Choreographing Social Memories: Healing and Collective Imagining in Eiko Otake and Wen Hui’s Artistic Collaboration
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1. Introduction
Edited by Eiko’s former student and filmmaker Yiru Chen and the two artists themselves, the film primarily uses footage shot during their shortened, in-person collaboration in China in January 2020. Suturing together footage in a diary format and beginning each scene with a date and location, the film candidly documents Wen Hui and Eiko Otake’s shared time during their residency. Presenting improvised duets between Wen and Eiko, the sharing of their personal histories and choreographic works, visits to the Nanjing Massacre Memorial, conversations with young Chinese students, and their negotiation of the imminent pandemic’s new social circumstances around the Chinese New Year holiday, the documentary provides an intimate glimpse into the personal lives and joint choreographic process of these two artists.
Shot by the artists themselves, the diary format presented in No Rule Is Our Rule allows viewers to encounter Wen and Eiko through a wide range of experiences from the artists’ own points of view. These scenes vary in length, resembling fragmented, spontaneous, and at times more fully formed thoughts inscribed onto a digital space. One of the recurring themes in the film is one’s relationship to history, in which the historical trauma between Japan and China was negotiated and articulated through the two artists’ mutual engagement with bodily memories.
Building upon existing understandings of the term, I conceive social choreography as a creative process of imagining new possibilities of social relations enacted through corporeal interaction between individuals and between individuals and the environments they inhabit. It is the act of actively embodying what is possible that is founded on a radical acknowledgement of and empathy for others’ experiences. In this article, I approach social choreography as both an analytical concept for reading a performance work or a film and as a methodology of choreographic practice. In the case of this film, choreography undergirds the decision of what to film, the movement in front of the camera, and the logic of documentary editing.
My analysis of No Rule Is Our Rule is guided by the following questions: How does the concept of social choreography function in this documentary, both as a creative process and an artistic product? How does this film invite new ways to understand what choreography is and where it takes place? What does a body-centered approach enable in the process of activating social memories, and what kind of social relations does it produce?
In the following sections, I first provide background context about the two artists. I then illustrate how Wen Hui and Eiko Otake’s dialogic and movement duets emphasize that the personal, interpersonal, and social are intimately intertwined. I then present how the establishment of social contract plays a foundational role in their collaboration. Finally, I discuss how Wen and Eiko articulate an expanded notion of what choreography is and where it takes place. Overall, I argue that their embodied methodology—grounded in the interweaving of personal and social memories—models an intimate, honest, and reciprocal way of engaging with history. This prioritization of bodily knowing points to the potential of collective healing from the tension and trauma in Sino-Japanese history and promotes collective imagining through intercultural dialogues.
2. An Intercultural Duet
At first glance, Wen Hui and Eiko Otake, eight years apart in age, are ostensibly very different artists with seemingly disparate life trajectories. Wen is Chinese, and Eiko is Japanese. Wen works in China and Europe (particularly Germany), and Eiko lives in the US but does not consider herself American. Yet their breadth of work and life experiences have shared many resonances. Their coming together anticipates an intercultural duet that bridges cultural, historic, and artistic differences and presents a fertile ground of creative possibilities for choreographing how we collectively remember histories.
Despite their different upbringings and artistic trajectories Eiko Otake and Wen Hui’s creative paths have increasingly converged in the past decade. One of their overlapping interests lies in their new approach to duets. Since the early 2010s, both artists decided to work fully on their own terms, no longer collaborating with their previous male partners of many decades—Koma (in Eiko’s case) and Wu Wenguang (in Wen’s case). Since 2014, Eiko has worked with other artists to develop a series of duets under the umbrella of the “Duet Project.” Eiko has intentionally chosen to work with artists across disciplines, nationalities, genders, races, cultures, religions, and times to explore what kind of conversation and creative potential these intercultural encounters offer. This collaboration with Wen is also framed within Eiko’s conception of the “Duet Project.” Similarly, Wen has also taken up duets in her work. Two of Wen’s documentary films feature scenes of intimate duets between her and her father’s aunt, whom she refers to as “third grandmother.” These two films, Listening to Third Grandmother’s stories (2012) and Dance with Third Grandmother (2015) recount lost memories of China’s socialist past through oral history interviews, duet dance scenes, and montages of everyday movement. The artists’ shared interest in exploring bodily relationships to history and memories through duet forms has long anticipated their creative collaboration.
