Eiko & Koma

The Museum of Contemporary Art (MCA), Chicago presents the Chicago premiere of Eiko & Koma’s Cambodian Stories, May 12-14, 2006. Cambodian Stories is an unprecedented collaboration for the acclaimed duo that traveled to Cambodia to work with young visual artists, aged 14-20, and struck up a moving creative relationship. The resulting performance is a cross-cultural, cross-generational dialogue about tradition, innovation, and the role of the artist in fostering social change.

Eiko & Koma are known worldwide for their "theater of movement." Using techniques from contemporary dance, butoh, and performance art, the pair has spent the last three decades creating unique and riveting performances, elegantly fashioning stillness, shape, light, and sound. Cambodian Stories opens on a stage thickly covered with sand and strung with large canvases. On this barren and empty landscape eleven young Cambodian artists collectively create an arresting painting of large-scale traditional Cambodian figures. Together with Eiko & Koma, they move and form a forest of beautiful lithe bodies within the mural-like paintings that serve as a backdrop and catalyst for interaction. With music by Cambodian-American composer Sam-Ang Sam, the artists explore the human body and their native landscape in a performance that expresses the hope and rebirth of a nation that has been ravaged by the painful past of Pol Pot’s genocidal regime.

With Cambodian Stories Eiko & Koma found themselves on a journey of unprecedented collaboration with young art students from the Reyum Institute of Arts and Culture in Phnom Penh. During a month-long cultural exchange, the duo offered a series of their "Delicious Movement" workshops to the students whose experiences were uncannily reminiscent of their own youth in post-war Japan. Growing up in the aftermath of Pol Pot, the students live in the shadow of their parents’ trauma, and the creativity inherent in painting and dance allowed them to communicate the memory of this inherited pain. Profoundly moved by their perceptiveness to movement and ability to express themselves through a new medium, Eiko & Koma decided to continue working with these young artists. Cambodian Stories is the result of a new community of artists from different generations, cultures, and genres, living and working together to realize the deeply transformative nature of art and the creative process. In creating Cambodian Stories, Eiko & Koma and the Reyum students take a step forward in creating new visions for the revitalization and future of Cambodia. Eiko and Koma met as law and political science students in Japan when, in 1971, they joined the Tatsumi Hijikata company in Tokyo. Their experimental collaboration soon developed into an exclusive partnership. They studied with Kazuo Ohno, the central figure in Butoh, the Japanese avant-garde performance form of the 1960s. Their interest in Neue Tanz took them to Hanover, Germany, in 1972 where they studied with Manja Chmiel. 1976 marked their first American performance, White Dance, and since then, they have presented their works at theaters, universities, museums, galleries, and festivals across North America, Europe, and Japan. They have also worked in dance/video as another means of communication with their audiences. In 1984, Eiko & Koma were named John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellows; the pair was also awarded one of the first Bessies for Grain and Night Tide, and was honored again in 1990 for Passage. They were named MacArthur Fellows in 1996, the first time the foundation awarded a “genius fellowship” to be shared by collaborators. Eiko & Koma have lived in the United States since 1976 and reside in New York City where they perform regularly and offer occasional Delicious Movement Workshops.

Reyum Institute of Art and Culture, located in Phnom Penh, is a non-profit, non-governmental organization dedicated to Cambodian arts and culture. Founded by Ly Daravuth and Ingrid Muan in 1998 in order to provide a forum for research, preservation, and promotion of traditional and contemporary Cambodian arts and culture, all activities presented by Reyum are free and open to the public. Because the large numbers of children stretch the resources of the Cambodian education system, all elementary school children either study in the morning or afternoon, leaving them with a great amount of unstructured and unsupervised free time. Reyum offers an alternative to these children by giving free half-day classes in drawing and painting to all who are willing to come on a regular basis and participate with concentration and commitment. The school’s aim is to train children to have both the skill to make representational drawings, and to attain a degree of creativity and imaginative thinking which may serve them in the various vocations they will pursue as adults.

Pressetext

Eiko & Koma: Cambodian Stories
AN OFFERING OF PAINT AND DANCE