There is comfort in the life cycle: We age, we decay, we're reborn, like nature
Eiko and Koma's ``Offering" premiered in New York's Battery Park City in July 2002 against a backdrop of the Twin Towers smitten into ashes and air. Even now, the raw dance piece built of dirt and darkness resonates with the grief of 9/11.
The Japanese-born husband-and-wife team, who've been based in New York since 1976 and had a studio on the 92d floor of one of the World Trade Center towers though 2000, brought an indoor adaptation of the work to Boston nine months later. That was the version I saw. It appeared truncated, a bit cramped, compared with the descriptions I'd read of the site-specific original, which could run for two hours and invited audience members to tune in or out as they pleased. ``Offering" then was not so much a performance as an event -- a slice of life (and its antithesis) whose dimensions were determined by each viewer.
Yet even from behind the fourth wall of Northeastern's Blackman Theatre, the essence of ``Offering" shot through. Conceived in 1999 under the title ``Coffin Dance," the piece began as a ritual for mourning, a way for Westerners to crawl inside the butoh understanding that death is, after all, a natural part of life: We age, we decay, we're reborn, like all of nature. There's comfort in the cycle: A tree decomposes and fertilizes the soil so another shoot can sprout. A human being is as much an element of the landscape as the dirt that crunched (audibly) beneath Eiko's gnarled feet in ``Offering" and then buried parts of her torso.
After 9/11, ``Coffin Dance" took on a more specific cast: It became the couple's offering to the residents of their shell-shocked city and beyond to help them regenerate after an unspeakable loss.
Certain images of ``Offering" linger, for me, like smoke: The set was a mound of dirt pierced by sticks and white bones, and a person-size papier-mache structure that could be taken as a cradle, a coffin, or an altar. Eiko and Koma, both gossamer-white, arose as if from mist among the orchestra seats to climb onto the stage. Perhaps most powerful was Eiko's quite literal return to the soil. At one point she clawed at the heap of damp earth with her fingers and shoveled a handful of it into her gaping mouth.
In their aesthetic, which is influenced by German Expressionism as well as butoh, Eiko and Koma express the life cycle by embodying subjects ranging from ancestral spirits returning to the world (``Snow," 1999) to the hot, caked earth of Taos, New Mexico (``Land," 1991).
Their movement has a kind of monumental minimalism, as they shift through shapes with an excruciating slowness. Time seems to stop; you realize that they've arrived at new positions without your knowing how they got there. The same phenomenon haunts memories of 9/11: Time, for many of us, hung in the balance, as American Airlines Flight 11 pierced the north tower against the blue sky. The image -- replayed interminably on television and in print -- hovers still.
``Offering" was a work designed to heal that came at the right time and in the right place. The words of a 9/11 survivor in the Aug. 21 New York magazine brought that home, once again, for me.
``I'm not afraid of dying anymore," said Tom Canavan, a securities specialist buried when the south tower collapsed, ``because after being buried underneath it, I couldn't see anything, pitch black, I couldn't feel anything; the first thing I said was `I'm dead.' But my second thought was `It's not so bad, it didn't hurt. If this is what it's like, it's not bad at all.' "
Thea Singer reviews dance for the Globe. 