3. The Individual Is Inherently Social
If we consider the documentary film to be a choreographic assembly of raw visual, graphic, and audio materials through a rigorous process of selection and omission, it becomes noticeable that what is included on screen about the two artists’ personal journeys deliberately emphasizes that the individuals are always constructed in relation with others and to the socio-political and cultural environments they inhabit. The first part of No Rule Is Our Rule, consisting of footage from the first few days they spent together, documents Wen and Eiko sharing their personal histories, which are accompanied by old black and white photographs of themselves and their families, as well as video documentation of their choreographic works. Prompted by their genuine curiosity about each other, they recount their personal memories of their individual pasts, in intimate and sincere conversations. One of the early scenes of the film, shot at Wen’s home soon after Eiko’s arrival in Beijing, reveals that this is only the second time that Wen and Eiko have ever seen each other in person. Their first encounter occurred 25 years earlier in 1995, when Wen visited Pennsylvania to see Eiko & Koma’s performance. Though they had been familiar with each other and their dance works, they did not know each other on a personal level until this collaboration. Their question-and-answer-style dialogues unfold organically as Wen and Eiko seek to get to know each other. This conversation also allows the audiences to take on the perspectives of the two artists to encounter them along with the artists themselves.
Wen Hui’s memories of her upbringing highlight the role of the Chinese state in shaping the lives of Chinese citizens and her tactics of resistance against its dominant ideologies and social expectations. Illustrated through photos of Wen dancing and her family portraits, Wen reminisces about her time in kindergarten, her experience in the art school as a class leader creating dance work for propaganda, and her sense of pride during that time. Through political education of various forms in the years of the Cultural Revolution, Wen was initially inculcated to embody the Maoist vision of the collective body of Chinese socialism through her dance.
Eiko’s sharing of her early memories and family histories presents tension between national obligation and individual desire, rooted in her family’s memories of World War II. Pointing at a photograph of Eiko’s parents on their wedding day with their family members, Eiko reveals that her parents were married on 10 August 1945, five days before Japan’s surrender during the war. In her own words, Eiko’s family believed that the war was “bad” (No Rule Is Our Rule, 17:16–17:20). Yet her father had no choice but to take part in it because of the government’s order. In a few sentences, Eiko sums up the tension between the nation and the individual by recounting her immediate family’s experiences, implying that sometimes individuals’ actions resist any facile judgment of being right or wrong. Though having not personally experienced the war, Eiko expresses that her memories of the stories recounted by her parents’ generation have passed down to her and become part of her own memories of history.
Dialogues through spoken word are one way of engaging with each other’s histories and experiences. The film also includes various scenes of their corporeal dialogues that highlight a different mode of knowing and sharing beyond verbal texts. For instance, in the opening scene against a large stone mountain with black and grey textures that resemble a water ink painting, Wen Hui and Eiko Otake sit next to each other on the ground. Wearing orange-red lipstick and a patterned silk jacket of the same color that resembles a kimono cardigan, Wen slowly shifts her forward-looking gaze to focus on Eiko’s palm, which appears to be holding something. Eiko, wrapped in a long white coat with a scarf that matches the color of Wen’s jacket, gently passes a tiny pebble from her palm to Wen’s hand. Both artists appear fully present in the moment and attentively sense each other’s motions without the need to maintain eye contact. The passing of the pebble between them becomes a metaphor for their sharing and exchange of experiences.
While the entire film presents a core message about how to encounter histories, these early scenes allow the audience to witness how Wen Hui and Eiko model their approach to accessing the memories of their creative partners. Their interaction establishes a living example of what Eiko reiterates in the film that no one comes from nowhere. The cinematic rendering of their dialogic and movement-based duet effectively shows that social relationships, identities, and memories are closely imbricated in intercultural encounters.
