Drawing in Circles WHY?

Performances:
Saturday, March 18, 4pm
Friday, March 24, 7pm
Saturday, March 25, 4pm

Joan Jonas’ and Eiko Otake’s collaborative project, Drawing in Circles will be on view at Castelli Gallery March 14 – April 1, 2023. This exhibition, with three accompanying live performances, marks a historic collaboration for the artists and a unique partnership between Castelli Gallery and Danspace Project.

 In private conversations that started in 2018, Joan and Eiko discovered shared influences including Japanese theater, film, dance, and literature as well as an intense interest in one another’s divergent processes with regard to live performance and video. In 2019, they began experimenting in Jonas’ studio both in New York and in Nova Scotia. During the pandemic, Danspace’s director and curator Judy Hussie-Taylor invited Eiko and Joan first to a public conversation in 2020 then to collaborate in 2021 on a video With the Earth at My Waistline.

Drawing in Circles, the installation, will feature With the Earth at My Waistline along with both new and older videos by each artist offering insights into their processes with regard to improvisation, collaboration, time, space, sound, object, and image.

The performances run approximately 30 minutes and will be followed by a conversation with the artists.

Castelli Gallery and Danspace Project
Link to Event

Movement-based, interdisciplinary artist Eiko Otake has often created works in conversation with the dead. In Mother, an installation of two short films in Green-Wood’s Historic Chapel, she talks and dances with her mother, who died in 2019. At the Cemetery, where many mothers have been laid to rest and are mourned, Otake invites viewers to consider the passage that links each of us to the past, a mother, her body, and death.

Born and raised in Japan and a resident of New York since 1976, artist Eiko Otake’s work centers on movement and visual poetry. For more than 40 years, she performed as part of Eiko & Koma, but since 2014 has focused on solo projects. Otake’s A Body in Places has been performed at over 70 sites, including The Green-Wood Cemetery in September 2020. She received a special Duke Performing Award, Bessie Award citation, an Art Matters grant, and the Anonymous Was a Woman Award.

The films in Mother will play on loop, along with visual installation, in the Historic Chapel daily, 10am–5pm.

Free and open to the public, no reservations are necessary. Please consider a donation to The Green-Wood Historic Fund so that we can continue to offer free and low-cost programs throughout the year.

Green-Wood Cemetery
Link to Event