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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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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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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No Rule Is Our Rule 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. No Rule Is Our Rule has been selected by Sans Souci Festival of Dance Cinema, Munich New Wave Film Festival, and WRPN Women's International Film Festival, and the film won Best Feature Documentary at the Japan International Film Festival.

The screening will be followed by a conversation between Eiko Otake and Merián Soto, a Puerto Rican dancer, choreographer, video, and improvisation artist.

The screening is organized by Asian Arts Initiative and co-presented with 2023 Philadelphia Asian American Film Festival (PAAFF) as part of their public programs. 

Asian Arts Initiative
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July 7 @ 5:00 pm

Join us for a special First Friday celebration from 5–8 p.m. featuring a live performance with Eiko Otake and David Harrington followed by an artist talk.

Evening includes:

• FREE museum admission — see what’s on view

• 5:30–7:30 p.m. Eiko Otake and David Harrington performance followed by artist talk with Philip Bither, Senior Curator for the Performing Arts, Walker Arts Center, Minneapolis*

• 5:30–7:30 p.m. Roma Ransom will be playing in Deco Lounge

• Art in Deco Lounge by Alan Baccarella

• FREE downtown shuttle, THE ZEB, running along Tejon Street to downtown art galleries

*In celebration of Otake’s solo exhibition I Invited Myself, vol. II, the Department of Theater and Dance at Colorado College is posting a series of two-day events in the Colorado Springs community.

In this site-specific performance, Otake will perform a series of actions in different museum locations while leading audiences to her exhibition on the second floor. Audiences should be prepared to follow Otake and find places to sit or stand in each location. Please be mindful that site-specific performances do not always offer clear sightlines, leaving it to audiences to discover how to best arrange themselves in the moment. There will be limited seating available for audience members who need physical support during the performance. Audience members may request mobility/physical assistance at patron services.

Please RSVP for the performance and talk on July 7

All events are free and open to the public.

Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center at Colorado College
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July 6 @ 6:00 pm

A Conversation & Performance with Eiko Otake & David Harrington

6 p.m. Cemetery as a Place for Art and Reflection:
Public talk with Harry Weil, Vice-President of Education and Public Programs, Green-Wood Cemetery, Brooklyn, NY

Preceding the With the Dead performance, this a public talk will draw attention to cemeteries as contemplative and complex sites in which history, memories, community, and artistry converge. Harry Weil will converse with Evergreen Cemetery Director Cheryl D. Godbout and Dianne Hartshorn representing Heritage Evergreen.

Cemeteries are places of memory and contemplation, where a community’s stories and histories lie, where we are reminded of our mortality. During the pandemic, Eiko performed in two cemeteries to reflect on and converse with the dead.

You can’t really come to the cemetery and not think about death or the people who have died. We know more about living. But we all die. I thought that performing was my practice of dying. But the practice of dying is not dying. We learn about death by attending to other people’s dying. But we also learn about death by missing the dead. —Eiko Otake

7 p.m. With the Dead
performance

As Eiko Otake’s six-month exhibition at the Fine Art Center at Colorado College nears its closing on July 30, Eiko will return to Colorado Springs with David Harrington, the artistic director and founder of the world-renowned Kronos Quartet. Their long-time friendship is matched by their international recognition as some of the most notable performing artists working today. With the Dead is an adaptation of Otake’s 2020 performance at Green-Wood Cemetery in Brooklyn, NY. Colorado Springs community members and former students of Eiko will join these two distinguished artists in their performance at the historic Evergreen Cemetery so we can collectively reflect on dying and the dead.

I dance thinking about the recent dead, and the dead from the past centuries, including many whose graves were never built. —Eiko Otake

8 p.m. Reception

Eiko and David will talk with audience members and participants.

In celebration of Otake’s solo exhibition I Invited Myself, vol. II, the Department of Theater and Dance at Colorado College is hosting a series of two-day events in the Colorado Springs community.

All events are free and open to the public.

The Historic Evergreen Cemetery
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Join us for a special evening with acclaimed movement-based, interdisciplinary artist Eiko Otake, whose latest Installation, Mother, is currently on view in the Historic Chapel. Having often explored themes of loss, Otake performed Two Grave Markers at Green-Wood in 2020, during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic. She now returns with Mother, in which, through video and sculpture, she converses and dances with her mother who died in 2019.

Price: Free. Registration required.

Otake will be joined in conversation with Gabrielle Gatto, Green-Wood’s coordinator of public programs and a certified death doula, for a discussion about dying, death, loss, and grief. In particular, they will focus on the experience of witnessing the death of a loved one: the impact it has on our own lives and, in contrast, how violence deprives people not only of life but also of an unhurried death. 

This talk takes place in the Modern Chapel, and there will be an opportunity to view the installation in the Historic Chapel before and after. A reception will follow.

Green-Wood Cemetery
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Monday, December 20, 12:00pm ET
Eiko Otake
Book Talk: A Body in Fukushima

Join us for a conversation with Eiko Otake: A Body in Fukushima​.
Part of the Segal Center’s Fall 2021 Book Talk Series.
Moderated by Frank Hentschker, Director, MESTC, The Graduate Center CUNY.

