Dance

Eiko performed unannounced in the Cathedral of St. John Divine, New York City as an artist in residence in 2016-2018.

Camera by Alexis Moh.

Lips that issue forth melodious vows. Warm skin on bedsheets stained with dreams. Faces crowned with halos that light a path to temples of the soul…..You will find it here in DREAMS and OMENS!

This title comprises Wishful Thinking (2015), Testimony (2013), and New Beginnings (2014) which were compiled into this form by Mike Kuchar in 2022.

The Dying Swan is a recreation of the acclaimed ballet — Russian ballerina Anna Pavlova's most famous role — borrowed from its theatrical context and taken back to the lake.  A frozen pond and fifteen-degree weather is the stage and setting for this version of the ballet, and the dancer (Laurie McDonald) in traditional costume of pointe shoes and tutu performs the death throes of the swan on the ice. The music is from "Carnival of the Animals" by Camille Saint-Saens.

Assisted by Alan Powell.

Home Exercises is a short dancefilm and hybrid documentary investigating the gestural habits and choreographies of aging individuals in their homes.

This title is also available as part the Movement Exercises trilogy.

Co-commissioned by the Dance Center of Columbia College Chicago and Danspace Project, Death Poem is a meditation on dying. Eiko dances a long solo on a futon under a mosquito net, accompanied by the sound of insects and cicadas. Koma enters from another world and tries to bring Eiko back with him, but he leaves without her, as she is not yet ready to go. 

M+ Museum presented A Body in Hong Kong in two locations as part of Mobile M+: Live Art, 2015. The second site she chose and performed at on December 11 and 12, 2015 was the West Kowloon Cultural District, the site where the M+ Museum would be built. Eiko perhaps covered a longer distance in this performance than any other in the past. This raw landscape, rather unusual in Hong Kong, and its political tenderness play as a background of her performance. A Body in Hong Kong is part of Otake’s ongoing project, A Body in Places.

Filmed in the remains of Soweto's historic Sans Souci Cinema (1948-1998), YOLO is a makeshift structuralist mash-up created in collaboration with the Eat My Dust youth collective from the Kliptown district of Soweto, South Africa. Vibrating with mic checks and sine waves, resonating with an array of pre-roll sound — this is cause-and-effect shattered again and again, temporarily undone.

 O humans, You Only Live Once!

Anna Pina Teresa reinterprets the pivotal scene in Rossellini’s Roma Città Aperta where Anna Magnani, who plays the character Pina, (based on the story of Teresa Gullace,) is murdered on the streets of Rome by the Fascist police. This scene is characterized by three movements performed by Magnani — resistance, running and falling. Filmed in the Sala Scherma at Foro Italico in Rome (Mussolini’s fencing studio designed by Moretti) Anna Pina Teresa examines the contemporary and historical dynamics between an urban Fascist space and movements of resistance. 


This slow-motion film is a glass snow globe with dancers who topple and bounce off the sides of the frame. Re-purposed by Breder at his Dortmund retrospective as Weisse Tasse in which a video was projected on the side of a white cup.

Revived as part of the Retrospective Project, White Dance is the first piece that Eiko & Koma performed in America.

“Animists are people who recognise that the world is full of persons, some of whom are human, and that life is always lived in relationship with others.”

-- Graham Harvey, Animism

Trance dance and water implosion, a kino-line drawn between secular freak-outs and religious phenomena. Filmed in a single take at a sacred site on the Upper Suriname River, the minor secrets of a Saramaccan animist's everyday are revealed as time itself is undone. Rites are the new Trypps -- embodiment is our eternal everything.

Designed as the centerpiece of Eiko & Koma’s three-year Retrospective Project, Raven is a radically scalable work. It can be performed in a theater, a gallery, outdoors, or at any other special site, and its length can vary depending on the context of the presentation. Raven’s genesis is in the concept underlying Eiko & Koma’s 1991 Land. The earth is precious in part because it can be unyielding. The landscape does not squander its riches on us; we have to negotiate our survival.

Circle's Short Circuit is an experimental feature-length work with neither a beginning nor an end—the film can be viewed from any random point. It moves through a circle of five interlocking episodes that describe the phenomenon of interruption in contemporary communication through various forms and modes, investigating causes, consequences, and side-effects. Genres shift along the episodic path of this circle, moving from documentary to essay, through collage, simulated live-coverage, and silent film.

