Eiko Otake Will Screen Short Films Created During The Pandemic At Mills College Oakland

The acclaimed performance artist Eiko Otake will present three of her evocative short films at the historic Marilyn McArthur Holland Theater in Lisser Hall, on Feb. 18 at 7 pm. Mills College Dance Department offers these rare screenings which will be followed by a conversation between Otake and artist/scholar Sheldon Smith.

Learn more at https://www.eventbrite.com/e/255875098307

The films to be screened, all created during the pandemic, include A Body in a Cemetery (15 min), an edited recording of her September 2020 performance in Brooklyn's Green-Wood Cemetery, mourning the dead from the pandemic as well as from past centuries; and Projecting Fukushima in Tokyo (35 min), which captures Eiko performing throughout Tokyo's streets and underground locations, marking the 10-year anniversary of the Fukushima nuclear meltdown. Eiko will conclude the evening with a report on her new work, Slow Turn, which includes a monolog performed on the 20th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks along the Hudson River near where the Twin Towers once stood.

Eiko is perhaps best known for the visually stunning interdisciplinary performance work, characterized by astonishingly slow motion movement, elaborate dreamscapes and breathtaking performances, that she created, performed and presented worldwide with her longtime collaborator Koma, between 1973 and 2014. Following studies with Kazuo Ohno and Tatsumi Hijikata in Japan and Manja Chmiel in Germany, Eiko & Koma created 46 interdisciplinary performance works, two career exhibitions and numerous media works. Eiko's solo projects began with a twelve-hour performance at the Philadelphia Amtrak station. Since then, Eiko has performed variations of A Body in Places at over forty sites

Otake, who is now in her 70s, has been surprising audiences worldwide since she set out in 2014 to make work on her own. The films she will share at Mills are part of this prodigious collection of intimate, emotionally evocative, and aesthetically arresting works that leave the stage behind, and place her in environments ranging from a train station in Philadelphia to the coastline of Fukushima. A 2022 Mills Performing Artist in Residence, Otake seems more inspired than ever, and has created a not-to-be-missed body of work that wrestles with destruction, mortality, relationship to the land, kinship and history.

This screening marks Otake's first public event after turning 70 and the beginning of her next 10-year project: Eiko Invites Herself.

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