EIKO OTAKE

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Eiko Otake is a movement–based, interdisciplinary artist born and raised in Japan and a resident of New York since 1976. She worked for more than 40 years as Eiko & Koma, but since 2014 has been performing her own solo projects A Body in Places and A Body in Fukushima.  In 2017 Eiko started The Duet Project, an open-ended series of cross-disciplinary, cross-cultural, and cross generational experiments with radically diverse artists both living and dead. 

Above is a trailer of Eiko Otake's three and a half hour film A Body in Fukushima, which premiered summer 2019.

Eiko Otake Fireside Chat Script:

I am an immigrant artist who has no intention to run for any office ever. There is not an ounce in my body that makes me want to be presidential. I do not want to dress, stand, or speak like a president. I always write my own speeches and pronounce them with a foreign accent. Every president has made mistakes. FDR is credited to have inspired this very project, but he ordered legal Japanese Americans to be forcefully interned during the Second World War. 

As an artist, I open up my body to the ills of the world and the urgency of survival. 

I share with you my three wishes. I have many more, but let’s start with a few. Wishes reveal who we are and how we might act. 

First, I wish U.S. presidents would not use the phrase, “God Bless America.” This implies that there is one God and that God will bless America only. People in the U.S. are different colors with different beliefs. Many of us are immigrants. Many people have family and friends abroad. We cannot be blessed when people in other countries are not blessed. Many people in the world like me feel disdain when U.S. presidents say, “God Bless America.” Blessings should be offered to all beings. Imagine many different gods being friendly with each other, exchanging stories. 

Second, I wish to add the following amendment to the U.S. Constitution: 

Aspiring sincerely to an international peace based on justice and order, the people of the United States forever renounce war as a sovereign right of the nation and the threat or use of force as means of settling international disputes. 

In order to accomplish the aim of the preceding paragraph, land, sea, and air forces, as well as other war potential, will never be maintained. The right of belligerency of the state will not be recognized.

This is Article 9 of the Japanese constitution. I only changed the country name from Japan to the United States. The Japanese constitution was drafted by American personnel in the Occupation Forces before it was negotiated with the Japanese government. For that reason, and because Japan has a large self-defense force with a strong military power, many politicians have criticized this article as unrealistic and hypocritical. They have advocated changing the constitution for decades. 

But that has never happened. I think this is because Article 9 represents the most urgent of post-war human desires—no war. And over the past 74 years, not a single word has been changed. No Japanese soldier has ever killed or been killed in battle since 1945.   

Can we imagine a U.S. that renounces war and the use of force? Yes we can. Imagination is powerful. 

Third, I wish people practiced remembering long time ago and imagining the future many generations later. When I perform in a river, I am amazed and relieved to feel the river has been flowing since long before I was born and it will flow long after I die. It is humbling. A river is an organism—what happens upstream totally affects what happens downstream. Our lives are in a river, the river of history and of the earth. All species and the environment are affected by our behavior. 

Nuclear disasters do not spare any species on earth. Developing nuclear power is directly connected to building nuclear arms because nuclear reactors create plutonium used for nuclear bombs. The half-life of Plutonium-239 is 23,000 years and the half-life of Plutonium-244 is 600,000 years. We cannot even warn the generations that will live that far in the future about the radioactive material we leave them because language will be so changed by then. And to make it worse, one cannot see or smell radiation. What we are doing in nuclear politics is nothing but ridiculous.

No nuclear reactor is safe. Do not forget what Fukushima and Chernobyl have shown us. We should awaken our bodies to revive our instincts. Our bodies have the wisdom to reject nuclear technology and corporate greed. Both run against our survival instincts and morals.

Lastly, what can I do so that people do not laugh or shrug at my three wishes? I start with what I can offer. I am happy to teach my movement workshops—I will go anywhere to teach if an invitation is sincere, including White House, United Nations, police offices, hospitals, prisons, and churches. I will ask people to lie down together on the floor and close their eyes. Then, I will ask them to move slowly without talking to each other. A body-to-body interaction, sensing our differences, makes us honor each other.  We must also honor our hesitation. Our bodies resist both being killed and killing others. This is a body-based democracy.

Feel the movements of nature, time, and society. Bring our bodies together and change our sense of distance. Being far away promotes indifference. Ignoring the truth and lying should be regarded as criminal, especially so for politicians. Yet, truthful information alone cannot change us. Information plus emotional investment produce effects that will bring us one step closer to our wishes. 

In globalized capitalism, humans have become increasingly voracious and senseless. I am an artist. I use my body as a tool, as a conduit for dialogues. Join me in creating a body-based democracy and a culture of sustained peace. Together, we will find creative ways to face our grave challenges. We must.