No Rule is Our Rule (2022) Screening and Q&A with co-directors Eiko Otake and Wen Hui

Date: Thursday March 27, 2025
Time: 5:30 PM - 7:30 PM
Location: Harry Ransom Center
FREE AND OPEN TO THE PUBLIC. PLEASE RSVP BY CLICKING HERE. 

This is a story of friendship between two independent female artists and their body memories each willingly carry. In January 2020, New York based, interdisciplinary performing artist Eiko Otake arrived in Beijing to visit Wen Hui, a Chinese choreographer and filmmaker. Eight years apart, Eiko grew up in postwar Japan and Wen during the Cultural Revolution. They planned to visit each other for a month to converse and collaborate. The surge of COVID-19 abruptly cut off Eiko's visit and the pandemic has so far made Wen's visit to the USA impossible but not the collaboration. Looking back on the video diaries they shot without a script, Eiko and Wen continued their dialogue on Zoom, sharing past works that form a deeper understanding of their circumstantial differences and characteristic similarities. Chinese film director Yiru Chen, once Eiko’s student, joined the team as a co-editor.

Special thanks to our co-sponsors:

Center for Asian American Studies
Center for Women’s and Gender Studies
Institute of Historical Studies 
Oscar G. Brockett Center for History and Theatre Criticism and the Department of Theatre and Dance 
Rapoport Center for Human Rights and Justice & the Sissy Farenthold Fund for Peace and Justice
The Sterling Clark Holloway Centennial Lectureship in Liberal Arts

Sponsored by: Co-sponsored by the Harry Ransom Center, UT Dept. of Theatre and Dance, and CEAS

University of Texas at Austin
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UPCOMING Performances: Thu, Feb 20 at 7:30PM

RUNNING TIME: 60min

VENUE: Peter Jay Sharp Building, The Adam Space (BAMcafé)

TICKET INFORMATION: Free
Admission is free on a first-come, first-served basis. RSVP does not guarantee entry, but helps us prepare for your experience and will ensure you get the latest information around the performance.

In their recently published anthology, Dance History(s): Imagination as a Form of Study, choreographers Thomas F. DeFrantz and Annie-B Parson gather a dozen diverse perspectives on the history of dance, each contributed by a working choreographer and all addressing the same question: What is dance history? By handing the authorial microphone to dance artists to serve as our dance historians, the book assembles their embodied lineages, and creates a new prismatic shape for dance history(s). The evening of book readings, with 60-second interstitial dances done by the authors, features a choreographic score by Annie-B Parson in collaboration with fellow choreographer/authors DeFrantz, mayfield brooks, maura nguyễn donohue, Keith Hennessy, Bebe Miller, Okwui Okpokwasili, Eiko Otake, Javier Steel-Frésquez, Ogemdi Ude, Mariana Valencia, and Andros Zins-Browne.

Brooklyn Academy of Music
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No Rule Is Our Rule with Eiko Otake
Co-Presented with Jacob’s Pillow

This moving film is a story of friendship between two independent female artists and the body memories that each carries. In January 2020, New York-based interdisciplinary performing artist Eiko Otake arrived in Beijing to visit Wen Hui, a Chinese choreographer and filmmaker. Eight years apart, Eiko grew up in postwar Japan and Wen during the Cultural Revolution. They had planned to visit each other for a month to converse and collaborate, but the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic abruptly cut off Eiko’s visit and made Wen’s visit to the USA impossible. Nevertheless, the collaboration continued. Looking back on the video diaries they had filmed without a script, Eiko and Wen continued their dialogue on Zoom, sharing past works that form a deeper understanding of their circumstantial differences and characteristic similarities. The pair will be in residence at MASS MoCA developing a new collaborative work.

Saturday, February 1, 4pm
$10 Advance

Mass MoCA
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There will be a free screening, open to the public, of Eiko Otake and Wen Hui’s film No Rule Is Our Rule (2022) at Colorado College's Edith Kinney Gaylord Cornerstone Arts Center on Monday, January 13 at 3PM.

