Performance

This science fiction adventure centers on the interaction between a crew of Earthmen and their seduction by the love-hungry Amazons of the red planet, Mars. The tale is brought to life with all the opulence that an $800 budget can produce and the young cast of non-actors live up to their fullest foibles as the plot thickens with a mix of romance and wartime action intertwined with a musical number or two. The ambitions were high and the necklines low in this effects-laden tribute to pulp fiction fantasy and intergalactic intercourse.

Miller & Shellabarger, their breath made visible by the cold of a refrigerated room, exchange breath with each other.

This title is only available as an excerpt on Suitable Video, Volume 1.

To be a man, to be a hero, to be a wife: these conflicting voices inhabit the body of a documentary filmmaker as he re-enacts the climax of a Western morality play, 3:10 to Yuma.

This title is also available on Donigan Cumming: Controlled Disturbance and Donigan Cumming Videoworks: Volume 3.

Taking aim at the social standardization enforced particularly on women's bodies, Rosler critiques the politics of "objective" or scientific evaluation that result in the depersonalization, objectification, and colonization of women and Others. As Joseph Di Mattia has pointed out, "The title of the tape is ironic--just exactly to whom are these 'statistics' 'vital'?

Rosler uses the format of a cooking demonstration (as in Semiotics of the Kitchen) to address cultural transaction--the meeting of Eastern and Western cultures. Reading directly from a West Bend Electric Wok instruction booklet, Rosler wryly comments upon the Oriental mystique conjured by the West Bend manufacturers, a mystique evoked and then "improved" upon through Western technology--i.e. non-stick surfaces and electric power.

Commissioned by and performed at the 2000 Brooklyn Academy Music Next Wave Festival, When Nights Were Dark is a full evening-length collaboration with Joseph Jennings and the Praise Choir. The work was created during a Lower Manhattan Cultural Council residency which allowed Eiko & Koma the full time use of the studio on the 91st floor of the World Trade Center North Tower throughout 2000. The décor of The Caravan Project was hugely expanded for this work and placed on a slowly turning wheel.

The Red Tapes is a three-part epic that features the diary musings of a committed outsider: revolutionary, prisoner, artist. The series offers a fragmented mythic narrative and a poetic reassessment of the radical social and aesthetic aspirations of the previous decade. Acconci maps a “topography of the self,” constructing scenes that suggest both the intimate video space of close-up and the panoramic landscape of film space.

A 12-year-old Olympic swimmer and her mother (both played by July) speak to the public about going for the gold.

“As the film progresses through subtle editing-in-reverse, July reveals the world around the televised facade. ... [T]he 23-year-old performer convincingly plays both Dawn Schnavel and her mom, or rather, vanishes into them. What’s noticeable isn’t so much the ease with which July transforms herself into a pre-teen girl and an older woman but the similarities and differences between the daughter and the mother July becomes.”

This video was made as the end-credit sequence for a film version of Ron Vawter's performance piece, Roy Cohen/Jack Smith, by Jill Godmilow. Ron was an extraordinary actor and extraordinary man. The two characters he portrays were gay men at radically opposite ends of the political, social, artistic and human spectrum.

Taking its title from a poem by Paul Celan (translated as “sleeping den”), this montage is the result of a script that reconfigures over two hundred lines of English subtitles, lifted from films ranging from Battleship Potemkin and Persona, to The Bitter Tears of Petra Von Kant. The disconcerting soliloquy on love and insomnolence is deliberately attempted in the original French, German, Russian, Italian, and Swedish.

Since 1977, Mierle Laderman Ukeles has been a volunteer artist-in-residence at the New York City Department of Sanitation, allowing her to introduce radical art into a public system. Since she wrote the Manifesto for Main-tenance Art (1969), virtually all of Ukeles’s work has been public. Recent permanent commissions include Percent for Art Fresh Kills Landfill Project, New York City, the world’s largest landfill; Schuylkill River Park, Philadelphia; Creative Time, New York City; and Ayalon Park, Israel.

This two-part video Gender Cruise on the Circle Line involves Brenda and Glennda leading a group of drag queens, drag kings, and other gender nonconforming people on a three-hour ride on the Circle Line boat around Manhattan.

This two-part episode features Glenn Belverio and Duncan Elliott participating in an ACT UP demonstration at President George Bush’s summer house in Kennebunkport, Maine, interviewing activists and documenting this historic event. In addition to this, Brenda Sexual and Glennda Orgasm attend Wigstock, an annual outdoor drag festival in Manhattan's East Village. At the festival, they rally for National Healthcare and discuss other issues such as violence against LGBTQ+ people. 

