Eiko & Koma: Raven

July 23, 2011 - 6:00pm - 10:00pm

photo by Danny Ardiono

A co-presentation with

See a slideshow of images from the performance here.

Saturday, July 23, 2011 – 6:00 pm
Garden opens at 5 pm.
Picnic with Eiko & Koma follows the performance. (Bring your own or purchase a brown bag picnic from us for $15.)

Tickets: The performance is SOLD OUT.

Parking: If you have already purchased tickets, please park at the Park & Ride located just to the west of the Brown Deer Road exit of I-43. A free shuttle bus will run between the Park & Ride and Lynden beginning at 4:45 pm.

Seating: You are welcome to bring blankets or camp chairs.

Beverages: The bar (beer, wine, soda, water) will open at 5 pm--cash only!

Raven is the centerpiece of Eiko & Koma’s recently inaugurated Retrospective Project, a three-year, multi-site project, which includes performances, exhibitions, installations, lectures, videos and publications. Raven is primarily made for a gallery space, to be performed without theatrical lighting and with the audience in close proximity. However, Raven is also malleable—“radically scalable” in length and configurable for venues as diverse as proscenium stages, black boxes, and outdoor sites. For Alverno Presents, Eiko and Koma will perform Raven at the Lynden Sculpture Garden.

The motifs of Raven originate from their 1991 work Land where Eiko & Koma created their own archaic landscape, a site of perseverance actively imagined and kinetically felt by performers and audience alike. For Raven, Eiko & Koma also draw on themes from their newest work Hunger (2008) (seen at Alverno Presents on October 18, 2008), showing that it is not only humans who are hungry—land, animals and spirits are also hungry for nourishment and intimacy. Raven meditates on how land, though often assaulted by humans, perseveres while also remembering its past. By evoking the image of a raven, an animal recognized in many cultures as a source of power and myth, the work will take on new meaning—both individual and universal—at each performance site.

Since 1972, Japanese-born choreographer/dancers Eiko & Koma have created a unique and riveting theater of movement out of stillness, shape, light and sound. Eiko & Koma dance about what matters to them. Their subjects are elemental; their message pitiless yet humanistic. Both their choreography and stagecraft are characterized by bold, highly theatrical strokes. The result is stark, infused with relentless stillness that subverts and transcends our everyday notions of time and space. Eiko & Koma want the vulnerability of their own dancing bodies to invite the audience's empathy.

photo by Anna Lee Campbell


Eiko & Koma at Lynden

Read more:
- New York Times article by Gia Kourlas, May 2010
- New Yorker article by Joan Acocella, April 2011

About Eiko & Koma
Eiko & Koma studied with Kazuo Ohno in Japan, Manja Chmiel in Germany and Lucas Hoving in the Netherlands before moving to New York in 1976 with their first piece White Dance. Since then, they have presented their works at theaters, universities, museums, galleries and festivals world-wide, including numerous appearances at the American Dance Festival and five seasons at BAM's Next Wave Festival. Eiko & Koma have also created two “living” gallery installations: Breath, commissioned by the Whitney Museum of American Art in 1998, and Naked, commissioned by the Walker Art Center in 2010. For both of these engagements, Eiko & Koma performed for four weeks during all open museum hours.

Eiko & Koma’s noted stage collaborations include Hunger (2008, with Cambodian painters-turned-performers Peace and Charian), Mourning (2007, with pianist Margaret Leng Tan), Cambodian Stories (2006, with the Reyum Painting Collective of young Cambodian artists), Be With (2001, with Anna Halprin and Joan Jeanrenaud), When Nights Were Dark (2000, with Joseph Jennings and a Praise Choir), the proscenium version of River (1997, with Kronos Quartet, who performed Somei Satoh’s commissioned score live), Wind (1993, with Chanticleer), and Land (1991, with Robert Mirabal and Sandra Lerner). Eiko & Koma are now embarked on a three-year Retrospective Project that considers the arc of their four-decade career as a springboard for moving forward.

Eiko & Koma have received two “Bessies” (1984 and 1990) Guggenheim (1985), MacArthur(1996) and United States Artists (2006) Fellowships. They were honored with the Samuel H. Scripps American Dance Festival Award (2004) and the Dance Magazine Award (2006) for lifetime achievement in modern dance.

More information: eikoandkoma.org


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