Cornerstone 131 (Screening Room)
Edith Kinney Gaylord Cornerstone Arts Center, 825 N. Cascade Ave.

Admission Fee (free for all audiences unless noted below):
Free to the Public

Sponsored by: Pamela Battey Mitchell '58 Visiting Artist-In-Residence in Contemporary Dance In Honor Of Hanya Holm

Colorado College
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Wet: Videos and dialogue by Eiko Otake and DonChristian
Wednesday, October 9, 6:00-9:00pm 
This event takes place in-person at Personality Cleaners.
302 Ellery Street
Brooklyn, NY 11206

DonChristian Jones and Eiko Otake invite you for their three hour event, in which they will show video works, physically converse, and reflect on their decades-long friendship and eight-year collaboration. The multi-channel videos projected on the walls of Personality Cleaners are works from 2017 and 2023—filmed at UCLA, Greenwood Cemetery, and the Robert Rauschenberg Residency in Captiva, Florida. “Onigiri (Japanese rice balls) and refreshments will be prepared and served by Eiko and Don.

Personality Cleaners
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This Friday at 7PM, discover the collaborative film “No Rule Is Our Rule” (2022) through an exclusive screening and discussion featuring Eiko Otake, who teaches an arts workshop “Delicious Movement” at NYU Gallatin each fall, and Wen Hui, an internationally acclaimed dance artist from China.

Open to NYU students only.

Gallatin School of Individualized Study (1 Washington Pl.)
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Eiko Otake - Interdisciplinary Artist ; Wen Hui - Choreographer, Dancer, Filmmaker

Wednesday, April 10, 2024 - 4:00pm

Auditorium
53 Wall Street
New Haven, CT 06511

This is a story of friendship between two independent female artists and their body memories each willingly carry. In January 2020, New York based, interdisciplinary performing artist Eiko Otake arrived in Beijing to visit Wen Hui, a Chinese choreographer and filmmaker. Eight years apart, Eiko grew up in postwar Japan and Wen during the Cultural Revolution. They planned to visit each other for a month to converse and collaborate. The surge of COVID-19 abruptly cut off Eiko’s visit and the pandemic has so far made Wen’s visit to the USA impossible but not the collaboration. Looking back on the video diaries they shot without a script, Eiko and Wen continued their dialogue on Zoom, sharing past works that form a deeper understanding of their circumstantial differences and characteristic similarities. Chinese film director Yiru Chen, once Eiko’s student, joined the team as a co-editor.

Directed by Wen Hui and Eiko Otake
Edited by Yiru Chen, Wen Hui, and Eiko Otake

Support for the artists and this event also came from The Beijing Contemporary Art Foundation and Duke University 

Yale MacMillan Center Council on East Asian Studies
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Film Screening and Discussion with Artists

Tuesday, April 9, 2024 at 7:30PM
Powell Family Cinema, Jeanine Basinger Center for Film Studies
Wesleyan University | 301 Washington Terrace | Middletown, CT
Free admission

No Rule is Our Rule
2023 / China/United States / 76 min
documentary
Directed and Produced,by Eiko Otake, Hui Wen
Edited by Yiru Chen, Eiko Otake, Hui Wen

This is a story of friendship between two independent female artists and the body memories each willingly carry. In January 2020, New York-based, interdisciplinary performing artist Eiko Otake arrived in Beijing to visit Wen Hui, a Chinese choreographer and filmmaker. Eight years apart in age, Eiko grew up in postwar Japan and Wen in China during the Cultural Revolution. They planned to visit each other for a month to converse and collaborate.  Yet the surge of COVID-19 abruptly cut off Eiko’s visit and the pandemic made Wen’s visit to the USA impossible—but not the collaboration. Looking back on the video diaries they shot without a script, Eiko and Wen continued their dialogue on Zoom, sharing past works that form a deeper understanding of their circumstantial differences and characteristic similarities. No Rule is Our Rule was selected for the Munich New Wave Film Festival and won Best Feature Documentary at Japan International Film Festival last year. 