Download the free sample chapter as well as other experts from upcoming Segal Talk Books HERE. ​

Born and raised in Japan Eiko Otake is a movement-based interdisciplinary artist based in New York City since 1976. After studying with Kazuo Ohno and Tatsumi Hijikata in Japan and Manja Chmiel in Germany, Otake created with her partner Takashi Koma Otake the dance duo Eiko & Koma. Since 1972 they have created 46 interdisciplinary performance works, two career exhibitions and numerous media works. Their durational performance living installations were commissioned by the Whitney Museum, the Walker Art Center, and MoMA. Their Retrospective Project (2009 to 2012) culminated in a comprehensive monograph, Time is Not Even, Space is Not Empty, published by the Walker Art Center. Eiko & Koma were honored with the first United ​States Artists Fellowship (2006) and Doris Duke Artist Awards (2012). They were the first collaborative pair to share a MacArthur Fellowship (1996) and the first Asian choreographers to receive the Samuel H. Scripps American Dance Festival Award (2004) and the Dance Magazine Award (2006).​​

Eiko’s solo project A Body in Places began with a 12-hour performance at the Philadelphia 30th Street Station. Since then, Eiko has performed variations of A Body in Places at over 70 sites. In addition, Eiko has performed alone 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.

About A Body in Fukushima:

March 2021 marked the 10th Anniversary of the nuclear disaster in Fukushima, Japan. A Body In Fukushima, a collection of insightful essays and 260 probing color photographs, presents the experience of two visitors to a land devastated by the release of radiation following the meltdown of reactors at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant. Between 2014 and 2019, dance artist Eiko Otake and historian/photographer William Johnston travelled to irradiated Fukushima five times to witness the destruction caused by this human failure. The images in the book manifest Eiko’s performances in this haunting and desolate environment

.Martin E. Segal Theatre Center
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This session will be run as part of the Exploding Appendix Avant-garde Art Practice and Research Group’s fortnightly meetup, which will be taking place online via Zoom (https://us02web.zoom.us/j/7317698673?pwd=OTlBN3RzalBRMGh1TW9qSHNDWmptdz09). The meeting ID is 834 4263 0530.  The passcode is “714908“. This session will be run by Bradley Tuck and take place on the 29th June 2021 from 19:30 – 22:30 (BST UK time). If you would like to join us for the session, or have any questions please message Bradley at explodingappendix@gmail.com

Exploding Appendix
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Film premiere: Friday, June 11 at 5pm (ET) via Zoom
The premiere will be followed by a live discussion.

REGISTER HERE (A Zoom link will be sent to registrants approximately 30 minutes prior to the event)

Part of PLATFORM 2021: The Dream of the Audience

Eiko Otake and Joan Jonas present a new short video work created while in-residence at Danspace’s historic venue in St. Mark’s Church.

During her Platform 2021 residency at Danspace Project, movement-based, interdisciplinary artist, Eiko Otake will be working on a new film collaboration with performance and video pioneer, Joan Jonas. In an unprecedented turn, Otake has invited Jonas to be the first artist to ever direct her in a performance, which will be filmed in Danspace’s sanctuary at St. Mark’s Church in-the-Bowery.

In recent years Otake and Jonas have formed a collaborative friendship (discussed in detail in their 2020 Conversation Without Walls). Both artists create work that engages deeply with its site and experiments with viewership; how the work is experienced and how the viewer experiences themselves within it.

After working for more than 40 years as Eiko & Koma, in 2014, Otake began performing her own solo project A Body in Places, through which she has been exploring the relationship of a fragile human body to the myriad intrinsic traits that are contained by a specific place. Platform 2016: A Body in Places was co-curated by Otake, Judy Hussie-Taylor, and Lydia Bell. It illuminated and expanded Otake’s solo project with readings, durational installations, and daily solo performances by Otake in locations all over NYC’s East Village, home to Danspace Project. Jonas premiered her acclaimed immersive performance work, Moving Off the Land at Danspace Project in 2018.

This film premieres June 11, 2021, and will be available for viewing on our Journal from July 1-Aug 31.

Danspace Project
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On Zoom
Free with RSVP
A link for the livestream will be sent to registrants 30 minutes prior to the event.

This CWW between Lydia Bell (creative producer, former Danspace Program Director) and Kristin Juarez (research specialist for the African American Art History Initiative, Getty Research Institute, past Danspace curatorial fellow) revisits Eiko Otake’s Platform 2016: A Body in Places, which illuminated and expanded Otake’s solo project in locations all over NYC’s East Village, and Ishmael Houston-Jones & Will Rawls’ Platform 2016: Lost & Found, which queried the effects of the loss of a generation of artists to AIDS on current dance creation.

In two PLATFORM 2021 Conversations Without Walls, Danspace’s signature long-form conversation series, Bell and Juarez will convene virtually to activate the archives of past Platforms. 

Danspace Project
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Join Eiko Otake and William Johnston for a conversation to mark the release of their new book, A Body In Fukushima. Moderated by Catharine Stimpson.

