Eiko and Koma, known for their impossibly slow movement and exquisite style, are trying to preserve their creations by teaching them to two teenagers

Orla Swift, Staff Writer

DURHAM - The young dancer sits folded over on her knees, her right arm stretched out like a beggar's. Like a painter posing a model, the dance maker known simply as Eiko turns the 17-year- old's hand palm up, then steps back to survey the image.

Dissatisfied, Eiko crouches and with her index finger raises the girl's chin.

Lift your right elbow, she says, and keep it from touching the ground.

The dancer, quietly obedient until now, looks at Eiko and grimaces in the universal teenage expression for “Are you kidding me?”

“It's more hard,” Eiko responds cheerfully. “It's hard work.”

This dance is daunting for Chakrya So, who goes by the nickname Charian, and her 18-year-old dance partner, fellow Cambodian Peace (Setpheap Sorn). But Eiko's task is yet more daunting. She and her husband/dance partner, Koma, are trying to pass along 35 years' worth of physical expression to two teenagers who have barely grown into their bodies, let alone learned how to speak through them.

This is the first time Eiko and Koma have set one of their works on other dancers, and American Dance Festival audiences will be the first to see it.

The work they chose for the reconstruction is “Grain,” created in 1983 and performed at ADF in 1984. Some people walked out, unsure whether the Japanese duo's impossibly slow movement and writhing around in rice could actually be called dance.

Eleven ADF appearances, a MacArthur “genius” grant and many unforgettable works later, audiences have caught on to the New York-based couple's intense and idiosyncratic style.

Their “Delicious Movement” – inspired in part by the gradual transformations that take place in nature – is imperceptible at times, with long periods of stillness and the occasional aerobic punctuation.

It's hard to imagine an Eiko and Koma dance without Eiko and Koma performing it. Their bodies are their language, and it's a vocabulary that comes from within, not from a raised arm here, a flexed foot there. The appeal of their intimate collaboration with Charian and Peace lies in seeing what ideas might emerge from working with fresh young minds from a different Asian culture.

Besides, ADF director Charles L. Reinhart kept insisting that they do it in the interest of preserving their exquisite style. They're not like the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater, a large company that keeps the choreographer's repertoire alive by performing it.

And the works are so singular that the pair have consistently declined other companies' proposals to take them on.

Eiko and Koma, who are in their mid-50s, don't spend much time contemplating what will happen when they no longer have the stamina to perform their vast repertoire. They're fit. They're full of ideas. And they would rather make new dances for themselves than worry about what will become of the old ones.

But Reinhart determinedly nagged that if they didn't offer some language immersion soon, their artistic vocabulary could be lost.

“We've been elbowing them gently, saying, 'We do not want to lose your contributions, your works,' ” Reinhart says. “ 'You have to put them on other dancers.' ”

Finally, they listened.

'Cambodian Stories'

Eiko and Koma discovered Charian and Peace while teaching movement to young visual artists at the Reyum Institute of Arts and Culture in Phnom Penh, Cambodia.

Modern dance is unusual in that southeast Asian country, which is still recovering from the violent oppression of the Pol Pot regime. Revitalizing traditional arts is a higher priority than newer forms, Eiko says.

Eiko and Koma made a dance called “Cambodian Stories” featuring 11 Reyum students, and they toured the United States with it in 2006. During that tour, Eiko and Koma grew attached to Charian and Peace.

Both teens had lost their fathers, and their families struggle to make ends meet. Eiko considers them her extended family. She likes how curious and honest they are, and she sees traces of herself in Charian's headstrong personality.

They invited the pair to the United States this year to study with them and to create a second dance together called “Cambodian Stories Revisited.” They performed it in the graveyard at St. Mark's Church in Manhattan.

Charian and Peace, like their mentors, are graceful and athletic. But where Eiko and Koma are compact with light skin – sometimes underscored with white Butoh-style makeup – Charian and Peace are willowy and olive-skinned, with beatific smiles and a classical elegance that brings to mind the statues of Cambodia's Angkor Wat. Where Eiko and Koma move close to the ground, making the audience ever conscious of gravity's pull, the teens at times appear to float.

These contrasts appealed to the choreographers. But they have also proved aesthetically challenging. At times the two pairs seem to be speaking a different dance language.

In “Quartet,” a new work on the ADF program with “Grain,” Charian and Peace must transform from what look like elegant moving statues to haggard beggars alongside Eiko and Koma. But as they gaze pleadingly, with Peace hobbling on a leg bent so far backward it looks as if it will snap, they still exude a youthful serenity that dissipates the tension Eiko and Koma have built with their own movements.

Martha Myers, dean emeritus of the ADF School, has seen many torches passed from choreographer to dancer in her long career as a choreographer, teacher and ADF dean. The dances may look a little different, she says, particularly with a company as unusual as Eiko and Koma. But it can be done.

“Of course, every ballerina has a very distinct style, and everybody mourns when one ballerina who just did 'Sleeping Beauty' like it will never be done again retires,” says Myers, who stopped by to watch a recent rehearsal. “And yet 'Sleeping Beauty' has gone on for a hundred and some years.”

Feeling and bones

Charian and Peace are diligent students. But they are far too busy trying to master Eiko and Koma's unusual choreography to free their minds for subtext. Charian says she has only now learned how to make “Delicious Movement” without holding her breath.

Art school was a breeze compared to this, she says in broken English.

“Everything I had seen came from painting: How make it beautiful? How make it wonderful?” she says. But in dancing, “my body have to follow my feeling. And some action is different from my body. So I have to try hard, and that sometimes make my bones hurt.”

The conservative culture in which the teens were raised poses yet more hurdles, Eiko says. Whereas she and Koma sometimes get so tangled up together that it's hard for an audience to make out whose limb is whose, young men and women in Cambodia don't even touch until they are married.

Eiko and Koma don't want to force them into uncomfortable proximity. And it's not just a boy-girl thing. It took five days for Charian to get used to resting her head on Eiko's chest in “Quartet.”

And whereas nudity sometimes plays a part in Eiko and Koma's dances – including “Grain” – the teens will not appear nude. Eiko and Koma will perform the brief, dimly illuminated nude section at the start of the piece.

After the ADF performance and one Friday at Wesleyan University in Connecticut, Charian and Peace will go home to Cambodia, where they are still in school. Eiko says she hopes to work with them again, perhaps on a long-term basis. But they have no plans to expand their company yet, only their family.

“They're at an impressionable age, so I don't want to assume anything,” Eiko says. “But they know that we are giving them quite an amazing opportunity. They also know now how to think in a very international way. So it's not a question of whether they want to come here or to stay, it's a question of do they want to think of their lives globally. Their mind is getting more open.”

The teens say they want to return and continue their work with Eiko and Koma. But for now, they are taking this challenge step (Inhale. Pause.) by step (Exhale. Pause.) by step.