Co-sponsored by Wesleyan University’s Allbritton Center, Center for the Arts, College of Film and the Moving Image, College of East Asian Studies, Dance Department, Fries Center for Global Studies, and Office of International Student Affairs. Hui Wen’s travel to the United States was supported in part by the Beijing Contemporary Art Foundation.

Wesleyan University

April 6, 2024
2:00–3:00pm
Ark Dance Studio

Please join us for a work-in-progress showing of the new work that Eiko Otake and Wen Hui will create during the residency. A Q&A discussion will follow the showing, moderated by the Director of the American Dance Festival, Jodee Nimerichter. A reception will take place right after the Q&A during which you could meet and converse with the artists.

Duke University
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Artist-directors Wen Hui and Eiko Otake; moderated by Prof. Jingqiu Guan (Duke Dance Program)

NO RULE IS OUR RULE is a documentary film about the friendship between two fiercely independent, interdisciplinary female dance artists Eiko Otake and Wen Hui. Eiko grew up in postwar Japan and has lived in New York since the 1970s. 8 years younger, Beijing-based Wen Hui grew up during the Cultural Revolution in China and shows her work internationally. They spent a month together in China in January 2020, when the surge of COVID-19 became first known to the general public. Postponing their physical collaboration, Eiko and Wen Hui continued to converse candidly over Zoom and co-edited the footage they filmed in China. The process has deepened their mutual understanding of their past works created and presented in different historical and social contexts. Chinese film director Yiru Chen, once Eiko's student, joined the team as a co-editor.

NO RULE IS OUR RULE played at the Munich New Wave Film Festival and won Best Feature Documentary at the 2023 Japan International Film Festival.

-- Q&A to follow screening featuring artist-directors Wen Hui and Eiko Otake, moderated by Prof. Jingqiu Guan (Duke Dance Program) --

Duke University Asian/Pacific Studies Institute
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The world is at “90 seconds to midnight,” the closest it has ever been, according to the Doomsday Clock of the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists. However alarming this prognosis is, nuclear disaster has long been in the making, demonstrated by decades of Indigenous, Third World, and feminist anti-nuclear advocacy. For decades, these advocates have recognized that nuclear and environmental threats and harms are intrinsically connected through legal, political, and economic structures of imperialism.

“Disarming Toxic Empire” will bring fresh, transnational, and interdisciplinary approaches to peace, nuclear disarmament, and environmental justice. Participants will consider and contest the unjust, imperial histories and geographies of nuclear testing, production, storage, and weaponry. The conference will bring together academics, advocates, and artists working through intergenerational channels of memory and justice to respond to nuclear toxicity in all its forms and manifestations, in sites ranging from the Navajo Nation and the Pacific Islands to Japan, North Africa, and Ghana.

The conference will open with a keynote address by 2017 Nobel Peace Prize winner Beatrice Fihn, former executive director of the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN). It will end with a performance of A Body in Fukushima by the movement–based interdisciplinary artist Eiko Otake.

Hosted by the Sissy Farenthold Fund for Peace and Social Justice of the Rapoport Center, the conference is a collaborative effort among many institutions at the University of Texas and beyond. Fihn’s keynote event is sponsored by the Swedish Excellence Endowment, the Barbro Osher Pro Suecia Foundation Excellence Endowment, and Texas Global.

