EP #190 - 12.17.2020 - Choreography in the Pandemic

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 but since 2014 has been performing her own solo project A Body in Places, which began with a twelve-hour performance at the Philadelphia Amtrak station. Since then, Eiko has performed variations of the project at nearly 80 sites. 

Between 2014 and 2019, she and photographer/historian William Johnston travelled five times to post-nuclear meltdown Fukushima and collaborated on creating A Body in Fukushima, an extensive and expanding project that documents places of nuclear contamination with Eiko’s body. Eiko has presented both photo exhibitions and film screenings of A Body in Fukushima internationally at museums, art centers, and conferences on environmental disasters. 

Also in 2017, she launched a multi-year Duet Project, an open-ended series of cross-disciplinary, cross-cultural and cross-generational experiments with a diverse range of artists both living and dead. David Brick is one of her collaborators of the Duet Project. In January 2020, Eiko travelled to China for a month to work with choreographer Wen Hui, during which the Covid-19 epidemic was identified. Since March, Eiko has been creating works in her Virtual Studio, which archives her art making and public conversations in the time of the pandemic.

Eiko has been honored with a MacArthur Fellowship, the Samuel H. Scripps American Dance Festival Award, and the first Doris Duke Artist Award. For her solo work, she has received a Bessies Special Citation, an Art Matters Fellowship, the Anonymous Was a Woman Award, and the Sam Miller Award for Performing Arts. Eiko teaches interdisciplinary college courses about the atomic bombings and other environmental issues at Wesleyan University, New York University, Colorado College, and Tokyo University. During the 2017–2018 academic year, Eiko was a Think Tank Fellow in Wesleyan’s College of the Environment. 

David Brick co-founded Philadelphia’s Headlong Dance Theater with Amy Smith and Andrew Simonet in 1993. Over the next two decades, these three co-founders created over forty dances as Headlong, performing nationally and internationally.

In 2008, David co-founded the Headlong Performance Institute, a training program for creating experimental performance.

David collaborates broadly in creating performance, participatory events, and community. His experience of growing up as a hearing member of a Deaf family continually influences David’s understanding of human bodies as active manifestations of culture. His recent work includes a residency at Dance Place in Washington DC to work on Island of Signs—a performance that explored growing up in a family with two languages, one that was shared and one that was not. He shared this residence with Carolyn Brick, his 78-year old Deaf mother who attended nearby Gallaudet University and was featured in a 1959 documentary about her experience there.