Eiko Otake: 44 Years at the Walker

By Walker Art Center

Walker Publishing Filed to Performing Arts · Part of Genre Non Grata

Eiko and Koma, Grain, 1984. Courtesy Walker Art Center.

Japanese movement–based interdisciplinary artist Eiko Otake has sustained a collaboration with the Walker for over 44 years, beginning with the performance of White Dance in 1981. Ranging from performances to a living installation, residencies, commissions, artist talks, and a catalogue, Otake, as part of the duo Eiko & Koma, has worked with the Walker to develop and present innovative movement works.

This April, Otake returns to the Walker with another new commission created with radical dance-theater artist Wen Hui, of Living Dance Studio. To mark this occasion, we’ve looked back at our long-standing collaboration with this innovative international artist.

Collected here are just some of the behind-the-scenes images, video interviews, and other documentation that charts the evolution of Otake’s work at the Walker.

Since the 1960s, the Walker has supported the creation of new performance work by providing over 300 artists with financial support and often other resources, such as space, time, and technical or curatorial expertise.

In Otake’s first Walker commission, as part of the duo Eiko & Koma, dance-on-camera work Lament (1986 was a collaboration with video artist James Byrne. Featuring movement material adapted from Eiko & Koma’s 1984 performance work Elegy, this video work was commissioned by the Walker Art Center and filmed in July, 1985, at the Triplex Theatre, New York, N.Y.

By commissioning performance work, the Walker plays an active role in encouraging performing artists to expand their practice, forge new types of collaborations, and/or realize works at a scale or complexity that would not otherwise be possible.

Interested in learning more about the Walker’s Performing Arts commissions? Explore them all in our Library and Archive.

Inspired by polish filmmaker Andrzej Wajda's 1956 feature film Kanal–that follows a near-decimated company of Polish resistance fighters as they make a final effort to escape the encircling Nazis through the sewers of Warsaw–Eiko & Koma's next Walker Commission, Canal, premiered in 1989. A work for several naked bodies, Canal's stage design suggested both urban sewers and the blood stream of a body.

The next Walker-commissioned project by Eiko & Koma, Wind (1993), focuses on child mortality across the globe by imagining a dying child; their two sons, Yuta and Shin, played the roles of a boy in the piece. The floor was painted to look like a galaxy, and white feathers fell from the ceiling, making visible a sense of wind.

Eiko & Koma returned to the Walker in 1996 with River, a co-commission by the Walker Art Center and cosponsored with Hennepin Parks, Minnesota.

First created within a small stream in the Catskill Mountains, River was a collaboration with naturalist and sculptor Judd Weisburg as well as environmental groups and park officials. The work usually takes place in a body of moving water at twilight, but in this occasion it was performed within the French Regional Park in Plymouth, MN.

Before the Walker temporarily closed its doors for the construction of the Herzog & de Meuron building, including the creation of the McGuire Theater, Eiko & Koma performed Offering a co-commission by Dancing in the Streets, University of Arizona, and the Walker Art Center.

Originally developed as a mobile outdoor work, Offering is transportable dance or living site "installation" can be brought into communities to serve a communal need for a ritual of mourning.

Having lived in New York since 1976 and having had a studio space on the 92nd floor of the World Trade Center building throughout the year 2000, Eiko & Koma's first New York performance of an outdoor Offering in Battery Park next to Ground Zero was an emotional experience. In July 2002, Eiko & Koma presented seven free performances of Offering in and around New York City in collaboration with Dancing in the Streets.

While serving as a real-life laboratory for continued development of their work, Offering furthered Eiko & Koma's commitment to proactively present their work as an integral part of a city's cultural landscape. Offering is an effort to enlarge the definition of the ideal dance audience by bringing dance where people are not expecting to encounter it.

In 2008, Eiko & Koma's Walker Commission work, Hunger poetically explored the elemental theme of hunger. Using butoh-inspired, glacially slow movement and real-time “action painting,” the work reflected on physical want and familial themes as it ebbed and flowed from the lovely to the violent, the poignant to the passionate. For Hunger, Eiko & Koma expanded their “dance tribe” into a quartet that includes two young Cambodian visual artists/performers whom they began working with during a residency in Phnom Penh in 2004 and live music performed by Joko Sutrisno.

As part of the revolving exhibition Event Horizon (2010), Eiko & Koma presented their most ambitiousWalker commission, Naked.

Art forms merge and a gallery becomes a stage as Naked, both a durational dance work and visual art installation, took shape. Created specifically for the space, this organic monthlong performance touched on universal themes relating to nature and the body. Eiko & Koma explored a conceptual environment, while their exposed bodies serve as a metaphor for raw human existence and the longing of the soul.

In addition to photography, the Walker documents many of its Performing Arts Commissions with curator interviews. In this dialogue, Eiko & Koma join senior performing arts curator Philip Bither for a candid and casual discussion of Naked and their rich relationship with the Walker. The presentation features a short documentary by Joanna Arnow.

Marking Eiko & Koma’s Retrospective Project in 2011, the Walker produced the book Eiko & Koma: Time Is Not Even, Space Is Not Empty. This publication presents a complete, illustrated catalogue of their dance works, alongside editor’s and choreographer’s notes, reprints of primary source and other archival material, and a series of newly commissioned written responses by Anna Halprin, Dean Otto, Sam Miller, Peter Taub, and others.

Learn more about the approach to creating this book in an original Walker Reader article authored by the book’s designer Andrea Hyde here.

Created in 2010, this short collects extracts from all of Eiko & Koma's performances at, or in association with, the Walker Art Center since 1981.

Joining forces with radical dance-theater artist Wen Hui of Living Dance Studio, Otake returns to the Walker this spring to premiere a poignant new work forged through deep collaboration. This new Walker Performance Commission explores how both performers’ lives have been affected by war; Otake grew up in postwar Japan and Wen in China during the Cultural Revolution. Together, the collaborators embody fierceness tempered by emotional honesty. Their formidable performance combines movement, text, and video as it excavates personal memories of war and its global resonances.

Over these 44 years, and counting, the Walker's Performing Arts Commissions have supported the risk-taking and innovative work of Otake. We look forward to continuing this collaboration and many more with local and international artists.▪︎

Experience Otake’s work yourself at the Walker April 11–12, 2025, with the premiere of Eiko Otake & Wen Hui: What Is War. Learn more and get tickets here.