Eiko Otake: Why and How I Perform in Cemeteries

“You can’t really come to the cemetery and not think about death or the people who have died. And that’s a good thing to think about. We know more about living, but we all die. We learn about death by attending to other people’s dying. We also learn about death by missing the dead.”

Nearly all of Eiko Otake’s work has been related to death in some way. Pieces such as Offering (2002), Death Poem (2006), Mourning (2007), and Slow Turn (2021) more specifically dealt with personal deaths or with massive killing. Starting in 2020 she performed variations of her site-specific solo A Body in a Cemetery at Green-Wood Cemetery in Brooklyn, NY, Maplewood Cemetery in Durham, NC, and Evergreen Cemetery in Colorado Springs, CO. Now at the age 73, Eiko performs a newly scored solo at Philadelphia’s Laurel Hill East.

Join Eiko as she shares her themes on death, cemetery as a performance site, and the specific relationship she and Green-Wood Cemetery have forged.