Tom's Life Bits

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Quoted, from today’s Independent Weekly:

“In a career of dystopic performances that have let audiences
examine the suffering of humans and nature on an almost frame-
by-frame basis, this one was a stand-out. Call it a strangely
blighted rite of spring, an implacable fertility ritual which
revealed the grotesquery of dehumanized sex; ultimately, a work
which conceivably dared to ask if rape is actually the default
sexual act in the animal kingdom.

Wait—you’ll need the catalog number if you want to see it: ADF
Video 1984.0013, at Duke University’s Lilly Library. Why? In the
final analysis, the considerably kinder, gentler version of
Grain we saw last week at the American Dance Festival had too
little in common with the harrowing original version Eiko and
Koma staged here 13 years ago.”

Grain: 2 stars

Quartet: 4 stars
	
Read on, and respond in comments.

Accept no substitutes Eiko and Koma’s protégés serve sterile
Grain, before a promising world premiere By Byron Woods

In a career of dystopic performances that have let audiences
examine the suffering of humans and nature on an almost frame-
by-frame basis, this one was a stand-out. Call it a strangely
blighted rite of spring, an implacable fertility ritual which
revealed the grotesquery of dehumanized sex; ultimately, a work
which conceivably dared to ask if rape is actually the default
sexual act in the animal kingdom.

Wait—you’ll need the catalog number if you want to see it:  ADF
Video 1984.0013, at Duke University’s Lilly Library.  Why?  In
the final analysis, the considerably kinder, gentler version of
Grain we saw last week at the American Dance Festival had too
little in common with the harrowing original version Eiko and
Koma staged here 13 years ago.

After a 2004 residency at the Reyum Institute of Arts and
Culture in Phnom Penh, Cambodia, the Japanese husband-and-wife
team collaborated with art students from the school on
multimedia performances combining choreography and real-time
painting. The resulting works, Cambodian Stories and Cambodian
Stories Revisited, have been well received in showings over the
past two years in the United States.

Reportedly after prodding from an ADF administration concerned
with the long-term preservation of their work, Eiko and Koma
agreed to place Grain, an early work, on two Reyum students: 17-
year-old So Chakreya (known as “Charian”), a female dancer, and
her 18-year-old male counterpart, Sorn Setpheap (called
“Peace”).

One immediate question should come to mind: Can two
teenagers—with little background in the dance forms Eiko and
Koma excel in—believably convey the dark gravitas and emotional
complexity of the striated relationships depicted in Grain? The
answer: Only to a point.

To be accurate, a complete side-by-side comparison of the works
is impossible, since the bleakest sections of the original were
either excised in toto or considerably brightened up in last
week’s edition. Plus, the opening sequence—now featuring two
nude bodies on stage, not one—was performed by the original
cast, before the entrance of their protégés: Reportedly, Charian
chooses not to perform nude.

Certainly, many elements of the original are present, and
occasionally, the new version improves over the old. The
ferocity of Charian’s depiction of something resembling a bird
of prey—crouched over, with arms arcing down, perched atop
Peace’s side as he lay in a near-fetal position—excelled the
first interpretation. It clearly suggested an animal about to
feed upon a creature either helpless or dead.

But the subsequent heavy lifting—when her character literally
picks him up and browbeats him toward the back of the stage—was
absent. The subsequent reversal in which she vainly flailed arms
and legs to pull out of his lap and embrace while both crouched
at center stage was muted beyond recognition.

The same went for the original, violent sexual contact in a mid-
work sequence where Eiko’s lifeless body was repeatedly shaken
as it tilted backwards, after Koma slithered up from between her
legs to hold her bisected form at mid-torso. The grotesque,
coercive sex in the work’s last moments was substantively toned
down—quite possibly removed entirely—just before Peace’s hand
slammed two lit candles into a mound of cooked rice, plunging
the work into final darkness.

Grain leaves us with some inconvenient questions: What precisely
has been “preserved” when a dance work is so altered that one of
its fundamental original points is entirely obscured? Did
casting teenagers for such forbidding and sexually frank subject
matter set this restoration project up to fail from the
beginning?

Whatever the cause or intent, the present version of Eiko &
Koma’s dark classic can be only said to contain a few selected
grains of the original’s truth.

Thankfully, the news is better from the world premiere of
Quartet. Apparently, Lisa Race isn’t the only artist with aging
on her mind. As a singer intones what can only be called a
Cambodian blues, Eiko and Koma’s substantially older and
physically damaged characters repeatedly compare their own
compromised forms with four idealized figures painted on
oversized canvases that fill the back of the stage. (A video
clip from the performance is available here.)

After moments of near supplication to them, Koma’s character
turns and—in a very rare development—smiles, as he first
remembers and then attempts to recreate old dancing moves.
Predictably for this genre, when the old body cannot support the
gestures, his character suddenly falls to the floor. After
extended stillness, he slowly, painfully resumes.

Eiko and Koma’s other points of comparison on stage? The bodies
of Charian and Peace, as they lie either sleeping or dead at the 
start (something of a toss-up here, since the lyrics of the folk
song refer to dead children as merely sleeping). While Peace
reposes, Koma’s hand smoothes across his arm and shoulder, as if
he were admiring the craftsmanship of an exquisite sculpture.

The sculpture reference is later reinforced as Peace and Charian
assume striking—and pitiless—poses as simultaneously perfect and
remote objects of beauty. That emotional remove is compromised
only in one instance when Charian looks with alarm as Koma
slowly grovels at her feet; her facial expression apparently
asking, “What is there to be done?”

There is more than a touch of Faulkner—and Ionesco’s La Leçon,
for that matter—in this work. A Southern world premiere seems
particularly appropriate for a piece which suggests how the old
disable the young, and how the past keeps the future from
happening. There’s substantial and tragic economy in this tale
of how the old recognize their former beauty in the young—and
are therefore compelled to destroy it.

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