SOLO BY MIN TANAKA

Born in Tokyo in 1945, Min Tanaka is a pioneer in the vast landscape of dance. Since the early 1970's he has been developing Body Weather research to explore the origin of dance through farming and dance work in a mountain village in Yamanashi in rural Japan. Min Tanaka and his company have danced in theaters, museums, streets, fields, forests, gardens, deserts, rivers and oceans, and rooftops and basements around the world. He has collaborated with renowned artists from various fields - composers such as Luciano Berio, Werner Henze, Toshi Ichiyanagi, Cecil Taylor, Milford Graves, Derek Bailey, John Cale, Aki Takahashi and Felix Laiko; visual artists such as Giorgio Turcatto, Karel Appel, Noriyuki Haraguchi and Richard Serra; and writers such as Susan Sontag, Kenji Nakagami and Colin Wilson. In addition to his original solo and group work, Min Tanaka has been keen to revive important works of dance and created his version of The Rite of Spring with international groups dancers in Japan, France, Czecho and Slovakia in 1990-1992, and with Russian folk dancers in Moscow in 1997. He was appointed Master of the new dance department at the School of Dramatic Art in Moscow headed by Anatoly Vasiliev in 2003, and with the dance company he staged an original dance work Goya—Guests from the Dark which toured Europe in 2005. Over the past few years Mr. Min Tanaka has been involved in numerous projects around the globe. These include: a solo within the Yoko Ono retrospective exhibition in New York and MIT, Massachusetts; choreography for a version of Werner Hentz's opera Venus and Adonis in Tokyo; an extensive tour in Europe and USA with a series of works inspired by Goya's print work Los Caprichos. In March of 2004 he created an original dance work Towards Csontvari for the Central Europe dance theatre in Budapest. He is also active in films and in 2002 he received the Best Supporting Actor’s Award from the Japanese Academy Award for the film Twilight Samurai. In addition, he has traveled to the islands of Indonesia for a research into their ritual folk dance and music, with the aim of producing a film based on the experience. Mr. Tanaka also holds numerous positions of eminence and is the Director of organizations like the Dance Resources on Earth, the Tokason Dance Troupe and the Tokason Agricultural Association Corporation & Body Weather Farm. Some of his recent projects include Magic Flute which performed at the Salzburg Festival in August; creation of a new work with Greek dancers at the Cultural Capitol of Europe at Patras, Greece; work at the Venezia Biennale Dance Festival and Symposium; the Locus Dance tour based on his biographical work to several Japanese cities including Tokyo; and the production of the multi-disciplinary annual art festival Dance Hakushu.

Back to International Plays