Eseohe Arhebamen or Eseohe Arhebamen-Yamasaki, also known as Edoheart (born Obehioye Eseohe Ikhianose Oghomwenyenmwen Cleopatra Anne Arhebamen), is a poet, dancer, singer, musician, producer, performance artist and visual artist. [1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6] [7] Eseohe was born in Zaria, Nigeria [8] and is descended from a royal family of the Benin Empire. Eseohe Arhebamen's maternal grandmother is Princess Theresa Maria Nodumwenben Osazuwa, a princess of the Edo people. [9] [10] Eseohe Arhebamen's great-grandfather Osazuwa Eredia, the father of Princess Theresa Osazuwa, was the Oba N’Ugu and Enogie of Umoghumwun, making Eseohe Arhebamen a royal descendant and princess. "The foundation of the kingdom of Ugu, with its capital at Umoghumwun has been traced to Prince Idu, the eldest son of Oba Eweka I." [11] [12]
Eseohe Arhebamen is the oldest of five siblings and frequently played a parental role in their upbringing. At the age of seven [13] Eseohe's family migrated to the United States and settled in Detroit, Michigan. At age 17 she enrolled in the University of Michigan at the Residential College. Although strongly encouraged to pursue medicine as a career path, Eseohe instead followed her passion for poetry, language and the arts. As an undergraduate student Eseohe focused on literary means and performance as a way to affect social change. [14] [15] While at the University of Michigan, Eseohe won prestigious awards for her writing [6] [16] and is included in a University of Michigan Anthology of Hopwood Award winners. [17]
At 19 years old, Eseohe earned a position as Writer-in-Residence with InsideOut Literary Arts in Detroit, Michigan and worked with children in impoverished inner-city schools to expand their literary skills. After moving to New York in 2003, Eseohe founded the company EdoHeart also written as Edoheart which became her performance name. Eseohe Arhebamen is synonymous with Edoheart.
Eseohe received a Bachelor of Arts from the University of Michigan in Creative Writing and Literature in August, 2005, and went on to receive another Bachelor of Arts in Studio Art with a minor in English from Hunter College. She further graduated from New York University with a Master's degree in Performance Studies, which is described as drawing from a study of the performing arts, anthropology and sociology, literary theory, and legal studies. Eseohe also intensively studied Butoh dance with Yukio Waguri. [18]
Areas of interest in Eseohe Arhebamen's experimental work are imaginative creation of alternate environments, and poetry and vocal expressions as a source for movement. [6] [19] She has choreographed and taught or led workshops involving these areas of interest at The Living Theatre and Columbia University's Teacher's College. [20] [21] Eseohe Arhebamen has appeared on Korean and American television and news, and in American, Estonian and Latvian newspapers. [2] [3] [22] [23] [24] In 2011, she was chosen by artist Kalup Linzy to appear in a documentary about New York artists. [25] [26] Eseohe Arhebamen also appears in a video tape included in acclaimed poet Anne Waldman's papers purchased by the University of Michigan Special Collections Library. [27]
Eseohe Arhebamen is the first indigenous and native-born African butoh performer. [28] In addition, Eseohe Arhebamen is the first performer to combine butoh dance with singing, talking, mudra, sign language, spoken word, and experimental vocalizations after the traditional dance styles of the Edo people of West Africa. [28] She refers to this dance style as Butoh-Vocal Theatre. [29] Eseohe Arhebamen's Butoh-Vocal Theatre style arises out of her work in poetry, music and the traditional Edo theater in which performers dance and sing simultaneously, and is influenced by her expressed belief in a common lingual history between the Edo people of Nigeria and the Japanese. [28] On 26 September 2010 Eseohe gave a performance at a Yukio Waguri intensive workshop demonstrating her style of Butoh-Vocal Theatre during which she danced butoh while singing Pure Imagination from Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory.
Eseohe's notable performance during the Fifth Diverse Universe tour was described by Kaarel Kressa as embodying natural elegance and femininity; with poetry, dance and song that won the hearts of the audience. [2] Eseohe's performances have also been called "powerful ritual". [30]
In 2006, Eseohe married long time sweetheart Seth Yamasaki, son of Pulitzer Prize winning photographer Taro Yamasaki, and grandson of Minoru Yamasaki, Japanese-American architect best known for designing the World Trade Center. The two live in Brooklyn, New York.
