On the first day of Eiko’s class, she announced that we would address just one question throughout the semester. Students gazed up at her eagerly, pencils poised to scribble down what they were sure would be a page’s worth of syllabus-speak. When she posed the question-what is art?-pencils dropped and a palpable fear set into the faces of the students. Eiko & Koma don’t avoid the tough questions-in fact, they embrace them.

For years, Eiko & Koma’s art has celebrated and questioned humanity, using their own bodies as canvases for these elemental concerns. This process can hardly be codified, but Eiko & Koma have developed a teaching system to share their dance philosophy: Delicious Movement. In Spring 2007, I enrolled in “Delicious Movement for Forgetting, Remembering, and Uncovering,” which Eiko taught to 30+ students at Wesleyan University-dancers, soccer players, and frat boys alike. Eiko guided us through various non-human states, using images from the natural world. She encouraged students to delve into their own discomfort with the movement, creating an environment of emotional rigor that was rare in our liberal arts classrooms, or, for that matter, in any classroom.

Eiko & Koma will be at the Joyce next week, for the New York premier of Hunger, Oct 28-Nov 2. They made Hunger in collaboration with the young painter/performers Charian and Peace, and all four dancers will share the stage, along with Gamelon player Joko Sutrisno. Charian and Peace attended the Reyum Art School in Phonon Penh, Cambodia, where Eiko & Koma met them in 2004 in a Delicious Movement workshop.

It is still a rare occasion for Eiko & Koma to share their stage with others (although this has been the direction of their work as of late). I can’t wait to see how the intimacy between Eiko & Koma extends to four. Many choreographers choose to infuse their work with dancers younger than themselves, but I suspect that Eiko & Koma’s choice is more conceptual than anything else. In the onstage world of Eiko & Koma, future and past are intimately connected. It seems only natural that their world would grow to include multiple generations-celebrating both the memory of youth and the process of rebirth.

I am curious about the way in which Charian and Peace relate to Eiko & Koma as students. The process of learning the highly specific and emotionally rigorous Eiko & Koma technique must have been no easy task. When art and teaching are so intertwined, the gift of teacher to student is enormous-both to the drop-in participant and the lifelong dancer alike.

Lydia Bell is an artist and dancer based in New York. lydiabell.wordpress.com

Choreographer’s notes: HUNGER

In 1983 we premiered Grain in a small loft downtown in New York. It was a dance about how our lives-bodies, spirits, and death-relate to an essential food (in Asia it is rice). For several years we performed Grain on tour and moved on to create other productions. In 2004 when we were in residence at Reyum Art School in Phnom Penh, not being able to present our more theatrical works, we performed a short section from Grain in the schoolyard. The Reyum children responded strongly and our friendship had begun. Though our communication was very limited, a group of older students, including Charian and Peace, decided to work with us. During the rehearsals and the tour of Cambodian Stories: An Offering of Painting and Dance (2005-2006), we cooked and ate many many bowls of rice together, sharing stories and learning each other’s lives. For example, every day in Japan people offer a bowl of cooked rice to a family shrine to feed the deceased. In Cambodia, people throw rice balls to graves on festive days. We all seem to recognize that dead people also become hungry and need to be attended. In 2007, at the invitation of Charles Reinhart of the American Dance Festival, we asked Charian and Peace to learn Grain. It was a first time anyone else performed a dance we made for ourselves. Watching them, we remembered what motivated us to make Grain. With these beautifully hungry young friends, we wanted to create an evening of Hunger. At any age, we are all hungry not only for food but also for knowledge, intimacy, and life. In our wanting, we can be self-absorbed and sometimes even act unkindly to others. Dancing our hunger, however, we hope to not only address our desire to live but also mourn for those, dead or alive, whose hunger still haunts their spirits.

–Eiko and Koma