What is War: A Poetic Examination of the Link Between the Body and Conflict By Eiko Otake and Wen Hui

By Lily Essilfie

From Tuesday, October 21st to Saturday, October 25th, the Brooklyn Academy of Music presented What is War, a poetic performance created by Eiko Otake and Wen Hui. I had the pleasure of attending the Friday showing and witnessing the creators explore the gravity war carries not just on a national scale, but on an individual and communal level. 

Through the use of archival footage, movement, and narrative storytelling, the artist captures the endless reach and destructive nature of War regardless of time and cultural differences. War can never be victimless—it contorts, shapes, and binds bodies to pain and loss that can continue for years beyond periods of post-war.    

About the Artists

Eiko Otake is a New York-based interdisciplinary artist with Japanese roots. Her work combines three major elements: media, installation, and movement. Otake has won acclaim for her work as half of the notorious duo Eiko & Koma, and has had many films, such as A Body in

Fukushima and the documentary, No Rule Is Our Rule (co-directed with Wen Hui), screened globally. 

When it comes to choreography, dance, filmmaking, and installation, Wen Hui is a Chinese trailblazer. Hui is the co-founder of the first independent dance theater group in Beijing, China, called the Living Dance Studio. She also explores social realities and histories throughout her works. For Hui’s cultural contributions, she has been awarded Germany’s Goethe Medal.

About the Performance: What is War

The performance begins with the two artists at a distance, one on each end of the stage, Hui on the far left and Otake on the far right. Among the darkness, stage lights illuminate their figures, and in between them, a patch of dirt. Apprehensive and uncertain, they move towards each other slowly, as if bound by leaden chains held together by sorrow and grief, which prevent rapid movement.  

(left to right) Wen Hui and Eiko Otake in a performance of What is War for BAM (Brooklyn Academy of Music) Next Wave 2025.

Despite the complicated history of their two nations separated only by a relatively narrow stretch of ocean, they inch closer and closer. Steadily, Hui and Otake cut through the deafening silence left behind in the plunder of war. There is no joy, laughter, or happiness. All that remains in the aftermath are lives forever marked by carnage and mass destruction.   

Bodies never forget. Memories do not just shelter in our heads. They find a way to live on our skin, our bones, and in our hearts. The use of footage helps the audience conceptualize how war reconstructs a person’s undoing and sense of becoming. 

The audience is transported back in time to World War II, as Japanese planes raid, bombs are dropped, and people attempt to flee. When Hui relays the loss of her grandmother, there is a heaviness in the air. Hui never had the opportunity to meet her, yet the ghost of what could have been remains.

Otake becomes an instrument to illustrate the dark horrors of the Site of Nanjing Lijixiang Comfort Station. Women, at the time, were stripped of their dignity and forced to endure subhuman treatment. Otake’s body paints a picture of these graphic war crimes; her movement tells their story. Like these women, Otake is stripped and left vulnerable.

I watched as their bodies twisted and convulsed, representing the catastrophic effect of the atomic bomb dropped on Nagasaki. Otake and Hui’s shadows merged, then detached, and merged again to form bodies devoid of outlines. Every movement reminded me of the implosive nature these weapons of mass destruction carried, and the extensive agony they inflicted on numerous human bodies.

Movement was such a crucial element in terms of rhythmically bridging personal testimony with physical expression. As I sat in the audience, I could see and feel the residuals of war making its way through time, leaving lasting imprints on the bodies of survivors. 

The performance ends in a full-circle moment. Otake and Hui are both naked and covered in emblems of war. Memories of woe and ruin are perpetually etched onto their skin. The world may move forward, but their bodies can never abandon feelings of anguish.  

As Otake and Hui part ways, they speak to and about those they held dearly who are no longer part of this world. They climb up the stairs, one on each side of the audience—Otake on the left and Hui on the right. They look past us, perhaps towards somewhere in the present or into the distant future, depicting survival and resistance.

The world is currently in a state of loss. People are not just losing their homes, family, and community, but they are also losing their way of life. With the ongoing genocides, What is War connects the past with the present, mirroring current events through a display of poetic movement. I walked away from this performance feeling more than I expected, thinking and conscious of more than I had anticipated.

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