Join us on Tuesday, September 16 for a screening of NO RULE IS OUR RULE (Eiko Otake and Wen Hui, 2023, run time: 1 hr 15 min), followed by a talkback with Otake at the Bushel Collective.
Doors at 7:30, screening at 8:00.
No Rule Is Our Rule is a video diary 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.
No Rule Is Our Rule has been selected by Sans Souci Festival of Dance Cinema, Munich New Wave Film Festival, WRPN Women’s International Film Festival, and Kalakari Film Festival, and the film won Best Feature Documentary at the Japan International Film Festival. The film has also been screened at Asia Society New York, Asian Arts Initiative, and several universities, including Wesleyan University, Yale University, Duke University, and Cornell University.
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 performing their own choreography which earned them Guggenheim, MacArthur, and United States Artists Fellowships, as well as the Samuel H. Scripps American Dance Festival and the Dance Magazine Awards.
Since 2014, Eiko has been directing her own projects. She has performed a series of site-specific solo work, A Body in Places at over 76 sites. In 2016, Eiko was the subject of the 10th annual Danspace Platform, a month-long curated program that brought her a Special Bessies Citation, an Art Matters Grant, and the Anonymous Was a Woman Award. A Body in Fukushima records Eiko‘s solo performances in post-nuclear disaster Fukushima, Japan. The project has produced a book publication, a feature-length film as well as numerous photo exhibitions, lectures, and performances. In 2017, Eiko launched her multi-year Duet Project, a mutable and evolving series of experiments in collaborations. She has worked with artists David Harrington, Ishmael Houston-Jones, Wen Hui, Joan Jonas, DonChristian Jones, Iris McCloughan, Beverly McIver, Mérian Soto, Wen Hui, and her late grandfather, Chikuha Otake. Her 10-year project, I Invited Myself, is a series of exhibitions and screenings of her media works. Her short and feature-length films have been screened in many film festivals internationally. www.eikootake.org