Conversation with Eiko Otake and DonChristian Jones
Friday, May 30 at 4PM
37 years apart, friends and artistic collaborators Eiko Otake and DonChristian Jones have created multiple performance and video works together. Their bodies co-inhabiting a wide range of spaces, they ran, collapsed, and held each other. Their spoken and non-verbal dialogues have focused on violence, survival, and witnessing.
Prior to their site-specific performances at Laurel Hill East, which will intersect with each other, join them for a conversation: what does it mean to create urgent work? How do massive deaths differ from personal deaths? They will also recall how they attended the death and dying of a parent.
A Body in Laurel Hill
Friday, May 30 at 6PM
Sunday, June 1 at 2PM
Eiko Otake is a movement-based, interdisciplinary artist who worked for over 40 years in the collaboration Eiko and Koma. In 2014 she started her site specific solo project A Body In Places--a site-specific series of solo performances--at more than 80 sites, including at 30th Street Station in Philadelphia, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and Green-Wood Cemetery in Brooklyn. In a layered exploration of time, season, landscape, architecture and culture, A Body In Laurel Hill continues this series and Eiko's longtime work on the theme of death and dying.
"In a cemetery, I think of the recent dead, and the dead from the past centuries, including many whose graves were never built. When I enter the cemetery, I try to leave my/our current upsets at the gate but make sure to pick those up on my way out." This site-specific work interrogates existence and non-existence: who, and what, is present or absent.
This performance by Eiko Otake is connected to The Politics of Mourning IV by DonChristian Jones. Please note that a ticket to either one of these performances includes admission to the other which will take place during the same time period and place. Total run time for both pieces is 90 minutes.
Why and How I Perform in Cemeteries
Saturday, May 31 at 6:30PM
"You can’t really come to the cemetery and not think about death or the people who have died. And that’s a good thing to think about. We know more about living, but we all die. We learn about death by attending to other people’s dying. We also learn about death by missing the dead."
Nearly all of Eiko Otake’s work has been related to death in some way. Pieces such as Offering (2002), Death Poem (2006), Mourning (2007), and Slow Turn (2021) more specifically dealt with personal deaths or with massive killing. Starting in 2020 she performed variations of her site-specific solo A Body in a Cemetery at Green-Wood Cemetery in Brooklyn, NY, Maplewood Cemetery in Durham, NC, and Evergreen Cemetery in Colorado Springs, CO. Now at the age 73, Eiko performs a newly scored solo at Philadelphia’s Laurel Hill East.
Join Eiko as she shares her themes on death, cemetery as a performance site, and the specific relationship she and Green-Wood Cemetery have forged.
Imagining the Future of Dying and Deathcare
Sunday, June 1 at 6PM
Just as in life, dying is not only an individual experience but one that’s part of an interlocking framework of systems often driven by profit and power. The current deathcare industry in the U.S. reinforces systemic inequities based on class, race, ethnicity, ability, sexual orientation and gender identity, and centers dominant Western ideas of how aging, dying, and grieving should look.
What could it look like to decolonize or undo the ideas and practices that privilege medicalized and commercialized ways of dying? What are the values, rights, and ancestral knowledge-ways that can help us re-envision and re-shape deathcare so that everyone has access to an autonomous and dignified death? What are the holistic ways we might reclaim human-centered, community-based practices that support an interconnected culture of dying that is just, equitable, and ecologically sustainable? Join Saharra Dixon, Eiko Otake, Krista Nelson and Narinder Bazen for a discussion that envisions the future of dying and deathcare.
Philadelphia Death and Arts Festival
Link to Event
