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Eiko and Koma have remarked, “We often take our inspiration from nature, which has its own sense of time and a grotesqueness that in our eyes can be beautiful.” I can’t think of a more perfect way to describe the visual assault that is an Eiko and Koma performance—complex, hyperbolic and deeply oxymoronic. Their true genius is an uncanny ability to simultaneously offend and captivate, perplex and create common ground, manipulating time and space to blur the lines between.
Watching these chameleons is like watching something exquisitely painful and cruelly personal. Like watching a moment from which you can’t turn your eyes, but feel like you should. It makes the personal public in a way that seems like a visceral déjà vu—something you innately connect to and understand physically, but that you can’t quite remember ever having experienced, and cannot articulate why something so disturbing feels so familiar, so warm and so at home.
Unlike choreography which exploits movement to represent and idea, Eiko and Koma’s Hunger (a new, full length work born from 1983’s “Grain” and a collaboration with students from the Reyum Art School in Phnom Penh) is truly a physical manifestation of a concept, extrapolated into a fluid mix of variations on that theme. Stillness, slow-motion, facial expression and carefully articulated gesture deconstruct for us the depth of what it means to hunger—history, violence, starvation, deprivation, tenderness, nurturing, sensuality, sexuality, shame, desperation, contentment, exploration and separation. Each sequence is like a loaded spring, wrought with tension, longing, purpose and suspense, so that when at last the release of contrasting movement arrives, it is a violent ecstasy that must be suffered in silence.
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| Eiko in Hunger, photo Al Hall |
In a particularly poignant moment, Eiko, stripped bare and force fed grain after grain, seemingly unable to quench her hunger, is held captive by Koma with the very cloak that was stripped from her to set her free, to unbind and expose her, and struggles in vain, in limbo, between desire and satiation, togetherness and individuality, captivity and freedom. Her nakedness replaced by grains and burlap, hands and faces, light and sound, struggle and symbiosis, the visceral dance between the two emits a powerful combination of pity, revulsion, sensuality and extreme power. How fitting for a piece dedicated to the exploration of filling a void…
To continue to try to describe with words the emotional resonance of Hunger would be a disservice to the piece and its creators. Do the research, find a theater and go see this work. It will haunt you. It will unnerve you. And it will fill you with ecstasy.
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