Eiko Otake & Wen Hui: What Is War?
Eiko Otake, Wen Hui (post-performance discussion led by Professor Jingqiu Guan)
Created and performed by Eiko Otake (of Eiko & Koma) and Wen Hui (of Living Dance Studio), What Is War is a powerful collaboration that fuses movement, video, and personal testimony excavated from the artists' recollections of war and its aftermath.
Otake grew up in post-war Japan and Wen grew up in China during the Cultural Revolution. Friends since 1995 and working closely since 2020, Otake and Wen explore the enduring impacts of war on human consciousness, collective memory, and the body.
Duke Arts is proud to welcome back Eiko Otake and Wen Hui to Duke, where they developed this performance work in part during a two-week residency with the Duke Dance Program in collaboration with American Dance Festival (ADF) in the spring of 2024.
Content Warning: What is War? contains nudity and addresses the subject of war.
Following the performance, Professor Jingqiu Guan will lead a discussion session.
***a second performance will take place on September 26 at 7:30PM***
About the artists:
Eiko Otake
Born and raised in Japan and a resident of New York since 1976, Eiko Otake worked for more than 40 years as Eiko & Koma, performing their own choreography. Since 2014, Eiko has been directing her own projects. In her solo project A Body in Places, Eiko has performed numerous site-specific works at over 70 sites.
A Body in Fukushima records Eiko‘s solo performances in post-nuclear disaster Fukushima. In her Duet Project, Eiko has been engaged in an open-ended series of cross-disciplinary experiments with a diverse range of artists. Her 10-year project, I Invited Myself, is a series of exhibitions and screenings of her media works. Her films, including the documentary No Rule Is Our Rule co-directed by Wen Hui, have also been screened in many film festivals.
Eiko Otake’s Website | Instagram | Facebook
Wen Hui
Chinese choreographer and dancer Wen Hui is one of the pioneers of Chinese contemporary dance. She also makes documentary films and installations. For the past thirty years, Wen Hui has been using dance theater as a means of social intervention.
In 1994, Wen Hui co-founded the first independent dance theater group in China, the Living Dance Studio, in Beijing. Since 2008, she has been researching the body as a form of personal social documentation and experimenting with how bodily memory can catalyze the collision between history and reality. In 2021, Wen Hui received the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany, known as the Goethe Medal.
Watch an excerpt
Notes on tickets:
- Ticket prices: $25—General (advance) | $30—General (same day) | $10—Students
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Production Credits
Conceived, Choreographed and Performed by: Eiko Otake and Wen Hui
Dramaturg: Iris McCloughan
Lighting Design by: David A Ferri
Commissioned by the Walker Art Center. Co-commissioned by UCLA’s Center for the Art of Performance (CAP UCLA), Jacob’s Pillow, and Colorado College Theater & Dance Department.
What Is War was made possible by the New England Foundation for the Arts’ National Dance Project, with lead funding from the Doris Duke Foundation and the Mellon Foundation.