On March 11, 2011 one of the most powerful earthquakes in recorded history devastated Japan, triggering a massive tsunami and nuclear meltdowns at three reactors in the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant complex in a triple disaster known as 3.11. On five separate journeys, Japanese-born performer and dancer Eiko Otake and historian and photographer William Johnston visited multiple locations across Fukushima, creating 200 transformative color photographs that document the irradiated landscape, accentuated by Eiko’s poses depicting both the sorrow and dignity of the land. The book also includes essays and commentary reflecting on art, disaster, and grief.

This is a virtual event that will take place on Zoom. Free with RSVP.

NYU Skirball
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On Zoom
Free with RSVP
A link for the livestream will be sent to registrants 30 minutes prior to the event.

Danspace Project’s Platform 2021: The Dream of the Audience features new work by acclaimed artists with long standing relationships to Danspace Project: Ishmael Houston-Jones, Okwui Okpokwasili, Eiko Otake, Joan Jonas, and Reggie Wilson. The Platform will launch with a conversation between the artists and Platform curator/Danspace Executive Director & Chief Curator, Judy Hussie-Taylor. With Hussie-Taylor, the artists will reflect on a year without audiences. What is lost when there is an extremely limited relationship to audience and/or no live audience to bear witness to your work?

Danspace Project
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How do artists use their own bodies to articulate pressing issues of environmental injustice and collective vulnerability across places, timescales, and cultures?

Artists Eiko Otake (Japan/USA) and Sarah Cameron Sunde (USA) bridge site-responsive performance, film, photography, and installation to examine experiences of embodied vulnerability in the face of environmental crises, including nuclear disaster and sea-level rise. Throughout their globe-spanning and multi-year projects, each artist has challenged viewers to reconsider their preconceptions of time, understand the intricate interconnectedness of human bodies and natural landscapes, and witness the impacts of social and environmental injustices in varied places and communities. In this virtual conversation, they will reflect on their durational performance projects, including Eiko Otake’s A Body in Places and A Body in Fukushima series and Sarah Cameron Sunde’s 36.5/A Durational Performance with the Sea. The artists discuss how they use their individual bodies to communicate global concerns, the impacts of industry-induced climate crises on the land and its inhabitants, and how they bridge visual and performing arts practices.

Press Your Ear to the Wind is an event series curated by Elinor New (BA '20) and presented by the Gallatin Galleries and WetLab, with support from the NYU Gallatin Dean’s Award for Graduating Seniors. Borrowing its title from Deborah Jack’s artwork “Foremothers”, this series is an invitation to listen to the wisdom held in the land, water, and our own bodies, and to trace the currents of resilience that flow from our inherited pasts into the futures we generate.

This event is presented by The Gallatin Galleries in collaboration with WetLab.

Zoom, free with registration
Open to All

The Gallatin Galleries
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Artists around the world continue to make work despite—and often grappling with—the COVID-19 pandemic and political and humanistic cries. Join a tour and post-election conversation in Eiko Otake’s Virtual Studio, which expands, re-focuses, and reimagines her and her collaborators' creative practices in 2020. Eiko will be joined by two of her colllaborators, DonChristian Jones ’12 and Iris McCloughan ’10, who will also moderate the discussion.

Invited by the Center for the Arts, Eiko started work on her virtual creative residency in March 2020. Her Virtual Studio is where she posts her new creations, dialogues, and reflections. The studio also includes her work with collaborators and their voices. In working at her Virtual Studio, Eiko says she is no longer content being just a dancer/choreographer. From the studio, she observes and reaches out to the world, the world full of movements—social, political, natural, and emotional. 

If you can, please check her website and view some works before joining this event, so you can have some questions and reflections to offer, as the artists would love to hear your thoughts. Participants will be hearing from artists and from each other. 

Read Eiko's intention in What Is Virtual Studio? and enjoy works created during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Read more about the project from Interim Director Jennifer Calienes on the Center for the Arts blog.

Wesleyan University’s Center for the Arts
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Moderated by Judy Hussie-Taylor

The foundation of the conversation between Eiko Otake and Joan Jonas finds these celebrated artists forming a generative and collaborative new friendship. The two discuss the mutual influence of Japanese theater, dance, and literature on their work as they offer insight into making new work and connections in the maturity of their careers.

Both artists have long histories of creating work that engages deeply with site and experiments with viewership; how the work is experienced and how the viewer experiences themselves within it—the performance or audience might be placed outside, observing from a long distance, or within a very small grouping—configurations of presentation that pose hopeful possibilities for future works in this unprecedented time of physical distance.

Initiated in 2011 by Judy Hussie-Taylor and Jenn Joy, Conversations Without Walls (CWW) are long-form, Saturday afternoon, roundtable discussions that provide context and insight into the work of Danspace Project’s artists and Platforms. The nearly decade-long series facilitates intergenerational conversations between writers, scholars, choreographers, and audiences. In this time when our physical doors remain closed and in person gathering is limited we are reimagining the CWW series as a digital program. Each episode of the CWW digital series will be broadcast live on YouTube and ultimately archived for the public on the Danspace Project online Journal.

Danspace Project
https://danspaceproject.org/calendar/cww-jonas-otake/