4. Social Contract as a Foundation for Social Choreography
The title of the documentary, No Rule Is Our Rule, plays with the paradoxical nature of rules. As much as both Wen Hui and Eiko Otake have embraced unruliness in their personal lives and artistic works as discussed above, the film’s title also indicates that unruliness is itself a rule that the artists agree to obey in this collaborative process. In this film, the two artists stage their consensus and choreograph social agreement as a performative element. Insofar as social choreography is both a corporeal and dialogic practice of interaction between individuals, Wen and Eiko lay the ground rules for their interactions and the ways that their interactions will be presented to viewers.
On 4 January 2020, the first morning after Eiko’s arrival in Beijing, the two artists are already eager to start working. Pointing the camera lens towards Eiko, who is warming up by swinging her arms around her torso, Wen asks, “What do you not want in this house if I am recording?” Eiko shakes her head and states softly, “No.” She continues, “If it is not good, then we cut…We don’t use…” (No Rule Is Our Rule, 04:50–05:08). Instead of censoring the filming process, Wen and Eiko agree to film each other as much as they see fit and make decisions on what to take out later during post-production. By carrying out a conversation like this at the very beginning of their filming process, Wen and Eiko obtain consent from each other, an important practice of documentary ethics. Through the on-screen verbal consent, Wen and Eiko also extend an invitation to the viewers, letting them experience their private lives and stories with ease rather than with a sense of voyeurism. This choreographed consensus underscores the two artists’ ethical commitment to each other and their audience. It also reaffirms their corporeal and dialogic interactions as a foundational element in their social choreography throughout the film.
In this documentary, the commitment to honesty and transparency in the two artists’ creative process also becomes palpable through the role of the camera, which functions as a listening and observing “body” onscreen. The film does not shy away from revealing the presence of the camera or the methods of filming. Rather, it intentionally evokes its presence. It makes visible from the very beginning of the film that the documentation of their creative journey is carried out by both Wen and Eiko themselves using a DV camera and occasionally their phones. By engaging with the self-reflexivity of the cinema, exposing its presence and the production process, the film repetitively prompts the viewers to recognize that the unfolding narrative onscreen results from an intentional and dynamic process of construction.
5. “Going to Places” as Social Choreography
In a public lecture given by Wen Hui and Eiko Otake to college students at the Nanjing University of Arts, the two artists shared a presentation slide that states, “Going to places is my choreography. There are things one only learns by being somewhere.” This expanded understanding of choreography underscores the body’s mobility through space and its encounters with specific places as generative of new knowledge. In Wen and Eiko’s creative process, visiting different places constitutes both the choreographic process and the choreography itself. In this film, the places where the two artists interact play important roles. The locations where the footage of the day was shot are specifically marked onscreen, like a stamp on a postcard. Each site is not neutral but is already imbued with memories and social meanings. Out of all the sites where the two artists traveled together, Nanjing is portrayed as the most significant.
Eiko’s decision to visit the Nanjing Massacre Memorial was spontaneous; the visit deviated from the original residency itinerary. She had felt a strong impulse to be at this historical site to directly encounter and process this historical trauma with her body. What does it mean for a Japanese woman to place her body within a Chinese city, especially Nanjing? What does it mean for a Chinese national and a Japanese national to visit, together, a monumental site that archives the most traumatic and painful intersection of Japanese and Chinese history? How does this site activate memories in their bodies, and in turn, what do their bodies produce by inhabiting this space?
