Duet Project, Eiko Otake and Ishmael Chambers-Letson
Tuesday 08 Dec 2026 from 7pm to 9:30pm
Wednesday 09 Dec 2026 from 7pm to 9:30pm
€12 (free for Centre Pompidou members, upon presentation of proof of membership)
Born in Japan, Eiko Otake is an award-winning, movement-based artist and a prominent figure of the New York art scene since the 1970s.
For her Parisian premiere, she presents a selection ofplace-specific media works, as well as her “Duet Project”, an open-ended series of cross-disciplinary experiments (2017-), performed on this occasion with renowned choreographer and performer Ishmael Houston-Jones. Together, they explore their bodies as landscape and time.
Each performance will be followed by a brief talk by performance studies scholar Joshua Chambers-Letson who considers how gathering and performance sustain communal life in the face of catastrophe.
Finally, Otake will offer a “Delicious Movement Workshop” on Thursday 10 December. The workshop is emphatically noncompetitive and welcomes everyone. No previous dance training is necessary.
The programme is presented in partnership with the Centre Pompidou.
Co-curators: Madeleine Planeix-Crocker (Lafayette Anticipations), Alice Pialoux and Linus Gratte (Centre Pompidou)
Production: Matthieu Maytraud
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.
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.
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.