What Is War (2025)
Collaboratively created and performed by Eiko Otake and Wen Hui
Lighting Design: David Ferri
Dramaturg: Iris McCloughan
What Is War premiered at Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, MN on April 11 and 12, 2025 followed by UCLA’s Center for the Art of Performance (CAP UCLA) in Los Angeles, CA on April 17, 2025.
View the digital program from Walker Art Center here
View the digital program from CAP UCLA here
In Fall 2025, What Is War will be performed at the following venues:
September 25–26, 2025: Duke Arts (Durham, NC) - Tickets are available here.
October 21–25, 2025: Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM) (Brooklyn, NY) - Tickets are available here.
More dates in Colorado Springs and Seattle will be announced soon.
Wen Hui (b. 1960) is Chinese and currently working in Europe. She grew up in China during the Cultural Revolution. Eiko Otake (b. 1952) is Japanese and lives in New York. She grew up in post-war Japan. Both are female performers/choreographers and filmmakers.
In January 2020, Eiko visited Wen Hui in China for a month. The pandemic obliged the artists to continue their dialogue at a distance. In the process of co-creating an award-winning feature length documentary film No Rule Is Our Rule, the artists began examining the personal memories they hold in their bodies. That quest led them to work together physically in the U.S. to co-create the new performance work What Is War, commissioned by the Walker Art Center, CAP UCLA, Jacob’s Pillow, and Colorado College’s Dance and Theater Department.
In this project, Wen Hui and Eiko Otake create a complex tapestry of language, movement, and video to share their personal memories related to war. As they move together, their bodies intimately support and absorb each other’s stories, inviting the audience to consider their own relationship to war on both a historic and personal scale.
For inquiries on the project please reach out to Eiko and Allison at info@eikootake.org.
3 minutes 45 seconds
A short video excerpt from a work-in-progress showing at Duke University
Camera by Jingqiu Guan
Edit by Eiko Otake and Wen Hui
Featured Press
Fjord Review: “What Is War” at CAP UCLA
PDF available
by Victoria Looseleaf, April 2025
LA Dance Chronicle: Eiko Otake and Wen Hui’s “What Is War” at CAP UCLA
by Jeff Slayton, April 19, 2025
Writing about our generation: What Is War at MASS MoCA
by John R. Killacky, February 2025
Interviews
Walker Art Center Magazine: Every War Belongs to You: Wen Hui on What Is War
by Rachel Cooper, April 2025
Walker Art Center Magazine: We All Have War in Our Bodies: Eiko Otake on What Is War
by Rachel Cooper, April 2025
Walker Art Center Magazine: Eiko Otake and Wen Hui on What Is War
by Rachel Cooper, April 2025
Photos
From the Artists
NOTE FROM EIKO
The current constitution of Japan was drafted by American civilian officials during the occupation of Japan after World War II. It was adopted on November 3, 1946, and came into effect on May 3, 1947. Not a single word has been changed since.
Article 9 states: Aspiring sincerely to an international peace based on justice and order, the Japanese people forever renounce war as a sovereign right of the nation and the threat or use of force as means of settling international disputes. In order to accomplish the aim of the preceding paragraph, land, sea, and air forces, as well as other war potential, will never be maintained. The right of belligerency of the state will not be recognized.
Everyone who taught me about World War II is now dead, but I remember their voices. Article 9 is in my body.
A LETTER FROM WEN HUI
Dear Eriko Ikeda,
My name is Wen Hui, a dance choreographer and documentary creator from China. I have been a friend of Eiko for thirty years. I heard you have been her friend since high school and she told you about me and our collaboration on What Is War.
In 2020, Eiko visited me in Beijing. She said she wanted to go to the Nanjing Massacre Museum. This surprised me because, though I had never been there, I imagined the site would be an uncomfortable place for a Japanese person. Her desire moved me, and we went there together. That was quite an experience!
At the site of Lijixiang “Comfort Station,” a division of the Nanjing Massacre Museum,but in a different location and much quieter place. There, Eiko told me that you were the founder of Women’s Active Museum on War and Peace in Tokyo, which exhibits accounts of “Comfort Women” from different countries, and that you have for decades supported and fought for these victims and their family members. I heard that you organized “the Women’s International War Crimes Tribunal on Japan’s Military Sexual Slavery.” Eiko also showedme many DVDs you produced, directed, filmed, and edited. Eiko and I watched the videos together as she translated the Japanese subtitles for me. Many people talk about war, but few people talk about the harm done to women in war. My past works have focused on women’s body memory. Hearing their voices and seeing their faces were deeply affecting to me. As a Chinese woman, I understand how courageous these Asian women from many countries are/were in their old age in sharing their stories and seeking justice. I deeply respect them and your work. I look forward to meeting you and your colleagues.
Sincerely,
Wen Hui
To learn more information on “Comfort House” and “Comfort Women” please refer to Lijixiang “Comfort Station” in Nanjing and Women’s Active Museum on War and Peace.
