'What is War' by Eiko Otake and Wen Hui

Why, 80 years after the end of the Second World War, do we still have wars? Two internationally acclaimed, multi-disciplinary artists who grew up in 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. 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 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, mirrors, 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.

Eiko Otake (formerly of Eiko & Koma) and Wen Hui (formerly of the Living Dance Studio) met in 1995 in China while performing at the Guandong 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 and friendship growing 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 the 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 mainly to 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 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 elder women 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."

"...cathartic. Two fearless women claiming their agency, sharing embodied truths."— John Killacky, Writing About Our Generation

What is War was created in part during a creative residency at Colorado College. From December 18, 2024, through January 17, 2025, Wen Hui and Eiko Otake researched and choreographed the piece. They also conducted a community workshop and an informal performance for the dance and storytelling class for seniors at Colorado Springs’ Hillside Community Center. The artists invited students, faculty, and community members to attend three showings of the work-in-progress while teaching a short course at the college called Full of Stories: Episodic Knowledge and Interdisciplinary Arts. In addition, they offered a public screening of their film, No Rule is Our Rule.

What is War is presented by the Department of Theatre & Dance, with generous support from the Colorado College War Studies Fund, the History, Asian Studies, Political Science, Philosophy, and Anthropology Departments, and a grant from the NEH Professorship. Additional funding for this performance residency was provided by the New England Foundation for the Arts' National Dance Project, with lead funding from the Doris Duke Foundation and the Mellon Foundation.

What is War was commissioned by the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis and co-commissioned by UCLA’s Center for the Art of Performance (CAP UCLA), Jacob’s Pillow, and the Colorado College Department of Theatre & Dance. The piece premiered at the Walker Art Center in April 2025 followed by a performance at CAP UCLA. This fall, the artists will bring What is War to four U.S. cities, including performances at Brooklyn Academy of Music’s Next Wave Festival and Künstler*innenhaus Mousonturm in Frankfurt, Germany.

Eiko OtakeBorn 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 the 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.

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 theatre 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 theatre 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 the 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 major international stages and festivals, including 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 presented at 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.

The Colorado College dance program began in 1941 with the legendary Hanya Holm, one of the world’s great pioneers of modern dance, who ran the summer program there for 43 years, establishing a mecca for dance across the country. Since the 1980s, the college’s Department of Theatre & Dance has been known for its distinctive curriculum in contemporary performance and for providing opportunities to study with world-renowned touring artists. In the classroom, students are introduced to a diverse body of knowledge that incorporates creative practice with studies in dance, design, and theatre, and exciting experiments by internationally acclaimed living luminaries, such as New York’s theatre company 600 Highwaymen, performance artists such as Sister Sylvester and Janani Balasubramanian, and choreographer Nora Chipaumire. You can learn more about CC’s innovative approach here: https://tinyurl.com/3h9wyp6y

Additional information: Theatredance@coloradocollege.edu

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Interviews: Eiko Otake eikootake@gmail.com, (917) 405-7941

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