Dance

Their first longer piece entirely in silence. The backdrop and floor were painted with a burned flour paste which crumbled down as they moved. In bright light, Eiko & Koma became thirstier as the four sections progressed, seeking both water and intimacy in an extreme setting.

Filmed in June 1998 at the Whitney Museum of American Art and produced by the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts/Dance Collection. Breath is a creative archive project of Eiko & Koma’s living installation of the same title commissioned by the Whitney Museum. For the living installation Breath, Eiko or Koma was in the installation during all hours that the museum was open.

In this early Tom Rubnitz, Barbara Lipp and Tom Koken collaboration, "Frieda" performs her rap song with a bevy of dolls as back-up singers and dancers. Features rock-bottom production values and song lyrics by Barbara Lipp and Tom Koken.

Co-commissioned by the Next Wave Festival, The American Dance Festival, and the Lied Center at the University of Nebraska, Land is a collaboration with Native American musician Robert Mirabal and painter Sandra Lerner. Robert and his cousin and drummer Laynold Lujan live in Taos Pueblo, New Mexico, where Eiko & Koma conceived this work. Not only did Eiko & Koma visit Taos repeatedly but Mirabal also spent three months in Japan and visited the East Coast several times for this collaboration.

Identically dressed, and with sibling-like resemblance, performance artists Trevor Martin and Kym Olsen shift between spoken word and athletic dance choreography in a collection of 29 scenes. Set in various locations--including a gymnasium, an abandoned hospital, and a trailer park circus--Martin and Olsen slip between a ventriloquist and his dummy, a seducer and his surrogate, a doctor and his patient, and synchronized dance partners. The film examines a complex social psychology--questioning the colonization of the human body for various political, medical and religious agendas.

Forti uses the camera as a research tool to record the movements of three grizzly bears pacing anxiously behind the bars of their cage in the Brooklyn Zoo. The collected visual information becomes part of the basis for Forti's movements in Solo No. 1.

Drills is a film about the choreography of preparing for the future. A hybrid documentary and experimental dance film reimagining the form of the Cold War-era, US government-produced social guidance film, Drills asks what futures we are preparing for through the exercises embodying present anxieties. Weaving in between multiple forms of choreography and documentation, Drills restages lockdown and active shooter drills, frames corporate and tech start-up office meditation, and reperforms Boy Scout drills from the 1917 Boy Scout manual.

"A chamber drama set in the confines of an apartment’s sun room, this video further explores visual themes and obsessions found in my earlier works and adds in a few new ones for good measure. Earlier motifs seen here are lightbulbs in pendulum movement, tabletop antics with simple household objects, Christo-like fleshy textures, sketchbook pages torn from their binders, book pages, bookshelves, and flowers. I play a vaguely Walter Mitty-ish figure, who imagines himself as a conductor, as Orpheus, and as conflicted characters in a Greta Garbo movie.

A dance, performed by A.K. Burns and Lanka Tattersall

This title is also available on A.K. Burns: Early Videoworks

“Trypps Number Three transports the documented transcendence of Jean Rouch's Les Maîtres Fous from the Hauka movement to a Lightning Bolt concert where overlapping bodies, swaying to noise rock, are framed in light beamed from the stage - we return to the models of Caravaggio or Garrel - bodies effectively transformed into islands of individual gestures and expressions via a spotlight and lingering camera, before the film cryptically bends upon itself: henceforth the image (through slow-motion effect) and sound (through Joseph Grimm's spacey

Mr. Thomas is in the back garden, performing his new moves in the glorious sunlight, making things happen. Somewhere between ritual, a white suburban war dance and 1970's "keep fit" exercise to lovely music, Mr. Thomas tries to coordinate with the Black Blob, that persistently undermines the nature of his representational space...

And the song goes:

We've only just begun to live

White lace and promises

A kiss for luck and we're on our way...

Shot during the fall of 2009 in Wesleyan University, this short documentary follows Eiko & Koma as they construct the first exhibition of their Retrospective and ponder upon questions the project asks. Directed and edited by Joanna Arnow.