Dance

Ponies discover an equine Shangri-La. The audience is introduced to a classic dance step. Chubby Checker provides the musical accompaniment.

This title is also available on Ben Coonley: Post Pony Trilogy.

A magnetic "dancing" ballerina toy, found by Bob, inspired this video of a real ballerina (Laurie McDonald) spinning as if the magnetic coils in an old black and white mid-century Setchell Carlson television monitor were controlling her movements.

"In the spring of 2002 I handed over to Charles Atlas a collection of films and videotapes in various formats that I had been accumulating with an eye to his editing them into what I call a "faux Rainer portrait" (though he may well call the final product something else).

Eiko edited this video to illuminate, in fast pace, her solo performance project A Body in Places. The red cloth she often uses in her performance is used as a visual link between different places and communities where Eiko performed.

Unlike other sectors of Romanian civil society who gained status after December 1989, the gay community struggled for many more years with a legal ban imposed by a conservative political class subservient to the Orthodox Church. Against this background, I planned to make a tactical video whose leitmotif was a pas de deux performed by two male dancers.

In collaboration with Ishmael Houston-Jones.

On September 1, 2022, Eiko and Ishmael Houston-Jones performed in Beverly McIver's painting exhibition Full Circle, curated by Kim Boganey.

The whole event took place in connected galleries of her show, but this excerpt is when Ishmael and Eiko danced a duet in front of the paintings that were also a duet of a sort.

Camera by Julie Ganas.
Edited by Eiko Otake.

Eiko Otake performed a version of her solo project, A Body in Places, as a part of River To River Festival on Wall Street. A Body on Wall Street won “Best Use of Location” for Round 3 of Dare to Dance in Public (D2D) Film Festival in 2020.

Camera by Alexis Moh.
Conceived, performed, and edited by Eiko Otake.

The union of humankind and the camera is a long and sordid tale. This lyrical dance illustrates the inseparable nature of the two.

This title is also available on Animal Charm Videoworks: Volume 3, Computer Smarts.

Alex and José is a 16mm single channel projection that explores gender, movement and form.

Music: Zeena Parkins

Joan Logue cuts down considerably Andy Warhol’s projection of fifteen minutes of fame, with this compilation of 30-Second Spots. Produced to be broadcast as individual, mini-documentaries on the included artists and their work, Logue’s short interpretive video pieces feature a prime time selection of over twenty New York performance artists, composers, dancers and writers, including Maryanne Amacher, Robert Ashley, David Behrman, John Cage, Lucinda Childs, Douglas Ewart, Simone Forti, Jon Gibson, Philip Glass, Spalding Gray, Joan Jonas, Bill T.

Wind imagines a dying child, a common event until recently and still so in many parts of the world today. This was a collaboration with Chanticleer music director, Joseph Jennings, who arranged a composition by Robert Mirabal and Francisco Guerrero. It was performed live by Chanticleer in San Francisco and specially recorded for tour.  Eiko & Koma’s two sons, Yuta and Shin, both played the role of a boy in the piece. The floor was painted to look like a galaxy and white feathers fell from the ceiling, making a sense of wind visible. 

The End of Time is a choreography for two lovers, enacted by three figures. It looks at the birth and the vanishing of desire as an endless chain with successive beginnings and endings.

"The End of Time (2012), is a choreography enacted by three figures exchanging between dominant and fragile roles. In each of the three chapters of the film, two men interpret the falling in and falling out of love, playing attraction and repulsion, taking off clothes and putting them on in what seems an eternal fable about love and separation."

The Dying Swan is a recreation of the acclaimed ballet — Russian ballerina Anna Pavlova's most famous role — borrowed from its theatrical context and taken back to the lake.  A frozen pond and fifteen-degree weather is the stage and setting for this version of the ballet, and the dancer (Laurie McDonald) in traditional costume of pointe shoes and tutu performs the death throes of the swan on the ice. The music is from "Carnival of the Animals" by Camille Saint-Saens.

Assisted by Alan Powell.

Polished obsidian mirrors, tezcatl, were once used in ancient Mexico for divination, to traverse into the worlds of the gods and ancestors.