University of Texas at Austin
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A Body in Nuclear Places: Eiko Otake’s Performance, Installation, & Translation Practices - A conversation with Eiko Otake and Rosemary Candelario

Date: Wednesday March 20, 2024
Time: 12:00 PM - 2:00 PM
Location: Meyerson Conference Room (WCH 4.118)

*This talk is part of the CEAS Artists, Activists, and Academics in East Asia Series  

Raised in Japan and a resident of New York since 1976, Eiko Otake is a movement–based interdisciplinary artist. She worked for 42 years as Eiko & Koma, receiving commissions from the Whitney Museum, the Walker Art Center, and MoMA, and major awards including the MacArthur Fellowship and the Samuel H. Scripps American Dance Festival Award. Since 2014 Eiko has worked as a solo artist, producing live proscenium and site-specific performances, museum and gallery installations, films, and a book. Eiko performs, teaches, and writes about the impacts of nuclear weapons and nuclear power, notably through her A Body in Fukushima project and her translation of award-winning literary writings by Hayashi Kyoko, a survivor of the Nagasaki A-Bomb.

Rosemary Calendario, Associate Professor in the UT Theatre and Dance, has written extensively about Otake’s earlier work in her award-winning book Flowers Cracking Concrete: Eiko & Koma's Asian/American Choreographies (Wesleyan University Press 2016). She both writes and makes dances engaged with Asian and Asian American dance, butoh, ecology and site-related performance and is the recipient of the 2022 Mid-Career Award from the Dance Studies Association.

University of Texas at Austin Center for East Asian Studies
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Join movement artists Eiko Otake, DonChristian Jones, and Iris McCloughan for a discussion with curator DJ Hellerman on collaboration and experimentation.

Organized in conjunction with Eiko Otake: I Invited Myself, Vol. III: Duets.

Free (suggested donation of $5)
Advance registration encouraged

The Fabric Workshop and Museum
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Artist Talk, Film Screening, and Q+A
7–8:30pm, Thursday, February 29th
Knowlton Hall rm 250
275 W Woodruff Ave, Columbus, OH 43210
Free & open to all!

Otake will be giving a performative artist talk at the Barnett Theatre, in Sullivant Hall.

Presented by The Ohio State Department of Art Visiting Artist Program in partnership with the Center for Ethnic Studies & The Ohio State Department of Dance.

Ohio State University

Join the Department of Performing and Media Arts on Saturday, February 17th for A Body in Places, a solo performance by artist Eiko Otake and a screening of No Rule is Our Rule followed by a Q&A. Free and open to all.

Performance: Saturday, Feb. 17 from 3:00 p.m. - 3:45 p.m., Mui Ho Fine Arts Library (2nd Floor, Rand Hall, 947 University Ave, Ithaca, NY)

Screening: Saturday, Feb. 17 from 7:00pm - 9:00 p.m., Film Forum, Schwartz Center for the Performing Arts (430 College Ave, Ithaca, NY)

A Body in Places is a solo performance by internationally acclaimed Japanese-American movement-based interdisciplinary artist Eiko Otake. Performing alone in a public site, her body activates and disrupts particular places. In turn, each place offers a different focus and meaning to her choreography. The project began with a 12-hour performance at Philadelphia's 30th Street Station. Since then, Eiko has created variations of A Body in Places as place-specific work and performed at over 70 sites, including three different buildings at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. In addition, Eiko has performed in many locations of post-nuclear meltdown Fukushima for her multi-year work A Body in Fukushima, her collaboration with historian and photographer William Johnston. The project has produced exhibitions, screenings, lectures, and performances, a photography book, and a feature-length documentary that premiered in MoMA in 2022. "With A Body in Places, I have always imagined digging a hole through the earth to connect each of my performance sites with Fukushima. I want to let my audiences see, among the bodies of the other viewers, my immigrant body carrying Fukushima tucked inside it," explains Eiko. At Cornell, Eiko will perform A Body in a Library in the remarkable Mui Ho Fine Arts Library, intimately conversing with the library's books and architecture, as well as its visitors. In the past, she performed in public libraries in Middletown, CT; Toronto, Canada; Pittsfield, MA; and Durham and Raleigh, NC.

