Eiko Otake
A Body in Laurel Hill
Ticketed Performance
Laurel Hill East
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.
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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. -
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 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).