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. Commissioned by the Walker Art Center. Co-commissioned by UCLA’s Center for the Art of Performance (CAP UCLA), Jacob’s Pillow, and Colorado College Theater & Dance Department. 

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 3–4, 2025: Colorado College (Colorado Springs, CO) - Tickets are available here.
October 9–11, 2025: On the Boards (Seattle, WA) - Tickets are available here.
October 21–25, 2025: Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM) (Brooklyn, NY) - Tickets are available here.
October 31–November 2, 2025: Künstler*innenhaus Mousonturm (Frankfurt, Germany) - Tickets are available here.

 
 

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

Why, 80 years after the end of the Second World War, do we still have wars?

Two multi-disciplinary artists who are from very different countries with a history of animosity toward each other began their collaboration with this question. Eiko Otake who grew up in postwar Japan, has lived in New York City since 1976. And Wen Hui who grew up in China during the Cultural Revolution, now lives in Frankfurt, Germany. What urgency brought them together? What learning will they share with us?

Conceived, choreographed, and performed by Eiko Otake and Wen Hui, What Is War explores the personal, cultural, and national relationships to war unearthed from the suppressed stories rarely discussed openly by parents, grandparents, families, friends, and ourselves. Deeply moving, at times beautiful, brutal, compassionate, and powerful, the piece combines movement, stories, video projections, languages, voices, a mirror, silence, and sound, to escort the viewer through memories and experiences, history and imagination, individuals and nation-states, as we realize and are reminded that war connects us all through generations – no matter how intimately or distantly.

For inquiries on the project please reach out to Eiko and Allison at info@eikootake.org.

 
 

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 Otake (formerly of Eiko & Koma) and Wen Hui (formerly of the Living Dance Studio) met in 1995 in China while performing at the Guangdong International Experimental Theater Festival. Wen Hui’s subsequent year-long fellowship in the US and performances in New York gave them many opportunities to become familiar with each other’s work, with mutual respect. Their friendship grew exponentially during Eiko's month-long fellowship in China in 2020, during which they spent every day together. They traveled to locations where Japan's aggression left marks, including Kunming, Wen's hometown, air-raided by Japanese military, and the site of the Lijixiang “Comfort Station” in Nanjing. While in Covid lock-down together in China, they shared their personal histories relating to mainly the second Sino-Japan War (1937-1945), and how their lives were defined by nation-state authorities. Later, as the pandemic raged, they co-edited virtually a feature-length documentary film, No Rule Is Our Rule, which solidified their desire to create a performance work on the theme of war.

Collaborating on What Is War helped the artists to recognize, as Eiko states, “How all our lives are defined by the societies we grow up in and with their histories – real, learned, fabricated, discovered, reckoned...but we do not need to stop there. We can seek to be with a friend who grew up differently and was taught differently. Honest conversations with and without words, but with trust slowly built between two individuals (in this case, two independent female older performing artists) bring revelations, our inner courage, and motivations to sustain our humanity and art making. Tangible thoughts were recognized while working on this piece; war is grotesque. War makes each one of us so small. War kills its own people. War makes us naked."

About Eiko Otake

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 turned her focus to solo projects. Eiko & Koma created numerous performance works, exhibitions, durational “living” installations, and media works commissioned by the American Dance Festival, BAM Next Wave Festival, the Whitney Museum, the Walker Art Center, and the Museum of Modern Art, among others. In addition to performing their own choreography, Eiko & Koma handcrafted their own sets, costumes, and sound.

The Retrospective Project (2009–2012) culminated in two exhibitions, screenings of media works, and a comprehensive monograph, Time is Not Even Space is Not Empty, published by the Walker Art Center. Eiko & Koma were the first collaborative pair to share a MacArthur Fellowship (1996) and the first Asian choreographers to receive both the Samuel H. Scripps American Dance Festival Award (2004) and the Dance Magazine Award(2006). They were honored with the inaugural United States Artists Fellowship (2006) and the first Doris Duke Artist Award (2012).

Eiko’s solo project, A Body in Places, began with a 12-hour performance at the 30th Street Station in Philadelphia in 2014. Since then, she has performed site-specific variations of 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, mixed-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 including a six-month exhibition at Colorado Springs’ Fine Arts Center. A recipient of an honorary degree from Colorado College (2020), she teaches a course that combines studies of atomic bombings and nuclear disaster with movement at Wesleyan University, New York University, and Colorado College.

About Wen Hui

Chinese choreographer and dancer Wen Hui is one of the pioneers of Chinese contemporary dance. She also creates 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 fellowship in 1997-1998 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, Rhein-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.