Presentation and Performance by Eiko Otake
Ticketed Performance
Laurel Hill West, Conservatory
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"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.
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is a movement-based, interdisciplinary artist. She worked for more than 40 years as Eiko & Koma creating numerous performance works. 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 a Cemetery (2020), Mother (2022), With the Dead (2022) and stone (2023). She has also performed in Maplewood Cemetery in Durham, NC and Evergreen Cemetery in Colorado Springs, CO. 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.
Learn more about Eiko Otake, and find tickets to her festival performances, here.