Harlem Stage’s E-Moves Festival: A Movement Presents the Premiere of SOAK by Eiko Otake and DonChristian Jones
Company:
Harlem Stage
Harlem Stage, the world-renowned performing arts institution championing the artistic freedom of artists of the Global Majority, will close out the 2025 season with its iconic signature dance series E-Moves Festival: A Movement. For more than 25 years, E-Moves at Harlem Stage has convened the world’s leading choreographers, dancers, companies artists, and musicians of color in an exploration of movement and message. With over a month of programming planned, the festival will culminate with the premiere of SOAK, a place-specific piece created at Harlem Stage by interdisciplinary artists Eiko Otake and DonChristian Jones.
Born and raised in Japan and a resident of New York since 1976, Otake worked for more than 40 years as Eiko & Koma and, since 2014, has been directing her own projects. In 2017, Otake began working with multimedia artist and director Jones whose work - greatly informed by his time spent painting murals on Rikers Island with incarcerated youth and teaching at Harvey Milk High School/Hetrick-Martin Institute - has exhibited and performed in spaces such as The Whitney Museum, Brooklyn Museum, and MoMA. The pair joined forces on Otake’s ongoing piece - The Duet Project: Distance is Malleable, an evolving and open-ended series of experiments in collaboration. In SOAK, Otake and Jones explore the concept of water as a shared origin, and the body as rivers of memories. Drawing upon their singular and dynamic history of collaboration, they collide toward many tomorrows.