Through the obsidian mirror, the solar and lunar ritual used to be a celestial dance. In Ritual, suns and moons whirl around, glowing brighter as their paths cross.

Eiko performed unannounced in the Cathedral of St. John Divine, New York City as an artist in residence in 2016-2018.

Camera by Alexis Moh.

The everyday performance of domestic labor is teleported into a surreal game world where an emotionally responsive AI chatbot provides no answers.

In this world, motion capture technology translates movement into data that can be unbound from the human body. Yvonne’s No Manifesto becomes a framework for understanding the existential impact of this new dataset. What happens to movement when it is divorced from affect and feeling? What happens to dance without the basic premise of embodiment and breath?

Co-commissioned by the Dance Center of Columbia College Chicago and Danspace Project, Death Poem is a meditation on dying. Eiko dances a long solo on a futon under a mosquito net, accompanied by the sound of insects and cicadas. Koma enters from another world and tries to bring Eiko back with him, but he leaves without her, as she is not yet ready to go. 

Eiko's grandfather Chikuha Otake (1878–1936) was a praised figure in traditional Japanese painting. But his anti-mainstream sentiments were shunned by the field authorities. His reputation was severely damaged by his failed run for the House of Representatives. Filmed in 2018, at the Philadelphia Museum of Art and the Suiboku Museum in Toyama, Japan, Eiko's edit combines videos of Chikuha's paintings and Eiko's performance with quotes from his essays and Eiko's musings.

Special thank you to David Brick, Ryohei Endo, Hiroyuku Horikawa, Feliece Fischer, and John Killacky.

(tell me why): The Epistemology of Disco is an often humorous, at times sarcastic and poignant look at the role that disco music has played in the formation of gay male identity.

Anna Pina Teresa reinterprets the pivotal scene in Rossellini’s Roma Città Aperta where Anna Magnani, who plays the character Pina, (based on the story of Teresa Gullace,) is murdered on the streets of Rome by the Fascist police. This scene is characterized by three movements performed by Magnani — resistance, running and falling. Filmed in the Sala Scherma at Foro Italico in Rome (Mussolini’s fencing studio designed by Moretti) Anna Pina Teresa examines the contemporary and historical dynamics between an urban Fascist space and movements of resistance. 


Subtitled A Rebellion against the Commodity, this engaged reading of the urban black riots of the 1960s references Guy Debord’s Situationist text, “The Decline and Fall of the Spectacle-Commodity Economy,” Internationale Situationniste #10 (March 1966). Along with additional commentary adapted from Barbara Kruger and musicians Morrissey and Skinny Puppy, the text posits rioting as a refusal to participate in the logic of capital and an attempt to de-fetishize the commodity through theft and gift.

Revived as part of the Retrospective Project, White Dance is the first piece that Eiko & Koma performed in America.

This video-lament for Mother Earth is a collaboration among Jim Barbaro, sound; Tobe Carey, cinematography and video editing; and Brenda Hutchinson playing a long tube.

"Made right after Covid lockdown, my art gave me an opportunity to rejoice, grieve and sonically face impermanence via sounds and a Chicken Dance I’ve been performing for decades. The beauty of this video is that it looks like Chicken Linda can finally FLY!! Please interact if you wish and dance, sing, cry, and FLY HIGH."

–– Linda Mary Montano

Minute Waltz is a ballet performance recorded on a time-lapse VHS security surveillance recorder borrowed over a weekend from a local bank. Laurie dances in slow motion for twenty minutes to create the three-minute video, the recorder capturing two frames of video per second, thereby compressing “real” time (a conventional video recorder records and plays back at thirty frames per second). When the time-lapse video is played back, at 30 frames per second, her slowed movements appear to be “normal” speed.

Inspired in part by the cover of "Megatron Man," Patrick Cowley's archetypal 80s disco album, Robot Love is a celebration of the playful, synthetic, party-driven, disposable culture of disco. The video is playful and opulent, presenting a night at the disco as a mind-expanding trip to an alternate universe.