Eiko in Maplewood Cemetery
photo credit: Ben McKeown
Eiko Otake
Featured Performances
Eiko in Maplewood Cemetery. photo credit: Ben McKeown
A Body in Laurel Hill
Laurel Hill East
Eiko Otake is a movement-based, interdisciplinary artist who worked for over 40 years in the collaboration Eiko and Koma. In 2014 she started her site specific solo project A Body In Places--a site-specific series of solo performances--at more than 80 sites, including at 30th Street Station in Philadelphia, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and Green-Wood Cemetery in Brooklyn. In a layered exploration of time, season, landscape, architecture and culture, A Body In Laurel Hill continues this series and Eiko's longtime work on the theme of death and dying.
"In a cemetery, I think of the recent dead, and the dead from the past centuries, including many whose graves were never built. When I enter the cemetery, I try to leave my/our current upsets at the gate but make sure to pick those up on my way out." This site-specific work interrogates existence and non-existence: who, and what, is present or absent.
This performance by Eiko Otake is connected to The Politics of Mourning IV by DonChristian Jones. Please note that a ticket to either one of these performances includes admission to the other which will take place during the same time period and place. Total run time for both pieces is 90 minutes.
Why and How I Perform in Cemeteries
Laurel Hill West
"You can’t really come to the cemetery and not think about death or the people who have died. And that’s a good thing to think about. We know more about living, but we all die. We learn about death by attending to other people’s dying. We also learn about death by missing the dead."
Nearly all of Eiko Otake’s work has been related to death in some way. Pieces such as Offering (2002), Death Poem (2006), Mourning (2007), and Slow Turn (2021) more specifically dealt with personal deaths or with massive killing. Starting in 2020 she performed variations of her site-specific solo A Body in a Cemetery at Green-Wood Cemetery in Brooklyn, NY, Maplewood Cemetery in Durham, NC, and Evergreen Cemetery in Colorado Springs, CO. Now at the age 73, Eiko performs a newly scored solo at Philadelphia’s Laurel Hill East.
Join Eiko as she shares her themes on death, cemetery as a performance site, and the specific relationship she and Green-Wood Cemetery have forged.
Born and raised in Japan and a resident of New York since 1976, Eiko Otake is a movement-based, interdisciplinary artist. She worked for more than 40 years as Eiko & Koma creating numerous performance works.
Eiko’s first solo project was A Body in a Station, a 12 hour performance at Philadelphia’s 30th Street in 2014. Since then she has performed A Body in Places, a series of site specific solo performances at over 80 sites, including a month-long Danspace Project PLATFORM (2016) and three full-day performances at the Metropolitan Museum of Art (2017).
Collaboratively created with photographer and historian William Johnston, A Body in Fukushima (2014–) is a multifaceted project that records Eiko‘s solo performances in post-nuclear disaster Fukushima. It consists of photo and video exhibitions, mix-media performances, lectures, a book publication, and a feature-length film.
Eiko is currently working on her 10-year project, I Invited Myself (2022–), a series of exhibitions and screenings of her media works. Its volume 3 was presented in Philadelphia in 2024 at Asian Arts Initiative and The Fabric Workshop and Museum.
Eiko has worked on the theme of death and dying for a long time, i.e. River (1995–1999), post-9/11 Offering (2002), Death Poem (2005) and Mourning (2007). More recently, in the historic Green-Wood Cemetery in Brooklyn, she has presented A Body in Cemetery (2020), Mother (2022), With the Dead (2022) and Stone (2023). She has also performed in Maplewood Cemetery in Durham, NC (2021) and Evergreen Cemetery in Colorado Springs, CO (2024).