Minute Waltz is a ballet performance recorded on a time-lapse VHS security surveillance recorder borrowed over a weekend from a local bank. Laurie dances in slow motion for twenty minutes to create the three-minute video, the recorder capturing two frames of video per second, thereby compressing “real” time (a conventional video recorder records and plays back at thirty frames per second). When the time-lapse video is played back, at 30 frames per second, her slowed movements appear to be “normal” speed.

A film titled Dance Movie (or, alternatively, Rollerskate) appears in many Warhol filmographies, but no work with this title has been found in the archive. The lost film, starring dancer Fred Herko, was shot in 1963. A year later, Herko leaped out of an open window while dancing to Mozart’s Coronation Mass in C Major. Inspired by descriptions of the missing film and the memoir of Herko’s best friend, the poet Diane Di Prima, Goddess of Speed poetically reimagines the last days of the young performer.

Eiko & Koma created Dancing in Water: the Making of River as the first video work for the Retrospective Project. Often produced in collaboration with environmental groups and park officials, River is an outdoor work Eiko & Koma performed in nine different sites. River usually takes place in a body of moving water, and the journey downstream suggests the passage of life and time. This video follows Eiko & Koma from rehearsals in the Catskills to performances in the Delaware River and the American Dance Festival.

For the November 13, 2015 opening of the Hiroshima Panels by Iri and Toshi Maruki at Pioneer Works, Eiko performed her solo in honor of the Hiroshima Panels and their creators. Japanese-style painter Iri Maruki, born in Hiroshima, and Western-style painter Toshi Maruki, who went into Hiroshima city just three days after the bombing. The artists decided to paint the panels together, which illuminate the human experiences of the Atomic Bomb. They spent 30 years painting the fifteen Hiroshima Panels, six of which were on display at Pioneer Works in Red Hook, Brooklyn.

Commissioned by and performed at the 2000 Brooklyn Academy Music Next Wave Festival, When Nights Were Dark is a full evening-length collaboration with Joseph Jennings and the Praise Choir. The work was created during a Lower Manhattan Cultural Council residency which allowed Eiko & Koma the full time use of the studio on the 91st floor of the World Trade Center North Tower throughout 2000. The décor of The Caravan Project was hugely expanded for this work and placed on a slowly turning wheel.

Shot with my students at the San Francisco Art Institute, this colorful drama with song and dance numbers (plus burlesque acts) follows the libidinous poisoning of Vatican personnel by an otherworldly intruder. The cast is mostly young and vibrant and the songs staged as opulently as possible on a $400 budget. Anyone interested in these collaborative productions will find a lot to gawk at in this backstage romance with pagan overtures galore.

E42 is a cinematic exploration of the area in Rome knows as the EUR, a modernist landscape that was originally designated by Mussolini as the the site of the World Fair of 1942 and as a celebration of the 20 year anniversary of Fascism. Originally designed as a monumental space for public performance and collective acts of solidarity to the Fascist regime, this landscape was in fact never inaugurated.

A brief glimpse into the cycles of Coyolxauhqui, the moon goddess, whose cycles used to be a dance. A fast-paced jazz soundtrack accompanies the quick, darting movements of the moon.

The later 1950s and early 1960s saw the development and proliferation of radically new forms of dance driven by a desire to understand the essentiality of movement divorced from traditional, balletic and modern syntaxes. At the forefront of this new wave of performance was Simone Forti, an artist with a hand in both improvisational techniques and choreographed task-maneuvers. This interview details her exploration of each – with a particular focus on her earliest investigations into movement, owing to time spent under the study of Anna Halprin.

Rust was commissioned by the American Dance Festival and performed on chain-link fences hung vertically in the center of the stage. Performed nude in silence.

Cambodian Stories is Eiko & Koma's multi-disciplinary collaboration with Reyum Painting Collective, young painters who study and work at the Reyum Institute of Arts and Culture in Phnom Penh, Cambodia. In addition to Eiko & Koma, who perform alongside their Cambodian artist colleagues, the creative collaborators include Reyum Institute founder Daravuth Ly, who functions as dramaturg, and Cambodian-born music ethnologist Sam-Ang Sam.

In Deux Pieds, video is used to create dance illusions, effects impossible to achieve in dance except via video technology. Video “keying” (a process of dividing areas of a black and white image into percentages of gradation) and blending of two separate images is used to enable Laurie’s legs to move independently of each other. Against a black background, she wears a black stocking on one leg, effectively “erasing” the leg to the camera’s eye, then switches the stocking to the other leg, and the two images are mixed together.