This tape addresses spiritual closure. Video gave me a chance to examine, see, and celebrate the seven spiritual venues, paths, and journeys that I have made: 1) Catholic life, 2) nun's life, 3) yoga life, 4) Buddhist life, 5) feminist life, 6) natural life, 7) life. Publicly, I am admitting that I am a spiritual materialist—been there, done that—but I am also saying that all of my spiritual experiences have worked together to prepare me for even deeper journeys combining all of the sacred technologies I have learned so that I can re-invent my own way.

This video shows the design and choreography of Eiko's three-channel installation on one screen. Each video was shot in California by Alexis Moh and Marjorie Hunt during a creative residency at UCLA in April 2019. 

In a gallery, three sequences are projected on three different adjacent walls or shown on three monitors separately. Eiko "choreographed" 17-min sequences of three videos, considering the overall dynamic and how they are aligned. This is a shortened version.

Documentation of Eiko performing in the installation space is available by request.

Eiko Otake, with her collaborator Merian Soto, visited a friend Bonnie Brooks in her country house and had a long walk in the forest. There was a small island occupied by three deers. They later returned to it and the deer were gone so Eiko danced in that place she named Deer Island.

An instructional road trip clarifies how to prevent a baby from choking. The giver of said instructions communes with stray dogs along the ocean front. She builds seaside graveyards, petit and monumental sand mountains. She nourishes the sand graves with fresh breast milk.

During my residency in New York I was designing a computer virus, which would contaminate computers through a screensaver that read “there is so much love in this world”. In the meanwhile, inspired by the illusionary democratic representation system in the United States and triggered by the indifference of the New York public to the presidential campaign, I went out to the streets to distribute fliers that carried this virus sentence. People of New York reacted in different ways to this action, which had similarities with many other hand-out actions common in big cities.

Martha Rosler (b.1943) received her BA from Brooklyn College in 1965 and her MFA from the University of California, San Diego in 1974. Rosler has produced seminal works in the fields of photography, performance, video, installation, criticism, and theory. Committed to an art that engages a public beyond the confines of the art world, Rosler investigates how socioeconomic realities and political ideologies dominate everyday life. Rosler's work has entered the canon of contemporary art through a process of steady, stealthy infiltration. Lacking commercial gallery representation until 1993, her endeavors as a prolific essayist, lecturer, and political agitator enabled her agenda to trickle down through critical channels.

For Example: Decorated is a talk show featuring art world personalities Britte Le Va, Peter Gordon, and James Sarkis. The show begins with Le Va reciting the credits; then she introduces herself, Soviet style — as in Do You Believe in Water? — by saying her name, then clapping. The other guests follow, and as the three converse about the role of art in life, they build little structures with the Lego blocks that cover the coffee table.

Three nuns in dark sunglasses sit at a table playing cards while a nurse is inteviewed about "what death looks like” on the soundtrack. As the nurse speaks, in medical detail, of death as a natural process, the nuns sit with party hats on their heads and light birthday candles stuck in bananas. On Death and Dying is a mocking and macabre look at the institutions of death—how hospitals and religions “manage” death. The tape resolves in the conclusion that “death is a job that you do by yourself.”

My teaching assistant during the spring semester (Marc Rokoff) at the San Francisco Art Institute began shooting a documentary of me and the students making our sci-fi drama, The Planet of the Vamps. Three years later it remained unfinished as he felt inadequate as a documentarian, and so I was offered the box of tapes to edit. I took on the task and the result is a lively record of the production class in action as it tackles the teleplay with a minuscule budget and scanty costuming.

Woman, monster, animal? A portrait of a woman's face, the movement slowed down and reversed, the grotesquely made-up face examined in close-up.

Banshee is a duet between Margaret Leng Tan playing The Banshee (Henry Cowell) and Eiko's Night With Moths (camera by Rebekkah Palov) in a performance of The Duet Project: Distance Is Malleable at New York University's Skirball Center on April 16, 2022.

Camera by Alexis Moh .
Edited by Eiko Otake.

Weaving Stories While Walking, a reading-performance film by Sónia Vaz Borges and Mónica de Miranda, interweaves multiple accounts from members of the resistance against the colonial powers in Cabo Verde, Guiné-Bissau, Angola, and Portugal. It looks at the centrality of individual and collective walking, movement, and affective experiences in understanding the liberation struggles and their legacy in the contemporary times. Weaving Stories While Walking intermingles timely narratives for the current social contexts.