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What is War

The body as vessel; the body as memory container; the body as truth-teller. All of these corporeal permutations were on view at the UCLA Nimoy Theater last Thursday, when Eiko Otake and Wen Hui performed their haunting, elegiac and deeply meaningful work, “What is War.” And for dance aficionados who remember the husband-and-wife duo Eiko and Koma, whose 40-year artistic partnership yielded works that mined the notions of silence, stillness and form, all while seemingly stopping time, Eiko continues her artistic journey, both as a soloist and, currently, with Chinese choreographer/dancer and filmmaker Hui.

Performance

“What is War” by Eiko Otake and Wen Hui

Place

UCLA Nimoy Theater, Los Angeles, California, April 17, 2025 

Words

Victoria Looseleaf

Eiko Otake and Wen Hui's “What is War.” Photograph by Jason Williams

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Indeed, the pair, eight years apart in age, who first met in 1995 but became better acquainted years later, began their collaboration that resulted in the feature documentary, “No Rule Is Our Rule.” An exploration of their personal histories, including visits to the Lijixiang “Comfort Station” (a section of the Nanjing Massacre Memorial that houses images of women and girls who were forced into sexual slavery by the Imperial Japanese Armed Forces during the second World War), and improvised duets, the film led them to create the stage piece, “What is War.”

The work investigates how Hui, who grew up in China during Mao’s Cultural Revolution, and Otake, who was raised in Post-WWII Japan, have been indelibly affected by war. Their performance was abetted by projected photos, film, lighting by Katelyn Braymer after David A. Ferri’s original lighting scheme and a movable mirror that doubled as a dust-encrusted window, designed by Carina Rockart Mirror, with construction by Paul Martin and Holly, and dramaturgy by Iris McCloughan.

Following a brief film clip of the pair discussing war, they each entered the space from opposite sides of the stage. Walking barefoot and molasses-like on a slim expanse of what looked to be sod, the pair was soon moving from upright to knee-crouching positions. The rear screen, meanwhile, featured images of planes dropping bombs, silently, as Otake was getting her hands in the dirt, and Hui recalled the day her grandmother had died. It was 1941, and “Everybody was running to bomb shelters.”

Eiko Otake and Wen Hui's “What is War.” Photograph by Jason Williams

Otake then leaned against the rear wall, arms up, fingers splayed before turning and bending backwards, the pair viscerally acting out a kind of memory play: beautiful, frightening, ominous, as their distinctive, yet universal, stories unfolded. With their heavily accented English, it wasn’t always clear what they were saying, which was actually okay, as their bodies not only held these shameful tales, but revealed them. 

The pair, even during the simple act of hand-holding, with melancholy faces of the Comfort Women projected onto the side wall, ballast-like, was a study in resilience. Then, with Hui offstage, Otake, in an unexpected moment (or not—as Butoh, the dance of darkness known to resist fixity, has also been branded as exposing the bare body), shed her black dress, her thin, near waif-like countenance a picture of vulnerability. 

Inching forward, she seemed to be revealing her soul, her heart, her mind in what was not, however, a stroll down memory lane, but more a memento mori, simultaneously cementing her being in the past while offering solace in the present, her face both ancient and new, a visage that held the entire universe within its creased skin. 

The scene, also featuring Duncan Woodbury’s unobtrusive but effective sound design—at times a kind of white noise accentuated by the dripping of water—then changed rather abruptly: Hui scurried into the space, moving spasmodically as if an escapee from a mental asylum, the hard memories of the past hurtling her to the floor. Fighting an unseen enemy, Hui could also have been channeling the circle of life, and with Otaki now behind the mirror as if a sorceress, the sounds of slapping feet were counterpoint to the duo being buffeted by their inner storms, inner wars.

Clinging to each other, whether standing, hunched over or spoon-like, making use of their elbows and clenched fists as fleshly weapons, or contorting their bodies as if unstrung marionettes, they continued with the tapestry of their horrific narrative, with Otake intoning about the bombs that were dropped on March 6, 1945, when “100,000 were killed, more people than in any single attack in human history.” 

Eiko Otake and Wen Hui's “What is War.” Photograph by Jason Williams

This cantata of pain, this deed and its memory, can never really be wiped clean, erased, obliterated from the story of atrocities, of humans killing humans. But by moving, by dancing, by simply being on stage, it might be possible that Otake, her long dark hair now unfettered, and Hui, who spoke of other wars, including Viet Nam, could purge themselves of that exacting evil, and by so doing, purge war’s criminality from others’ minds, at least temporarily.

A brief foray up the aisles of the theater ensued, with the twosome again donning some garb, all the while speaking of the cold-blooded murders, before returning to the stage. Hui then began to sing, a surprisingly deep voice emanating from her small but mighty body, with Otake rising on her toes in this duet of defiance, before a compelling denouement: Lying on the floor, Otake labored to remove her dress, as Hui then drew on her partner’s naked being with magic marker.

These impermanent body and face tattoos—all shapes and sizes, perhaps some ancient language or a way to mark the body as the mind had been marked/scarred with horrific images, but also with and by familial ones, proved a perfect summation of the evening. Otake, after making designs on a prone and nude Hui, rose and walked backwards, situating herself behind the mirror, leaving Hui alone on the stage.

But not for long, as the lights came up on this remarkable pair, standing once more, the remembrance-scarred performance coming to a sublime, albeit, astonishingly intimate, end.

This was/is life-changing art.

Victoria Looseleaf

Victoria Looseleaf is an award-winning, Los Angeles-based international arts journalist who covers music and dance festivals around the world. Among the many publications she has contributed to are the Los Angeles Times, the New York Times, Dance Magazine and KCET’s Artbound. In addition, she taught dance history at USC and Santa Monica College. Looseleaf’s novella-in-verse, Isn't It Rich? is available from Amazon, and and her latest book, Russ & Iggy’s Art Alphabet with illustrations by JT Steiny, was recently published by Red Sky Presents. Looseleaf can be reached through X, Facebook, Instagram and Linked In, as well as at her online arts magazine ArtNowLA.

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