"A library is a quiet place. Dance is a visual and kinesthetic art, so seeing me there, silence could become more visible and profound." — Eiko Otake

No Rule is Our Rule is a 76-minute documentary film about the friendship of two fiercely independent, interdisciplinary Asian female dance artists, Eiko Otake and Wen Hui. Following Eiko’s two-week visit to China in January 2020, their collaboration and subsequent conversations delve into their lives in post-WII Japan and the Occupation and China's Cultural Revolution, respectively, and their distinct cultural memories that intersect in the shared trauma of the Sino-Japanese War and the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic in China. No Rule is Our Rule is in collaboration with director Yiru Chen and won Best Feature Documentary at the Japan International Film Festival in 2023. The film screening will be immediately followed by an Artist Q&A Session, culminating the daylong event series.

Cornell University Department of Performing & Media Arts
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The Institute of Dance Scholarship, AIR (Arts Interdisciplinary Research) and the Dance Department at Boyer College of Music and Dance are pleased to announce the Spring 2024 program of the Dance Studies Colloquium. Most events are live-streamed and continue to be free and open to the public.

Eiko Otake Carrying Fukushima in Conwell Theater, 3-4:30pm

A Body in Fukushima is the title of the extensive and expanding collaborative project between Eiko and photographer/historian William Johnston. Eiko first invited Johnston to collaborate on creating photograph works in Fukushima in 2014, 10 years ago. It was at the time Eiko began conceiving her first solo project, A Body in Places, which started with A Body in a Station at 30th Street Amtrak train station in Philadelphia in November 2014 along with the first Fukushima photo exhibition at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts (PAFA) which also produced her performances at Philadelphia Station.

In 2014, Eiko and Johnston made two extended visits to the irradiated areas surrounding the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear reactors, where all residents had been evacuated. They returned to the area again in the 2016 and 2017 summer and found much of the places they had visited in 2014 have been radically changed. New sea walls were built, and many workers were brought in to clear houses and buildings and decontaminate the fields and roads. The only places that were left untouched by bulldozers were shrines and forests. Eiko danced in these places that remain highly irradiated, embodying bitter grief, anger, and remorse. In 2019, they visited Fukushima for the fifth time.

Boyer College of Music and Dance
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Dance On Camera and Film at Lincoln Center (FLC) present the 52nd edition of the Dance on Camera Festival from February 9 to 12, 2024. The four-day festival features 11 programs with a total of 36 films selected from countries around the globe, including eight world premieres, five North American premieres, two U.S. premieres, and more than 10 New York premieres. Dance on Camera Festival, the longest-running dance film festival in the world, takes place at Film at Lincoln Center with programming organized by the nonprofit organization, Dance On Camera.

“The 52nd Dance on Camera Festival invites New York audiences to traverse a rich, international tapestry of dance films that transcend time, style, and form while celebrating innovative artists and stories,” said co-curator Michael Trusnovec. “We’re thrilled to share classical grace alongside the vitality of contemporary expression with all those who seek the beauty of dance, old and new.”

The festival is programmed by the Dance Films Association.

a foreigner
Eiko Otake and Patrizia Herminjard, 2023, USA, 4m
World Premiere
Japanese with English subtitles

Once a person is a foreigner, she never ceases to be a foreigner. No place is hers, except her shadow. This film features award-winning, movement-based interdisciplinary artist Eiko Otake, who has been a pivotal figure in site-specific dance for more than five decades.

Dance on Camera Festival 2024
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Join us for a screening and discussion of No Rule is Our Rule, a documentary film about friendship between two fiercely independent, interdisciplinary female dance artists Eiko Otake and Wen Hui. Eiko grew up in postwar Japan and has lived in New York since 1970s. 8 years younger, Beijing based Wen Hui grew up during the Cultural Revolution in China and shows her work internationally. They spent a month together in China in January 2020, when the surge of COVID-19 became first known to the general public. Postponing their physical collaboration, Eiko and Wen Hui continued to converse candidly over Zoom and co-edited the footage they filmed in China. The process has deepened their mutual understanding  of their past works created and presented in different historical and social contexts.  

