Based on a tale by Charles Perrault, Tom Rubnitz's The Fairies comes complete with frogs, princes, kind fairies, and evil stepsisters—all costumed à la Rubnitz. Featuring Sister Dimension as the fairy godmother, Michael Clark, and others, the tape playfully illustrates a familiar fairytale moral, as each person gets what they deserve. The evil girl spits up toads, while flowers and jewels emerge from the mouth of Matilda the Good, and a dancing prince carries her away.
A portrait of influential Dutch musician and composer Louis Andriessen, as he talks about composing a new work. Andriessen draws inspiration from the life of Dutch painter Piet Mondrian and his love for ballroom dancing.
"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).
Commissioned by Lower Manhattan Cultural Council (LMCC) for the occasion of Eiko receiving the Sam Miller Performing Arts Award. Premiered at LMCC’s A Toast to Downtown on December 9, 2020. Shot at LMCC’s Arts Center at Governors Island.
Performer Eiko Otake.
Director/Editor Liz Sargent.
DP Minos Papas.
Production by Cyprian Films, New York.
Eiko Otake, based in the United States since 1976, is a highly regarded artist who has performed in many countries as part of the performance duo Eiko & Koma. Her solo project A Body in Places has attracted much attention since it began in 2014, and she performs it for the first time in Japan.
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.
Having collaborated with videographers for previous media works, Eiko & Koma decided to work alone in creating Husk. Koma adopted the role of cameraman to film Eiko's solo piece. Eiko & Koma used the playback function of the video camera to create choreography for body and camera as one long take. This media dance is presented with no editing done in post-production. Sound design by Eiko. Filmed May, 1987 at the Kampo Cultural Center, New York, NY.
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.
Filmed by Jingqiu Guan on November 7, 2022 at Royce Hall Rehearsal Room during the creative residency sponsored by UCLA Center for the Art of Performance (CAP). This video was used for the performance on November 20, 2022 at UCLA.
Performed by Eiko Otake
Edited by Eiko Otake, assisted by Jingqiu Guan
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.
Born 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 has been working on her own projects. Her works often investigate themes of death and dying, history, and the persistence of collective memory. Eiko has also broadened her collaborative practice to create interdisciplinary work with artists from different backgrounds and disciplines, both alive and deceased.
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.
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.
Focusing on the mentorship of Eiko and Koma with the young artists who study and work at the Reyum Institute of Arts and Culture in Phnom Penh, Cambodia, Cambodian Stories evokes questions of tradition, innovation, and the role of the artist in fostering social change and discoveries of new ways to leap from the canvas to the stage. Eiko & Koma's collaboration hones in on these young painters' collective energy and explores the challenges they face pursuing artistic careers in a country with little opportunity.
A Body in a Cemetery is a 15-min short film that documents a place-inspired solo performance by dancer/choreographer Eiko Otake in Green-Wood Cemetery, the U.S.’s second oldest cemetery in Brooklyn that holds 570,000 "permanent residents." Presented in September 2020 by Pioneer Works and Green-Wood Cemetery, this event was for many the first time attending a live performance since the pandemic shutdown.
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?
Created at Eiko & Koma's home in the Catskills and set to Gamelan music, Grain was first presented during a month-long season in an East Village loft. Charles and Stephanie Reinhart were among the ten audience members one night and invited Eiko & Koma to the American Dance Festival that year. Since then, the work toured widely.
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.
Adapted from their performance work Fur Seal (1977), this video is the first and only outdoor work Eiko & Koma created for video. The piece was filmed at Pt. Reyes, California in November 1983. Eiko & Koma were very cold because of the water and wind–so were the film crew! Eiko edited the piece with the help of Jeff Bush.
This work was originally designed with no sound and was 19 minutes long but in this shorter version, Eiko added the sound of sea waves.
(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.
Alex and José is a 16mm single channel projection that explores gender, movement and form.
Music: Zeena Parkins
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."
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.
Filmed during a trip sponsored by UCLA CAPS in 2019.
Camera by Alexis Moh.
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.
