Two events to blow you open.

In the 28 years since Eiko & Koma first brought their work to the United States from Japan, their startling, elegiac installations and performances have become a major force in our postmodern melting pot. Though they don't use the term Butoh in reference to their work, they did study with two of the major figures of the postwar Japanese avant-garde, Tatsumi Hijikata and Kazuo Ohno and were influenced equally by study with Neue Tanz disciple Manja Chmiel in Hannover, Germany. The couple has successfully fused these lineages, using the natural world as source material to create slow-moving, primordial tableaux vivants.

Since settling in New York, Eiko & Koma have won numerous prestigious grants, fellowships and residencies, including a 1996 MacArthur fellowship and two New York Dance and Performance (Bessie) awards. Their traveling installation, Offering, to be performed free of charge among the tombstones outside St. Mark's Church in the Bowery this weekend, is a ritual of regeneration. Its first NYC performance in Battery Park last July was staged atop a mobile sculptural unit that might have been an oversized incense brazier, a reliquary or a monolithic jeweled beetle on its back.

Huddled together or reclining amid heaps of earth, Eiko & Koma's figures attained the transcendence of prayer, calling on the forgiveness and healing that the earth affords. Body parts, partially exposed, adopted qualities of larvae or fungi and created images of inertia, entropy, and decay that reminded viewers of the constant possibility of fertility and rebirth within loss. According to their website, Offering provides audiences "solace from nature's eternal rhythms?in which movement and stillness, life and death, are but a breath apart."

To coincide with this installation, Eiko & Koma will be leading a Delicious Movement Workshop at Danspace Project, in association with Movement Research, June 16-19. No dance experience is necessary. Participants will be guided through a series of transformative exercises, including working within the set of Offering. (For more information, contact Movement Research at 212-598-0551.)

Kun-Yang Lin, whose Beyond the Bones will premiere at Joyce Soho this weekend, has also evolved a personal style that combines elements of his traditional heritage in unexpected ways. Lin, born in Taiwan, first made a name for himself in the U.S. by dancing in the work of others, most notably Mary Anthony Dance Theatre, and formed his own company, Kun-Yang Lin & Dancers, in 1997.

In his solo dancing, the specificity of gesture, gaze and carriage of the torso from the traditional Chinese forms of his initial training is clear, framed for the Western proscenium stage. His vocabulary includes phrasework from modern dance techniques and recognizable shapes like ballet's arabesque and port de bras.

His group works reference styles ranging from modern dance pioneer Doris Humphrey's sculptural groupings to the strongly theatrical craft of contemporary choreographers Jennifer Muller (whose work he has previously performed) or David Parsons. Lin's broad choreographic ambitions surf unabashedly across influences, and the passion with which his eight-member company performs the work is visible. Traditional costumes are juxtaposed against musical choices from Puccini to Dead Can Dance.

This kind of fusion, brought to different syntheses by such radically different artists, mirrors the plurality of the 21st-century city. Conventional forms communicated through modern slash-construction identities (Japanese/American, Taiwanese/American) transcend the historic exoticization of the Western view of the Asian body.

As viewers, we can participate in an exchange of energy that forges new alliances and reevaluates fixed relationships. We are invited into an inspiring microlaboratory wherein culturally imposed barriers of race and personal history are blown open. This trope of inclusiveness suggests a metaphor able to renegotiate what ethnographer Clifford Geertz has called our "fluid, plural, uncentered, and ineradicably untidy" modern lives.

Offering, June 18-22, at St. Mark's Church, 131 E. 10th St., (betw. 2nd & 3rd Aves.), 212-674-8194, 8:30 p.m., free.

Beyond the Bones, June 19-22, at Joyce Soho, 155 Mercer St., (betw. Houston & Mercer Sts.), 212-219-0736, 8 p.m., $15/$12 adv./$10 st/sc.