What Is War (2025)

Collaboratively created and performed by Eiko Otake and Wen Hui

Lighting Design: David Ferri
Dramaturg: Iris McCloughan

“What Is War” will premiere 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. Fall 2025 tour dates and venues will be announced soon, including a New York presentation of What Is War.

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

Writing about our generation: What Is War at MASS MoCA
by John R. Killacky, February 2025

Photos

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.