In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

| 195 East (Coast) Meets West (Coast): Eiko & Koma Collaborate with Anna Halprin Dance Magazine, October 2001 This October issue of Dance Magazine came out just before September 11. That morning I was supposed to go to a meeting at the New School. Although both World Trade towers had already been hit and I had seen the footage on television, I stupidly thought the meeting might still go on. So I packed three copies of the issue to give to colleagues and took the subway downtown. I got out at the 14th Street stop to head toward the New School. Instead I joined the crowd at 12th Street and Seventh Avenue that had a good view of the towers a couple miles to the south. As I approached, a man leaving the crowd passed me, saying, “It just fell.” I had no idea what could have fallen. I saw the North Tower, with flames where windows should have been, making its sides bulge and buckle—more terrifying with the naked eye than on television. I took some steps to look around it, where the South Tower should have been, and suddenly realized what fell. Then I knew that everyone else on that corner had seen the South Tower go down. People were stunned into silence; I was hyperventilating. I wanted to stay on that corner but I felt a strong pull to be with my son, Nick, who was at the Bank Street School, up in the Columbia University neighborhood. I started running uptown, only to hear a rumor that the Empire State Building would be the next target, so I ran farther west. (The subways had either stopped or were too risky by then.) To lighten my load, I took the three magazines out of my bag and left them on a ledge somewhere and kept running. Finally a crowded cab picked me up, and then another took me to Bank Street School. Many parents had rushed to the school. We were all shaken to our roots. In the lobby I saw Eiko, whose son Shin was in Nick’s class. She had already read my article and reminded me that I had likened her and Koma to disaster victims. I had forgotten that part, but at this point, disaster was everywhere, and Eiko & Koma’s work had a new relevance. The collaboration between Eiko & Koma and Anna Halprin gave me an opportunity to write about both artistic entities and also to hint at some of the cultural convergences and collisions. A revolving portable cave with stringy stalactites is lit from below as though from bubbling lava. The dancers Eiko and Koma fade into view, each in a separate hollow of this dreamlike environment. They are survivors, victims of a natural or unnatural disaster. Wearing a swath of rag or maybe nothing , ashen faced, bereft, they seem to have no particular gender. Existen- 196 | Through the Eyes of a Dancer tially alone in this fire-and-ice, end-of-the-world scenario, they inch toward each other. The audience waits, with schooled patience, for the next small thing to happen. Depending on your inner resources, the wait can seem like mere forbearance, or it can be an opportunity to meditate on life and death, living and dying. Eons later, they finally make contact, skin touching skin. Without changing their demeanor, they suddenly seem ecstatic. Their relationship turns romantic, erotic. They seem to be in pre- or post-lovemaking embrace, damn the world outside. During the hour-long When Nights Were Dark (2000), audience members undergo the most extreme emotions while watching the most minimal action.Welcome to the mystery of Eiko & Koma, masters of their unique form of dance. Into this mystery steps another mystery: the phenomenon that is Anna Halprin. At the age of eighty-one, Halprin joins Eiko & Koma in a world premiere at the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts October 16 to 18. Halprin, widely acknowledged as a visionary in dance, community ritual, and the healing arts, has been helping plan this collaboration, entitled Be With because of its merging of generations and styles, for the past year. The fourth collaborator is experimental composer/cellist Joan Jeanrenaud, formerly of the Kronos Quartet. In their apartment in Manhattan Plaza, a midtown housing complex mostly for artists, Eiko and Koma spoke about the development of their work. They met in Japan in a workshop given by Tatsumi Hijikata, founder of the Japanese contemporary form butoh, which means “dance of darkness .” Each time Koma...

Share