Edoheart is a notable butoh artist.

She is also a royal descendant of the Ugu Kingdom of the Benin Empire of Nigeria and claims the title of Princess, as given to her by her mother, Princess Osemwonyenmwen Aikheugiomo Rita Patience Izuagie Arhebamen, first granddaughter of the Oba n’Ugu Osazuwa Iredia who in his lifetime also held the title of Enogie of Umoghumwun-Nokhua. Edoheart’s full birth name is Obehioye Eseohe Ikhianose Oghomwenyenmwen Cleopatra-Anne Arhebamen.

Beyond this, Edoheart, also commonly known as Eseohe Arhebamen, is an experimental African artist.

Since 1999, she has seriously worked in the mediums of poetry, painting, dance, installation, sculpture, writing, music, fashion arts, video arts and the performance of self.

Her ultimate desire is to present an avant-garde African entity who embodies the creative uniqueness of Edo culture and can be seen as an ambassador of the great beauty, importance and style of Edo, Nigerian, African and indigenous peoples of the world.

The word “Edo” in Edoheart’s first language, Edo, means, “Love”.

Edoheart was born in Nigeria, raised in Detroit city and is currently living in New York. She experienced great adversity, abuse and trauma while growing up.

Escape through imagination remains a central tenet of her performance work. Other themes in her work are poetry, iconography, African identity and trance.

Edoheart grew up in a family that sang religious songs together.

During her teenage years, she gave poetry-slam performances in Detroit that evolved into free-improvisation vocalization soundtracks incorporating African songs and Edoheart’s poems.

Edoheart has won several awards for her Poetry and has also been awarded departmental awards from the University of Michigan- Ann Arbor and NYU- Tisch School of the Arts.

She has appeared in newspapers, magazines, television and radio in South Korea, Japan, North America, Ukraine, Latvia, Estonia and Nigeria.

Called “powerful ritual” and “voodoo theatre”, she has taught the Arts to children since 2001 and facilitated/taught adult workshops at institutions like Columbia University, Spelman College and The Living Theatre.

Her butoh dance lineage is descended from study with Yukio Waguri and incorporates classical voice technique studies with Claudia Friedlander.

In the year 2007, Edoheart undertook intensive collaborations with sound artist Toshio Bing Kajiwara and butoh artist Vangeline, premiering the second production of her Fire Butoh Series (Fire Butoh 2) at Grace Exhibition Space.

In 2008, she toured extensively with the notable Estonian performance art group, Non Grata. It was in this time that Edoheart began to call her butoh style “Butoh-Vocal Theatre”.

Edoheart is the first African performer of butoh and also the originator of the style of butoh-vocal theatre, which integrates singing, talking and experimental vocalizations with butoh.

Currently completing a Master’s degree in Performance Studies (rhetoric, theory and philosophy) at NYU, her thesis works focus on elucidating phenomenologies that include her butoh-vocal theatre style.

Edoheart is the first artist to use the term, “butoh-voice”. She is also a choreographer and teacher of butoh.

Some of her students have been Michael Freeman, Douglas Allen, Laura Russello, Jorge Rojas, Rosamond S. King, Paunika Jones, Bryant Keller, and Wura Natasha Ogunji.

As a musician, Edoheart’s sound is sometimes African-folk in the spirit of Miriam Makeba but Edoheart also has a noisy, unpredictable side, as in her song “Harmony” which features a wild, free-improvisation vocalization over drum-machine reverb.

Her free music singles on the netlabel Clinical Archives have been downloaded over 10,000 times each in only 3 weeks.

The most popular song on her 2010 album, “Wa Domo Edo”, was “Sosomoneycockplease”, for which she created her own beats.

It has inspired a new EP of her own beats called “Get As E Be (EP)”, also recorded in 2010 and available on Bandcamp as a free download.

Edoheart has published two books of poems, released three musical collections, four music singles and several video-artworks that include her original musical creations and collaborations; to date, most notably, her Fire Butoh series.

Edoheart’s more classical art works in the genres of painting and sculpture revolve around incarnations of the Edo color language, several invented personalities, and concern the fetishization of objects and experiences.

In her Colortree series (2006-2008) for example, Edoheart gathered dead branches from New York City’s Prospect Park and spent months tightly winding them with 24 and 28 gauge gold wire. She then used rice paper and ink to create petals after the rubric of the Edo color language and attached the petals to the “jewelried” or “hallowed” branches. Each color tree is essentially brought back to “life” and “speaks” a unique poem she has written on it using the colored petals. Edoheart considers these objects magical and has given many away as blessings.

Her paintings feature repeating symbols drawn from various African writing systems juxtaposed with romanized English writing system in multicolored tapestries and surreal images of simplified, expressive faces and body-parts she considers “ghosts” and “spirits”.

As a multimedia artist and a princess of the Edo people, Edoheart’s desire is to create edifying experiences that integrate the senses and increase our understanding of the world and ultimately, to radically expand the acknowledgement of African arts beyond the category of “traditional”.

Edoheart’s performances combine music, dance, visual projections and performance art and have been called “powerful ritual”.

Her live shows feature video projections, her own songs and ritualistic dance. She pairs her folk and avant-garde music with colorful installations and movement rooted in Japanese ankoku-butoh, Nigerian Edo dance theatre and whatever she happens to be interested in at the moment. She has, for example, included Hula, American Sign Language and Bharatanatyam in her work.

Edoheart frequently works in tandem with the filmmaker Taxiplasm. Some works they have collaborated on are “Sugarinaplum”, “Sometimes (Take Me Away)“, “It Can’t Be True” and Steven Vega’s “Harbor”, created in residence at Robert Wilson’s The Watermill Center.