About the Collaboration
Eiko has lived in New York and worked in America since 1976. Wen Hui, a Chinese citizen, currently lives in Frankfurt. We met in 1995 when we both were invited to perform at the Guandong International Theater Festival. We got to know each other better during Wen Hui’s year-long fellowship in 1997-1998 in the U.S. In 2020, Eiko had a month-long fellowship in China during which we spent every day together. Eiko was deeply moved by Wen Hui’s friends and family who opened their hearts because Eiko was Wen Hui’s friend. When Wen Hui’s subsequent visit to New York had to be canceled due to the pandemic, we decided to look back at the footage we made in China and co-edit a film with Yiru Chen. The process of making the film, No Rule Is Our Rule, required frequent communication, which also built the foundation for What Is War.
While working on this project, we learned many things from each other, our families, and friends. We also remembered things we had forgotten. We are grateful to Wen Hui’s mother, Lao Xiujuan, for revealing her childhood experiences with war.
— Wen Hui and Eiko Otake
About the Artists
Born and raised in Japan and a resident of New York since 1976, Eiko Otake is a movement-based, interdisciplinary artist. She worked for more than 40 years as Eiko & Koma, but since 2014 has been working on her own projects. Eiko & Koma created numerous performance works, exhibitions, durational “living” installations, and media works commissioned by American Dance Festival, BAM Next Wave Festival, the Whitney Museum, the Walker Art Center, and the Museum of Modern Art, among others.
Eiko has performed her solo project A Body in Places at over 70 sites, including a month-long Danspace Project PLATFORM (2016) and three full-day performances at the Metropolitan Museum of Art (2017). Collaboratively created with photographer and historian William Johnston, A Body in Fukushima (2014–) is a multifaceted project that records Eiko‘s solo performances in post-nuclear disaster Fukushima. It consists of photo exhibitions, video installations, mix-media performances, lectures, a book publication, and a feature-length film that has been screened at festivals internationally.
The Duet Project (2017–) is a series of experiments with artists of different disciplines, races, genders and generations. The project has produced performances and media works, including feature length documentary No Rule is Our Rule, collaboratively created with Wen Hui. Eiko is currently working on her 10-year project, I Invited Myself (2022–), a series of exhibitions and screenings of her media works. A recipient of an honorary degree from Colorado College (2020), she teaches at Wesleyan University, New York University, and Colorado College.
Chinese choreographer and dancer Wen Hui is one of the pioneers of Chinese contemporary dance. She also makes documentary films and installations. For the past thirty years, Wen Hui has been using dance theater as a means of social intervention. Since 2008, she has been researching the body as a form of personal social documentation and experimenting with how bodily memory can catalyze the collision between history and reality.
A graduate of the Beijing Dance Academy in 1989 with a degree in choreography, Wen Hui studied modern dance in New York in 1994. She also received a 1997-1998 fellowship from the Asian Cultural Council to continue her studies in New York. From 1999-2000, she worked with Ralph Lemon’s Dance project, Geography Trilogy II – Trees, and toured the U.S. with the company including the BAM Next Wave Festival in New York in 2000.
In 1994, Wen Hui co-founded the first independent dance theater group in China, the Living Dance Studio, in Beijing. In 2005, Wen Hui and Wu Wenguang established the Caochangdi Workstation and co-curated The Crossing International Dance Festival in Beijing. The same year, they initiated The European Artists Exchange Project and Young Choreographers Project. In 2015, Wen Hui curated the ReActor Project at Shanghai Museum of Contemporary Art (Power Station of Shanghai).
Wen Hui’s work and that of the Living Dance Studio have been invited to perform at the most provocative international stages and festivals, including her Report on Body at the Walker Art Center in 2003. Her two films, Dance with Third Grandmother and Dance with Farm Workers, were shown in the Chinese Pavilion at the 2015 Venice Biennale. Dance Only Exists When It Is Performed is a set of two solo exhibitions featuring Yvonne Rainer and Wen Hui at the Beijing Inside-Out Art Museum in 2019. Her exhibition, The Arts of Memory, was shown at the Guangzhou Image Triennial in 2021. Wen Hui’s solo work, I am 60, was presented at Festival d’Automne in Paris and at the 2021 Ruhrtriennale in Germany. Her newest work, New Report on Giving Birth (2023), was also presented at the Festival d’Automne, Rhine-Main Dance Festival at Künstlerhaus Mousonturm in Frankfurt, HAU Hebbel am Ufer in Berlin, HELLERAU European Art Center in Dresden, and at PACT Zollverein in Essen.
In 2004, her Report on Body won the ZKB Patronage Prize by Zürcher Theater Spektakel.
In 2021, Wen Hui received the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany, known as the Goethe Medal.
What Is War was made possible by the New England Foundation for the Arts' National Dance Project, with lead funding from the Doris Duke Foundation and the Mellon Foundation.
