Created at Eiko & Koma's home in the Catskills and set to Gamelan music, Grain was first presented during a month-long season in an East Village loft. Charles and Stephanie Reinhart were among the ten audience members one night and invited Eiko & Koma to the American Dance Festival that year. Since then, the work toured widely.
Subtitled A Rebellion against the Commodity, this engaged reading of the urban black riots of the 1960s references Guy Debord’s Situationist text, “The Decline and Fall of the Spectacle-Commodity Economy,” Internationale Situationniste #10 (March 1966). Along with additional commentary adapted from Barbara Kruger and musicians Morrissey and Skinny Puppy, the text posits rioting as a refusal to participate in the logic of capital and an attempt to de-fetishize the commodity through theft and gift.
Adapted from their performance work Fur Seal (1977), this video is the first and only outdoor work Eiko & Koma created for video. The piece was filmed at Pt. Reyes, California in November 1983. Eiko & Koma were very cold because of the water and wind–so were the film crew! Eiko edited the piece with the help of Jeff Bush.
This work was originally designed with no sound and was 19 minutes long but in this shorter version, Eiko added the sound of sea waves.
(tell me why): The Epistemology of Disco is an often humorous, at times sarcastic and poignant look at the role that disco music has played in the formation of gay male identity.
Alex and José is a 16mm single channel projection that explores gender, movement and form.
Music: Zeena Parkins
Inspired in part by the cover of "Megatron Man," Patrick Cowley's archetypal 80s disco album, Robot Love is a celebration of the playful, synthetic, party-driven, disposable culture of disco. The video is playful and opulent, presenting a night at the disco as a mind-expanding trip to an alternate universe.
Filmed during a trip sponsored by UCLA CAPS in 2019.
Camera by Alexis Moh.
Edited by Eiko Otake.
The End of Time is a choreography for two lovers, enacted by three figures. It looks at the birth and the vanishing of desire as an endless chain with successive beginnings and endings.
"The End of Time (2012), is a choreography enacted by three figures exchanging between dominant and fragile roles. In each of the three chapters of the film, two men interpret the falling in and falling out of love, playing attraction and repulsion, taking off clothes and putting them on in what seems an eternal fable about love and separation."
Eiko Otake performed a version of her solo project, A Body in Places, as a part of River To River Festival on Wall Street. A Body on Wall Street won “Best Use of Location” for Round 3 of Dare to Dance in Public (D2D) Film Festival in 2020.
Camera by Alexis Moh.
Conceived, performed, and edited by Eiko Otake.
Merce by Merce by Paik is a two-part tribute to choreographer Merce Cunningham and artist Marcel Duchamp. The first section, “Blue Studio: Five Segments,” is an innovative work of video-dance produced by Merce Cunningham and videomaker Charles Atlas. Cunningham choreographed the dance specifically for the two-dimensional video monitor screen. Atlas uses a variety of video imaging effects, including chromakey, to electronically transport Cunningham’s studio performance into a series of outdoor landscapes. The audio track includes the voices of John Cage and Jasper Johns.
Event Fission is an outdoor performance on the Hudson River landfill, produced by Creative Time. Eiko & Koma danced with a huge white flag billowing on top of a sand dune as the audience watched from below. The white flag was used to symbolically attack the newly developed downtown buildings. On a lower level of the landfill, to which Eiko & Koma tumbled down, there were fires on four corners of the performing area. At the end of the performance of 50 minutes, Eiko & Koma were swallowed into a deep hole they had dug and hid, disappearing with a blast of sand.
C.L.U.E. (color location ultimate experience), Part 1 is a collaborative video and performance work by artists A.L. Steiner and robbinschilds, with AJ Blandford and Seattle-based band Kinski. Inhabiting the intersection of human movement and architecture, A.L. Steiner and robbinschilds (Sonya Robbins and Layla Childs) present a full-spectrum video, set to a score by rock quartet Kinski.
Wake is a cinematic dance collaboratively created by Eiko & Koma and James Byrne. It was filmed in special sessions during the premiere run of the living installation Naked, at Walker Art Center, November 2-30, 2010. James's body held camera moves with Eiko & Koma through a primal landscapes.
This lyrical piece celebrates the male body simply and elegantly. Its subject, Christophe, is exquisitely portrayed by the sepia-toned balletic video. Three men dressed in overcoats dance in and out of the frame in front of a mostly stationary camera. Occasionally they open or partially remove the overcoats to display beautifully sculpted male bodies.