This event marks Wen Hui's first return to New York since 2018, when she presented her work Red at Asia Society. The 76-minute film screening will be followed by a discussion with the artists themselves. Yiru Chen, who joined Eiko and Wen Hui in editing, will also participate in the conversation, which is moderated by Zhen Zhang, Professor in the Department of Cinema Studies at NYU Tisch and founding Director of the Asian Film and Media Initiative. 

No Rule is Our Rule was recently selected for the Munich New Wave Film Festival and won Best Feature Documentary at the Japan International Film Festival this year. 

Asia Society
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Eiko Otake returns to Asia Society for a performative dialogue at the intersection of movement and visual art. Known to past Asia Society audiences as a part of Eiko & Koma, Eiko will reflect on the life and work of her grandfather Otake Chikuha, whose painting Fall of the Castle (1902) is currently on view as a part of Meiji Modern: Fifty Years of New Japan at the Asia Society Museum. With projections of his artwork, family photos, and writings, Eiko will share episodic knowledge about her grandfather's life and artistry in the context of her own journey as an artist. Photographer and historian William Johnston will join Eiko onstage in reimagining Chikuha within the rapid social, cultural, and political changes that occurred during the Meiji (1868-1912) and ensuing Taisho (1912-1926) eras for today’s audiences.

Asia Society Museum
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Experience this co-presentation of a singular movement-based artist’s celebrated works across two venues. Led by DJ Hellerman, Chief Curator & Director of Curatorial Affairs at FWM, and Joyce Chung, Curator at the Asian Arts Initiative (AAI), this tour begins with AAI’s presentation, A Body, which features Eiko’s lone body moving within different landscapes and absorbing what they hold. The group will then head down the street to FWM to experience Duets, which highlights Eiko’s collaborative projects with artists of different races, identities, cultures, disciplines, and ages.

Organized in conjunction with Eiko Otake: I Invited Myself, Vol III: A Body at the Asian Arts Initiative (on view through December 9, 2023) and Eiko Otake: I Invited Myself, Vol. III: Duets at The Fabric Workshop and Museum (on view through March 24, 2024).

Event begins:
Asian Arts Initiative
1219 Vine Street, Philadelphia, PA 19107

Event ends:
The Fabric Workshop and Museum
1214 Arch Street, Philadelphia, PA 19107

Asian Arts Initiative / The Fabric Workshop and Museum
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Tuesday, November 7 (5:30PM)
EIKO OTAKE: A BODY WITH FUKUSHIMA
Co-presented by Aurora Picture Show and Cynthia Woods Mitchell Center for the Arts
Location: Dudley Recital Hall, University of Houston, 4800 Calhoun Rd, Houston, TX 77004
Free Admission

Aurora and Cynthia Woods Mitchell Center for the Arts are proud to present Japanese-born interdisciplinary artist Eiko Otake’s solo performance project, A Body with Fukushima. Eiko spent four years of her childhood in a prefecture next to Fukushima. After the region was hit with multiple disasters including an earthquake, a tsunami, and the explosions of the Daiichi nuclear plant, Eiko visited the irradiated Fukushima five times with a historian and photographer William Johnston. Experiencing a deep sense of regret for human-made environmental disaster, Eiko danced alone hoping to use her body as a conduit to people who are far away and to future generations. Eiko has presented this project in various forms, including exhibitions, a photo book, and a film. Here, she will perform live within an installation of moving image projections. A Body with Fukushima presents a powerful embodiment of grief, upset, and remorse while bringing together the present, past and the landscape of post-earthquake Fukushima through and with Eiko’s body. There will be an artist talk and Q&A following the performance.

Dudley Recital Hall is located on the first floor of the Fine Arts building, on the campus of University of Houston (use Entrance #16 or #18). Click on this link for a map and paid parking directions. 

Aurora Picture Show
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