CJS Thursday Lecture Series | Dancing Ground Zeroes in Japan and the United States: Eiko & Koma’s Transnational Choreographies of the Nuclear

Since their 1979 dance, Fission, the New York based, award-winning Japanese/American choreographers Eiko & Koma have made a series of dances that critically engage nuclear issues. Evoking the ground zeroes of Hiroshima and Nagasaki; Trinity, New Mexico; New York City; and most recently Fukushima, dances such as Land, Offering, Fragile, and Eiko’s solo project A Body in Places create complex transnational geographies between Japan and the U.S. and raise questions of mutual implication in the nuclear age. Contrary to the nuclear discourse bound to butoh that fixes the post-nuclear firmly in the past, Eiko & Koma’s engagement with the nuclear invites audiences to perceive the ongoing repercussions of nuclear disasters.

Rosemary Candelario, Assistant Professor of Dance at Texas Woman’s University, specializes in the Japanese avant-garde movement form, butoh. She is the author of Flowers Cracking Concrete: Eiko & Koma's Asian/American Choreographies (Wesleyan University Press 2016) and co-editor of the Routledge Companion to Butoh Performance (forthcoming 2018). She has studied, taught, and performed butoh across the United States and around the world.