Artists Eiko Otake and Wen Hui have a lot in common: they are both women dance performers, choreographers, and filmmakers. Both grew up in Asia—Otake in postwar Japan and Hui in China during the Cultural Revolution—and both relocated to pursue their work in a new setting, with Otake in New York and Hui in Europe.
In the past five years, Otake and Hui have joined together to consider how their bodies are a repository for their memories.
“We met in 1995 in China while performing at the Guangdong International Experimental Theater Festival,” Otake reported, in regard to her performance there as part of her duo Eiko and Koma. “Because I had long history working with Koma [Otake], and she was working with her partner, there was a sense of camaraderie I felt being in a small-size company.”
The two then worked remotely during the COVID-19 pandemic on a feature-length
documentary film, No Rule Is Our Rule, and now, are working together again on a new performance piece, What is War. It will be performed in October at On the Boards. Why, 80 years after the end of the World War II, do we still have wars? That is the central question of Otake and Hui’s new performance piece.
Otake believes that she and Hui are now at the right phase of their careers that their strengths can best complement each other.
“When we were young, many of us were trying to find our own voice and desire,” Otake observed. “But at a certain age, we open ourselves again, because we become curious about other people’s ways and voices, and we then realize, as different as we are, we also have deep commonalities.”
Despite all that they share, Otake and Hui’s work also aims to make good use of their differences. Otake especially appreciates Hui’s training in documentary film, while she herself is more interested in alternative worlds and transformation. To create What is War, Otake and Hui attended creative residencies at Duke University, Colorado College, and Mass MoCA.
“Tangible thoughts I recognized while working on this piece include: war is grotesque;
war makes each one of us so small; war kills its own people; war makes us naked,” Otake shared. “We knew these things, but they just came back to me over and over.”
From Otake’s perspective, current events unsettled the work that she and Hui created.
“It feels hard and wrong that the piece and its content became too timely,” she said. “We did not start this piece in this world today in which we now find ourselves living. When I heard the Department of Defense might be called the Department of War, I did not know what to do with myself.”
Worldwide realities of the current year have been upsetting, but also thought-provoking, for Otake and Hui as they present their artistic work.
“Every day, everywhere, we hear what is happening in Gaza and Ukraine and in other places of conflict and violence,” Otake emphasized, as she described the self-questioning that she and Hui engaged in about creating an aesthetically-pleasing performance piece about a subject steeped in chaos. “It feels wrong, but giving up our inquiry on this subject does not feel like an option.”
In What is War, Otake and Hui share their personal memories and also invite the audience to consider their own relationship to war.
“Eighty years after World War II and fifty years after the Vietnam war, each of us forget what we know and how much we do not know,” Otake said, “and that might be the part of the reason why we still have wars.”
In delving into their histories and physicalizing them onstage, Otake and Hui want to encourage audience members to remember our own stories and remember others in our lives whose stories we’d benefit from hearing.
What is War runs from October 9 to 11 at On the Boards (100 West Roy Street, Seattle).