Anna Pina Teresa reinterprets the pivotal scene in Rossellini’s Roma Città Aperta where Anna Magnani, who plays the character Pina, (based on the story of Teresa Gullace,) is murdered on the streets of Rome by the Fascist police. This scene is characterized by three movements performed by Magnani — resistance, running and falling. Filmed in the Sala Scherma at Foro Italico in Rome (Mussolini’s fencing studio designed by Moretti) Anna Pina Teresa examines the contemporary and historical dynamics between an urban Fascist space and movements of resistance.
This video-lament for Mother Earth is a collaboration among Jim Barbaro, sound; Tobe Carey, cinematography and video editing; and Brenda Hutchinson playing a long tube.
"Made right after Covid lockdown, my art gave me an opportunity to rejoice, grieve and sonically face impermanence via sounds and a Chicken Dance I’ve been performing for decades. The beauty of this video is that it looks like Chicken Linda can finally FLY!! Please interact if you wish and dance, sing, cry, and FLY HIGH."
–– Linda Mary Montano
Inspired in part by the cover of "Megatron Man," Patrick Cowley's archetypal 80s disco album, Robot Love is a celebration of the playful, synthetic, party-driven, disposable culture of disco. The video is playful and opulent, presenting a night at the disco as a mind-expanding trip to an alternate universe.
Eiko edited this video to illuminate, in fast pace, her solo performance project A Body in Places. The red cloth she often uses in her performance is used as a visual link between different places and communities where Eiko performed.
Eiko's grandfather Chikuha Otake (1878–1936) was a praised figure in traditional Japanese painting. But his anti-mainstream sentiments were shunned by the field authorities. His reputation was severely damaged by his failed run for the House of Representatives. Filmed in 2018, at the Philadelphia Museum of Art and the Suiboku Museum in Toyama, Japan, Eiko's edit combines videos of Chikuha's paintings and Eiko's performance with quotes from his essays and Eiko's musings.
Special thank you to David Brick, Ryohei Endo, Hiroyuku Horikawa, Feliece Fischer, and John Killacky.
Kuyenda N’kubvina looks at how thought and culture propagate in the slender nation of Malawi. Weaving our way through video halls, book stores, dance floors and radio stations, in cities and small villages, we meet Malawians who traffic in ideas, reflecting the rhythms of Malawian contemporary life. The video was instigated by the filmmaker’s relative ignorance about the people and culture of southeast Africa, and accompanies her as she seeks out individuals and infrastructures that channel and articulate Malawian identity.
In collaboration with Ishmael Houston-Jones.
On September 1, 2022, Eiko and Ishmael Houston-Jones performed in Beverly McIver's painting exhibition Full Circle, curated by Kim Boganey.
The whole event took place in connected galleries of her show, but this excerpt is when Ishmael and Eiko danced a duet in front of the paintings that were also a duet of a sort.
Camera by Julie Ganas.
Edited by Eiko Otake.
C.L.U.E. (color location ultimate experience), Part 1 is a collaborative video and performance work by artists A.L. Steiner and robbinschilds, with AJ Blandford and Seattle-based band Kinski. Inhabiting the intersection of human movement and architecture, A.L. Steiner and robbinschilds (Sonya Robbins and Layla Childs) present a full-spectrum video, set to a score by rock quartet Kinski.
Wind imagines a dying child, a common event until recently and still so in many parts of the world today. This was a collaboration with Chanticleer music director, Joseph Jennings, who arranged a composition by Robert Mirabal and Francisco Guerrero. It was performed live by Chanticleer in San Francisco and specially recorded for tour. Eiko & Koma’s two sons, Yuta and Shin, both played the role of a boy in the piece. The floor was painted to look like a galaxy and white feathers fell from the ceiling, making a sense of wind visible.
Introduces the audience to the rockin' talkin' pony, who provides musical accompaniment for a series of Texas country-dance lessons.
This title is also available on Ben Coonley: Trick Pony Trilogy.
E42 is a cinematic exploration of the area in Rome knows as the EUR, a modernist landscape that was originally designated by Mussolini as the the site of the World Fair of 1942 and as a celebration of the 20 year anniversary of Fascism. Originally designed as a monumental space for public performance and collective acts of solidarity to the Fascist regime, this landscape was in fact never inaugurated.
