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Fearless trailblazers, Eiko Otake and Margaret Leng Tan, talk to Vogue about art, friendship, and life.
Otake and Tan performing at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine, 2018.In a year that has seen a 339% increase in hate crimes against the Asian American community, often targeting vulnerable elders, it was beautiful, and radical, to watch two septuagenarian Asian women artistsand their visionary practices, making and holding space for each other’s presence.
“Friendship is radical because it can protest against the norm,” Otake says. Friendship has been a comforting balm, and also a galvanizing force, in both of their personal and artistic lives: Allen Ginsberg, the revolutionary Beat poet, was a friend and collaborator of Otake’s, as was Anna Halprin, a cutting-edge figure in postmodern dance; Crumb, the Grammy and Pulitzer-winning composer, personally handed the score of his final work,to Tan when she visited him at home in Media, Pennsylvania last year, with the words: “I hope to hear you play this very soon.” Tan previously performed Crumb’s , which was written for her, at the National Gallery of Art in Washington D.C. in 2017, with Crumb in attendance. Following performances of her music-theater portrait,Metamorphoses Tan playing Henry Cowell’s “Mortality has weighed on both their minds throughout the course of the pandemic—both women lost their nonagenarian mothers in the last few years—and wended its way into the physicality of their art. Tan dedicatesto the memory of Cage and her mother; and Otake tells her that Crumb, who died in February, will be there at the Library of Congress not only through his music, but through Tan’s actual performance too, because “our bodies remember being watched.” Otake herself, who performs in the clothes of dead friends and family, and has been wearing only black since the war on Ukraine began, will dance atthis winter, followed by a major multi-site exhibition in Colorado Springs and the next phase in an ongoing collaboration with performance art pioneer Joan Jonas. I am struck by the sense of urgency both women have; how deeply in love with their crafts they still are; how busy they have been and will continue to be. The work goes on. After I leave, they tell me, they will stay on to sow the creative seeds for a new project. “And we better do it soon,” Tan adds. At one point during our conversation, Otake opens a bottle of bubbly rosé just to celebrate the grand nothingness of being alive on this day.In our interview-scheduling email thread, after Tan’s vampire remark, I responded, at four in the morning, to express my pure delight at what fabulous role models they are: iconoclastic artists who have never conformed to what is expected of them, still as nocturnal and impulsive as millennials. I thought I had the last word, that they must have gone to bed by then, but the next morning, I realized I had been mistaken. There was another email from Eiko, after mine, from close to 5 a.m.: “For Margaret and me, we need to breathe every breath we still have!” Seventy has never looked so gorgeous, so hungry. To cap off Asian American and Pacific Islander Heritage Month, Otake and Tan talk toCan you describe your embodied relationship to your instruments—the piano, for Margaret; the body, for Eiko—at the moment of performance?The piano is an extension of my body. The ultimate moment of truth for me is when my fingertips make contact with the keys or the strings. My entire body is poised in a state of supreme alertness.For me, the real performance has to come as a betrayal to the preparation. Although I practice and prepare, I never want a performance to be derived purely from good preparation. I want to be open to the moment before the audience, because I’m still thinking, still deciding, still changing, as I perform.I guess that’s where we differ. When I am performing, I simply monitor the exits on the highway. It plays itself; I am not actively doing anything. All the work is done already.MLT: What connects us is our unspoken understanding of the three-dimensionality of space. We share an acute awareness that the space is alive: when we occupy this living space there is an energy that binds us. Perhaps that is why we enjoy working together.Margaret is impeccable. I adore her and completely respect her craft. But I have a side of me where I don’t want to be “just right.” I want toand survive it. I see this as a deep manifestation of being a child of the Japanese post-war era. Additionally, I was physically weak. So when I became a movement artist, it was important to me that I did not have a body or a practice that might intimidate those who are less able-bodied than what mainstream society considers to be a person with a productive physicality. “Productivity” can be a very alienating word. I am more interested in what my body can hold.Eiko, what you do is so radical, there is no precedent for it. You personify what Cage said about error: “Error is merely our inability to adjust immediately from a preconception to an actuality.” That is so wise, so Buddhist, and so Zen. And so utterly forgiving! In a performance some things may work out better than others but there is no right or wrong way to get there. This sense of freedom that Eiko has, I love it, and I envy her. You are the epitome of what Cage wanted—that artists should come out from their ivory towers.
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