm in right now around the Dora piece, I feel like the piece has taken on the second part of its life now that Dora is dead. I think that her passing was sad, but it was not tragic. The life was long and full. So I think about your kimono now in light of...were my dancers the kimono that this piece was wearing? Young people whose bodies were young and live were given material to do, which is almost like a body of clothes, but inside this material we're telling the story of this woman who is passing away in front of us. Now, there's something else has got to be like Eiko's body in the work. And what is that? It is the way in which we think, the way in which we feel about time and space, that is the Dora that's left. The thing that will carry on is Dora inside this work. That is kind of rewarding to me. That's what I was doing. That's why I wanted this work to be made in the way it was made because time passes, but something remains. And it's that something that remains which I wanted to call a ghost. What do you think remains in your work?

Eiko Otake 
I'm not interested in my story very much because again, I grew up thinking of generations before us have gone through much more life and death thing…I am interested in transformation. It is me, but it is not me. I'm against buying a costume, so everything I wear is either my mom's thing or my grandma's thing. I never wash my costume. I like the feeling that it just gets beaten up. It gets dirty. It gets more miserable. And it ages.

Bill T. Jones 
In the world of dance, I was taught that two things happen: When a work is done again and again, it either goes away, it's rubbed smooth and it loses relevance, or it develops a sort of hard core of relevance. Does public love it? Does the public look at this work and it reminds the public of an era? All of these things are important to me. I'm thinking constantly about history, and our history, and justice, and the opposite of justice in the world, and how art can talk about how those things come together and not. So I'm hoping that Dora will be the piece that will still exist, probably will exist digitally, and people will remember me, and they will remember the questions I had about Dora, and they will remember Dora, and they will remember the life and the world that she lived in. And that is almost like seeing for me seeing Eiko at a train station moving through like a spirit. Who is that? What is she here to tell us? Because it's not the woman's body that I'm looking at, but there's something else in that station with Eiko and with me. I want to make that with my type of work. You have been successful in finding a very intimate way to do that thing.

Eiko Otake 
You make a big piece. I make a small piece.

Bill T. Jones 
We're the same age, but I feel like I am ever more distant from the young, and then I see that you're constantly surrounded by the young.

Eiko Otake 
I'm interested in the distance. One of my collaborator is a rapper. He's a painter. He's very talented. But he's maybe 29. I'm older than his own mom. We see the world from different time. Even though both of us remember 9/11, he said he remembered he saw it as a child. I'm really interested in being together. I had a duet with Okwui. I've always liked her. We've been friendly, but one dance we did together then we have this memory, and it just becomes different. It becomes camaraderie. I've been working alone and remember I've been working 40 years only with Koma. So I'm pretty excited to learn someone else...and then we'll walk away and look at each other differently. And in a sense, you and I already had that, that night writing each other. That night we also had a dinner and saw the show. That's like this together. And it changes our relationship. And it doesn't have to happen that often because I still carry it with me. In your creating work, do you sometimes miss performing? Because it was an important part of who you were.

Bill T. Jones 
Yes, I was a performer, but I think that I'm also a thinker. And I also know that just like your glass, your art is there. My body in this culture means something. And how I use my body means something. So unfortunately, I feel like I'm always performing.

Eiko Otake 
Yes. You are. You put yourself in a place where you are seen, you're heard, you are performing, you are projecting.

Bill T. Jones 
Yes, and the trick for me is how to be performing and be vulnerable. How to be vulnerable, unafraid, and in some ways, generous, embracing people, which is what I wanted the Dora work to do, that she and I are very different people, but we found a way to be together. Something sad is happening, but something is being born. And you said that you're interested in transformation. 

Eiko Otake 
It's not like I know who I am. It's like it's a different Eiko, a different body. This sense of transformation, it's here. It always has been here. We don't see it every day, necessarily, but now when pandemic or violence or historically wrong things happens, something we already know comes up. That's because we also experienced something else too, not only in our lifetime, but also we learned before our lifetime. And yes, I do carry this. I do carry it from my childhood.

Bill T. Jones 
And do you want to be remembered?

 Eiko Otake 
I used to say no. But I also at this point, I feel like why do I have to limit the work to be seen only right now? Because another 18 years old coming up 10 years from now, and then 20 years from now another 18 years old coming up, so if somebody sees a little thing I make now and I die, I feel I am still communicating something in my intention...

Bill T. Jones 
Dora, she trusted me enough to give me this story. And now, what you just said, I think I feel that way about Dora's story. And that gives me confidence that the work that I do, the work that I make has a purpose because it can bring that story to someone. I embrace you. Thank you very much for your friendship, and I would like to also do a duet with you, if we could find an opportunity to do one.

From 2015-2016, Bill T. Jones and Eiko engaged in a series of email exchanges following Bill’s response to Eiko’s translation of From Trinity to Trinity by Kyoko Hayashi. These were shared both in Bill’s blog and Eiko & Koma’s website.

On April 13, 2020, Bill T. Jones posted the following on Instagram:

How do the dead stay in touch? I was snatched back into my conversation with Eiko Otake in which we spoke of ghosts, absence, and space as evoked by revisiting Analogy/DORA:TRAMONTANE when I scrolled upon this photo from two years ago. It shows the damage done to my grandmother, Anna Edwards ( Big Mama’s) grave by young revelers who party in the “colored cemetery“ there in Bunnell, Florida—the place of my birth. Eiko and I didn’t draw a connection between my family and Bjorn’s—between Dora and my Grandmother. The connection is hatred, violence and History. Yes, Eiko! Space is malleable but also time.