Benin City is the capital and largest city of Edo State, southern Nigeria. It is the fourth-largest city in Nigeria according to the 2006 census, after Lagos, Kano, and Ibadan. It is situated approximately 40 kilometres (25 mi) north of the Benin River and 320 kilometres (200 mi) by road east of Lagos. Benin City is the centre of Nigeria's rubber industry, and oil production is also a significant industry.
Butoh is a form of Japanese dance theatre that encompasses a diverse range of activities, techniques and motivations for dance, performance, or movement. Following World War II, butoh arose in 1959 through collaborations between its two key founders, Tatsumi Hijikata and Kazuo Ohno. The art form is known to "resist fixity" and is difficult to define; notably, founder Hijikata Tatsumi viewed the formalisation of butoh with "distress". Common features of the art form include playful and grotesque imagery, taboo topics, and extreme or absurd environments. It is traditionally performed in white body makeup with slow hyper-controlled motion. However, with time butoh groups are increasingly being formed around the world, with their various aesthetic ideals and intentions.
Anne Stevenson was an American-British poet and writer and recipient of a Lannan Literary Award.
Teet Kask is an Estonian choreographer.
Alison Wong is a New Zealand poet and novelist of Chinese heritage. Her background in mathematics comes across in her poetry, not as a subject, but in the careful formulation of words to white space and precision. She has a half-Chinese son with New Zealand poet Linzy Forbes. She now lives in Geelong.
Kalup Linzy is an American video and performance artist who currently lives and works in Tulsa, OK. His performance are characterized by their low-tech quality, themes of community, socializing, family, the church, sexuality and homosexuality.
Luciano Chessa is a musician, performance/visual/installation artist, and musicologist.
Peter Sparling is a 20th-century American dancer and dance professor. He is a Thurnau professor and former chair of the University of Michigan Department of Dance and Artistic Director of the Peter Sparling Dance Company, based in Ann Arbor.
Maureen Fleming is an American dancer, performance artist, and choreographer from New York City. She studied butoh dance in Japan, and was described by The New Yorker magazine as "perhaps the foremost American practitioner of Butoh."
Lyn Coffin is an American poet, writer, translator, and editor.
K. E. Allen is an American poet.
Donovan Hohn is an American author, essayist, and editor.
Simona Orinska is a Latvian butoh artist and a contemporary dancer, poet, director and choreographer. She is also a Dance Therapy and Dance Movement Therapy practitioner.
Ursula Endlicher is a New York City based Austrian multi-media artist who creates works in the fields of internet art, performance art and installation art.
Nejla Y. Yatkin is a German-American choreographer.
Katrina Andry is an American visual artist and printmaker. She is based in New Orleans, Louisiana.
Nia Love is a dancer and choreographer based in New York City. She is a radical thinker, artist, performer and professor that focuses on Modern dance, Post-Modern dance, and West African dance. She is known for her spiritual relationships to movement and performance, as well as her personal work that is critical of structural racism and examines the role of women in dance through her poetry, movement and art.
James Hannaham is a writer, performer, and visual artist. His novel Delicious Foods (2015), which deals with human trafficking, won the PEN/Faulkner Award and the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award and was named one of Publishers Weekly's top ten books of the year. The New York Times called it an “ambitious, sweeping novel of American captivity and exploitation.”
Melati Suryodarmo is an Indonesian durational performance artist. Her physically demanding performances make use of repetitive motions and often last for many hours, sometimes reaching "a level of factual absurdity". Suryodarmo has performed and exhibited throughout Europe and Asia as well as in North America. Born in Surakarta, she attended Padjadjaran University, graduating with a degree in international relations before moving to Germany. She lived there for 20 years, studying performance art at the Braunschweig University of Art with Butoh choreographer Anzu Furukawa and performance artist Marina Abramović.
InsideOut Literary Arts (InsideOut) is a 501(c)(3) literary nonprofit organization based in Detroit, Michigan, that uses creative writing and poetry programs to build students' literary and academic skills. InsideOut provides opportunities for Detroit students to work with professional writers through a school-based Writers-in-Residence program, afterschool programming, and community events.