"Move to rest, sleep, and dream. Move to pass time, bloom, and linger." These are the opening lines of Eiko Otake's "Delicious Movement Manifesto." Otake is a multi-award winning, New York-based Asian-American performance artist whose passion for dance began almost 50 years ago at the height of the Tokyo student uprisings in 1968.
The manifesto's sense of playful freedom, evoked through a clash between action and stillness as integral parts of movement, appears to be a leitmotif in Otake's life and work as a dancer and choreographer.
Born in post-war Tokyo, under American occupation, her father's job as a banker required the family to frequently move houses. In total, Otake changed school six times during her elementary education.