Duet Project

Eiko Otake

Born and raised in Japan and a resident of New York since 1976, Eiko Otake is a movement-based, interdisciplinary artist. She worked for more than 40 years as Eiko & Koma performing their own choreography, but since 2014, Eiko has been directing her own projects. In her solo project A Body in Places, Eiko has performed numerous site-specific works. A Body in Fukushima records Eiko‘s solo performances in post-nuclear disaster Fukushima. In her Duet Project, Eiko has been engaged in an open-ended series of cross-disciplinary experiments with a diverse range of artists, including Wen Hui with whom Eiko is performing in What Is War. A recipient of MacArthur, the Samuel H. Scripps American Dance Festival Award, and Doris Duke Artist Award, Eiko teaches regularly at colleges and in communities.

Ishmael Houston-Jones 

Ishmael Houston-Jones is choreographer, author, performer, teacher, and curator. His improvised dance and text work has been performed worldwide. Drawn to collaboration as a way to move beyond boundaries and the known, Houston-Jones celebrates the political aspect of cooperation. He and Fred Holland shared a 1984 New York Dance and Performance “Bessie” Award for Cowboys, Dreams and Ladders, which reintroduced the erased narrative of the Black cowboy back into the mythology of the American west. He was awarded his second “Bessie” Award for the 2010 revival of THEM, his 1985/86 collaboration with writer Dennis Cooper and composer Chris Cochrane. In 2017 he received a third “Bessie” for Variations on Themes from Lost and Found: Scenes from a Life and other Works by John Bernd. Houston-Jones received a fourth “Bessie” in 2020 for Service to the Field of Dance.

As an author Houston-Jones' essays, fiction, interviews, and performance texts have been published in several anthologies. His work has also appeared in the magazines PAJ, Movement Research Performance Journal, Bomb, and Contact Quarterly. His first book, FAT and Other Stories was published in 2018 by Yonkers International Press.

Houston-Jones is currently an adjunct professor at The Experimental Theater Wing of NYU/Tisch School of the Arts and a visiting professor at Bennington College in Vermont. He is a 2022 recipient of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship and in 2024 was awarded the Balasaraswati/Joy Ann Dewey Beinecke Endowed Chair for Distinguished Teaching award from the American Dance Festival.
 

Joshua Chambers-Letson 

Joshua Chambers-Letson is the Ethel M. Barber Professor of Performing Arts, Department Chair of Performance Studies, and Professor of Performance Studies and Asian American Studies at Northwestern University. JCL’s research and teaching interests include performance theory, queer of color critique, racial performativity and performance, and the study of contemporary art, theatre, and performance. Josh is the author and co-editor of a host of books including Unfinished Grief: Queer Love and Loss, After the Party: A Manifesto for Queer of Color and A Race So Different: Law and Performance in Asian America.