Dialogue Eiko Otake - Emmanuelle Huynh, 2016

In February 2013, I began creating a portrait of the city of New York, studying the relationship certain of its residents have with the architecture of their city.
I met Eiko Otake, a Japanese dancer and choreographer. She emigrated here, and has lived and worked in New York for 40 years.
I had two questions for her: 

"How did your body, your imagination and your mind, which come from the Japanese culture incorporate the space of this city, this country? And what did you leave behind when you left Japan?

Surprised, she responded with questions which revealed her curiosity about me.
Since then we have been alternating work time in the studio, long discussions, reciprocal invitations to watch rehearsals or each other’s public events. 
Eiko chose to emigrate to the occupying country, to be a foreigner, to teach “delicious movement” at American universities as well as teaching interdisciplinary classes on the bombing in Japan and mass violence.
I am half-Asian myself, with a Vietnamese father who emigrated to France at a time when Vietnam was preparing Dien Bien Phu and its independence. 
I teach contemporary dance and theory at a school of architecture and directed a national masters program dance school, where the principal concern was the idea of freeing oneself from all categorizing, where important butoh artists from Japan came to teach intensively, giving an enhanced visibility to these artists, who were first discovered and acclaimed in France in the 80s.
Eiko has worked for 40 years with the Japanese dancer and choreographer Koma as part of the well-known duo Eiko and Koma. However in 2014, she began a cycle of solitary work, "Bodies in places," where she places her body in powerful spaces such as the northern waiting room of the Philadelphia train station, and at Fukushima ... It is the first time she has danced alone.

I danced for over 30 years in pieces by other people, in my own works, alternating formats, in solo, duo and group pieces (like Tôzai!..., a work I created in 2014, for 6 dancers and a  monumental curtain), in theatres, parks and museums …

The invitation from the Thalie Art Foundation was for both of us exceptional as well as inaugural: it brings our first public encounter onstage, and it will precipitate our ongoing questions: what are we teaching, what are we dancing and what are we mourning as we dance?
In the middle of the exhibited works chosen by Nathalie Guiot and Philippe Terrier-Hermann, in the beautiful space known as Hangar H18, after a residency in the venue and th town, we continue our progress, moving toward each other.

Emmanuelle Huynh 
Wesleyan University/Connecticut
April 2015

> Upload the Press Kit of Wabi Sabi Shima exhibition ( Hangar H18 - Bruxelles) where the performances took place