Instead of focusing on specific narratives of the Sino-Japanese war, No Rule Is Our Rule presents how the two artists choreograph their bodily relationships with a place imbued with painful wartime memories. On 18 January, the two artists (along with a translator) arrived at the Nanjing Massacre Memorial Hall. The scene intercuts between shots of Eiko attentively witnessing the museum exhibits and still close-up shots of the exhibition itself. We see Eiko gently touching the names of Chinese civilians carved on a smooth stone surface with her right hand, as if she is having a dialogue with them through a tactile exchange. She speaks to her translator in Japanese, “It is so much work because each person’s life has weight. Each name was individually carved.” The camera zooms in slowly on her hand. This choreography of the camera movement directs the viewer’s attention to the haptic experience of her hand moving over the names carved into the stone. Her body and its movements in relation to the war memorial environment remind viewers of the breadth of interactions that constitute the social choreography in No Rule Is Our Rule.
If Eiko’s corporeal interaction with the site can be seen as a duet with a traumatic past, Wen Hui’s instinctual bodily impulse to document this encounter is prompted by her own desire to archive this duet, one that is charged with political implications. The next day, Eiko Otake and Wen Hui visited Nanjing Comfort Stations at Liji Lane Site Museum. The scene begins with Wen positioning a tripod with a DV camera mounted on top at the center of a plaza, reiterating her role as the primary cinematographer in this scene. In the succeeding shot, we see Eiko filming and taking pictures with her cellphone of a full wall of black and white close-up shots of 70 elderly women whose anguished facial expressions project pain, loss, and sorrow. We soon learn that these photos depict women who were forced into sex slavery by the Imperial Japanese Army. They were called “Comfort Women.” These survivors, appearing similar in age to Eiko, silently cry out and bear witness to the crimes imposed on their bodies during their youth.
Adjacent to this poignant photographic wall display stands a copper statue that depicts three grieving women clinging onto one another, one of whom appears to be pregnant. Wen and Eiko put down two bunches of white flowers at their feet and knelt in front of them. In the next shot, we see only Eiko Otake, still kneeling, alone and deep in her thoughts. The soundscape in this scene is the quietest in the entire film, empty of dialogue, with only traffic sounds that can be heard at a distance. This rather abrupt cut implies that Wen has left the scene to reposition the camera to get a closer shot of Eiko and to show her relationship with a site imbued with memories. In Wen’s composition, Eiko’s body implies with clarity and sincerity her empathy for those who suffered during the war and her apologetic position for the deeds of the Japanese government. Wen Hui’s impulse to document Eiko suggests her will to present an alternative and nuanced portrayal of a Japanese citizen’s reaction to this history that counters the dominant representations of Japan’s lack of repentance in official Chinese nationalist discourses.
6. Conclusions
No Rule Is Our Rule witnesses Wen Hui and Eiko Otake’s three-week, in-person artistic collaboration in China right before the outbreak of the global pandemic. During their time together, the artists’ honest and unfiltered dialogues about their personal lived experiences allude to their individual relationships with nation-states and highlight the ways in which their bodies are marked with their memories. By establishing a mutual agreement and expectations for their collaborative process, their open discussion stages a performative process of setting a social contract that creates a foundation for their embodied exchange. Visiting different places in China, especially memorial sites of the Second Sino-Japanese War in Nanjing, becomes a form of choreography through the artists’ intentional bodily engagement with the sites and with each other. This choreography provides new ways to access a traumatic history by highlighting the nuances of individual bodily experiences and memories that are often omitted in official discourses of history.
Social choreography as a frame of analysis allows us to focus on how various artistic elements, not just dance movement in a conventional sense, are constructed and assembled through a particular logic that allows for meaningful engagement with society. As a methodology, it provides a body-centered approach that is built upon an understanding of the body as an interface for social connection, participating in a reciprocal exchange with the social world. In other words, the body functions as both a site that stores and enacts social and cultural experiences and a site that can effect changes. My analysis of No Rule Is Our Rule also highlights that social choreography is ultimately an act of imagination that is made possible when the individuals taking part in its process are willing to engage with their own and others’ memories and histories with radical openness and empathy. It is this reciprocity between the body and the social world that enables the creative process to become a form of theorizing itself and where new social possibilities can be imagined. Wen Hui and Eiko Otake’s approach to encountering each other and the social environment presents an intimate, empathetic, and caring way of moving through the world that honors and engages with memories, gesturing toward a more just and compassionate society.
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