Culture Club

What happens in Eiko and Koma’s Hunger isn’t nearly as important as how it happens: slowly, deliberately, intensely. You’ve probably never seen a dance piece in which the dancers move so little yet express so much. I’m not even sure that “express” is the right word, for Eiko and Koma Otake, along with their guest performers, Chakreya So and Setheap Sorn (young art students from Cambodia), don’t so much communicate the elemental emotions at the center of Hunger as embody them in terrifying and nearly unbearable ways.
    It’s not an easy dance to watch. The movement is glacial. The tableaus often suggest a peaceable kingdom - a fluttery silk backdrop’s broad brushstrokes evoke a quiet landscape, and the atmosphere is saturated with the chirp and buzz of insects. But within the bucolic frame, the figures are starving - physically, emotionally, spiritually.
    The opening image is the most haunting. Under a spike of white-blue light, two figures are suspended in total silence (except the clank of wire fence as their bodies imperceptibly shift). Barely registering as human, the chalk-white forms are almost completely motionless for several minutes. Are they frozen in a block of ice? Free-falling through outer space?
    As the next tableau unfolds, the opening seems to have become a dream, or at least a haunting image of cold isolation. The earthly world that fills the stage offers little respite. Starving figures are fed, but never nourished. Death seems hovering in the very air. Only the act of creation - a large canvas is violently inscribed with images of birds and plants during the final minutes of the piece - seems to offer some solace and peace.