Today from our friends at Guernica, we present an interview with performance artist Eiko Otake. Author Jill J. Tan writes, “Eiko embodies experiences in order to cultivate empathy in her audience. Within her, the maggot, the artist, and the political actor all agitate toward truth.” This article was originally published on December 1, 2015.

Photo: William Johnston. Courtesy of the Artist.

Eiko Otake dances with a stillness at once excruciating and exquisite. Her work is a negotiation of precision and flow, withdrawal and surge, shyness and exposure. For much of her career, she has danced as half of a duo, Eiko & Koma, with her partner in performance and life, Takashi Otake. Her first solo performance, which took place just last year, was titled A Body in Places; it has so far included “A Body in a Station,” put on at Manhattan’s Fulton Center, and “A Body in Fukushima,” a photo series in which Eiko’s movements are documented against a landscape made desolate by the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster. As Eiko notes in the following interview, “I am using my body as a constant.”

Eiko Otake and Takashi “Koma” Otake met in Tokyo in 1971 as students at an avant-garde theater company run by Tatsumi Hijikata, a choreographer and co-founder of the performance genre Butoh. Eiko and Koma’s partnership, which began as an experiment, has lasted for over forty years. They settled in New York in 1976 and toured often, performing at museums, theaters, and festivals. They also staged free, public outdoor performances to take their work beyond the confines of traditional art spaces. In 1996, they became the first collaborators to jointly receive a MacArthur Foundation Genius Grant.

Read the full article here.