Flowers Cracking Concrete: Eiko & Koma's Asian/American Choreographies by Rosemary Candelario (review)

Avant-garde artists Eiko & Koma have gained international acclaim with audiences for nearly fifty years. Despite receiving prestigious awards and fellowships and amassing hundreds of reviews, their breadth of work is rarely the subject of academic research. Rosemary Candelario's 2016 Flowers Cracking Concrete: Eiko & Koma's Asian/American Choreographies fills this void by thoughtfully examining why Eiko & Koma continue to be undertheorized and often misread by reviewers preoccupied with Orientalist ideals. Using choreographic analysis, participant observation, interviews, and archival research, Candelario reveals how Eiko & Koma's movement practice, teaching, choreographic process, and performances explore social issues and offer methods for sustained political engagement. In seven chapters, Candelario provides meticulous choreographic description to theorize Eiko & Koma's relationship to time, nature, violence, mourning, renewal, and intercultural exchange. Focusing on their concerns as transnational artists, Candelario demystifies and de-exotifies Eiko & Koma and underscores the performers' rigorous examination of their racialized and gendered bodies in relationship to the physical and political environment. As the title suggests, just as a growing flower can slowly, with persistence, push through the weight of concrete, Eiko & Koma in each performance and in their long-standing career as working artists have achieved "gradual but profound transformation" that has affected the dance community and beyond (4). Candelario, too, bolstered by the works of Asian American dance studies scholars like Yutian Wong, SanSan Kwan, and Priya Srinivasan, makes fractures in the sedimentation of Orientalist discourse that has denied rigorous analysis of Asian/American bodies.

Through a discussion of their biographies and an examination of over thirty of their works, Candelario makes an argument for Eiko & Koma as both Japanese and Asian American artists. They are Japanese not only because of their upbringing, but also as citizens influenced by the nation's postwar political climate and innovative art scene. Eiko and Koma were among the many student activists of the early 1970s angered by the Japanese government's efforts to suppress dissent and sanitize the image of the distressed nation. As activists-turned-artists, Eiko & Koma met as residents in Tatsumi Hijikata's live/work space, Asbestos Hall, in Tokyo. Uncomfortable with Hijikata's controlling methods the two left after spending less than a year under his tutelage. They took improvisational classes with butoh pioneer Kazuo Ohno, whose approach to movement was to allow the individual to "find their own dance" (37). Despite Eiko & Koma's lifelong friendship with and admiration for Ohno, their time with him was also limited. The two soon left for Europe, landing in Germany in 1972, where they trained under the mentorship of Mary Wigman's assistant, Manja Chmiel.

Eiko & Koma's choreography is also rooted in their Asian American identities. In 1976, after two years of performing in Europe and North Africa, they were invited to perform in New York. A year later, Eiko & Koma moved to New York City where they refined their style through their involvement in the down-town dance scene in the 1970s and 1980s. As artists of color, their experiences navigating life in the United States (raising a family, seeking funding sources, establishing collaborative projects, teaching in universities) heavily inform their work. Candelario cites David Palumbo Liu's use of a solidus between Asian and American to represent Eiko & Koma's identities as a part and apart of US culture (1999). This marker points to the history of Asian exclusion, practiced through restrictive immigration policies and extended through acts of violence, incarceration, and discrimination. Such actions, however, coexisted with efforts to increase cheap labor, exploiting Asian bodies to build the nation's transportation and agricultural infrastructure (see Lowe 1996). As these histories repeat, the solidus indicates the irresolvable tensions that continue to inform dynamics of race in the United States. Candelario positions Eiko & Koma in this history to further emphasize their activist approach to dance.

More than a turn toward...