MIN　TANAKA
(Dancer)

Min Tanaka is an avant-garde and experimental dancer, deeply inspired by Tatsumi Hizikata, founder of Ankoku Butoh, Dance of Darkness.

Trained in classical ballet and modern dance, he was active as a modern dancer around 1960s. Then he came to be skeptical about the cultural and class-bound identity of dance vis-à-vis post-World War II society. In1966 he defected from the dance community and was expelled from the Japanese Contemporary Dance Association. In the 70s, he developed "hyper-dance", emphasizing psycho-physical unity of the body, and forged a major cultural impact on the art and culture community in Japan and abroad through collaboration with intellectuals, scientists and and practising artists of his time.

In 1978, Tanaka made his international debut by participating in “Time-Space of Japan—MA, ” Paris Autumn Festival (commissioners: architect, Arata Isozaki, and composer, Toru Takemitsu). For three decades ever since he has presented solo and group performances throughout the world in Europe, USA, former socialist and Third-World regions.

His dance/life activities outside the formalist theater/dance/ music scenes gradually drew the attention of avant-garde activists, artists, novelists, life scientists, ethnologists, anthropologists, philosophers……and he became involved more actively in collaborative research and creative projects for social education and transformation. These cross-genre activities vary from choreography and performance in opera, contemporary and traditional folk dance, visual art, architecture/landscape, medical/psychiatric science to free improvisation music.

At age 40, with his fellow dancers and researchers, Tanaka opened an organic farm in the countryside in Japan out of his curiosity in the intrinsic affinity between our body/labor and nature. Through this ongoing experience he has come to be convinced that dance is deeply and irreversibly rooted in the humanity’s practice of agriculture.

His eager exploration into the origin of dance encompasses traditional and folk arts/dance, not to mention their contemporary evolution of such time-honored human endeavors. He has collaborated with traditional arts such as Japan’s Noh theater and even performed solo dances in the framework of Indian Kutiyattam Festival thanks to the generous invitation of its successor and transformer, his excellency Master Gopal Venu of Kerala.

In the past decade he has been invited to play as an actor in numerous films and TV programs. For his performance in “The Twilight Samurai, ” an epoch feature film directed by Mr. Youji Yamada, Tanaka was given the Best Debutant Actor’s Award and the Best Supporting Actor’s Award by one of Japan’s leading cinema associations. More recently he has further expanded his scope of activities in the popular media including the National NHK TV documentary and drama
programs as a narrator and actor.

Tanaka’s incessant and exclusive search for the origin of dance continues and has come to take an even more deep-rooted approach, with the Locus Focus project, a site-specific and improvisational dance performance series taking place at a variety of every-day life scenes throughout Japan and abroad.



1945 Born on March 10, under the fire of US air raids on Tokyo.
1965 Quits Tokyo National University of Education.
1973~ After studying ballet and modern dance since 1964, started solo
dance of his own style, naked and improv, Subject series; in the late
70’s, arrested several times for dancing nude in the streets.

“I don’t dance in a place; I dance the place……”
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Selected Solo/Group Acts (over 4000 solo dances since 1970’s)

2008 Itinerant solo dance series Locus Focus at open-air and indoor spots
in local cities and natural landscapes in India, Japan…: the series
started in 2004 and since realized also in Indonesia, China, New
York City, and throughout Japan.
2007 solo dances at Masato Okada’s photo exhibit Between Mountain
and Sea (collab with Tanaka) at P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center in
NYC. The same-title photo anthology published by Kosakusha.
2006 Asahi Performing Arts Award for the solo work, where we fall into transparency, and other works; announced his departure from the big theater scene in favor of anonymous places; Magic Flute (Tanaka choreographed in 1999, directed by Pierre Audi), Mozart 250, Salzburg Music Festival.
2005 Started a perpetual forest conservation project in Kalimantan Island with Indonesian local offices and people.
2004 Locus Focus series started in Indonesian Islands, culminating in a film and a photo anthology, Min Tanaka’s Dance Road in Indonesia (released in 2007); Contemporary Dance Critics’ Assn. Award (received for several times since the late 1970’s); Japan Academy Award Best Supporting Actor Prize for his acting in the film Twilight Samurai (Tasogare Seibei) directed by Yamada Yoji.
2001 Solo at Yes, Yoko, a Yoko Ono show, and duos with Meredith Monk,
in post-Sept. 11 NYC and elsewhere, USA.
2000 Danced with exhibited pieces by Beuys, Kabakov et al. at Gent Contemporary Art Museum, Belgium, on Tokason Troupe Europe Tour; Goya Series, inspired by Los Caprichos, continued in Japan, Europe, USA and Russia till 2006; taught and presented several works till 2006 as Dean and Master of the Dance Dept. and resident dance company at the Moscow City School of Dramatic Art under the leadership of Anatoly Vasiliev.
1997 The Poe Project—Stormy Membrane, inspired by E.A.Poe, synopsis
by Susan Sontag, commissioned and presented at Jacob’s Pillow
Dance Festival, USA, and subsequently in Tokyo; solo dances in
Gwanju Biennale, Korea, collab with Muraoka Saburo, Takayama
Noboru, Haraguchi Noriyuki and Koyama Hotaro.
1996 A Conquista, adapted from Artaud’s unstaged text, Conquest of
Mexico, San Paulo and Tokyo; One Thousand Years of Pleasure,
inspired by a novel by Nakagami Kenji, collab with Noh master
Kanze Hideo.
1994 Directed and danced in Dance of Life, inspired by Edward Munch, for Lillehammer Olympic Art Festival, later presented in Tokyo; duo with Cecil Taylor, Mercer St., NYC, Japanese Art after 1945, Guggenheim Museum SOHO.
1992 Choreographed and danced the title role in the opera,Oedipus Rex,
conducted by Ozawa Seiji and directed by Julie Taymor, Saito
Memorial Festival, Matsumoto, Japan.
1990 The Rite of Spring, collab with Richard Serra, Opera Comique,
Paris; the piece also presented in Prague, Bratislava and Japan;
dance at Laborde Hospital, collab with Felix Guattari.
1987 Maijuku piece, Can We Dance the Landscape?, collab with Karel
Appel and Tan Dung, Paris Opera Comique, later brought to
Netherlands National Music Theater, BAM/NY and Japan.
1986 Solos in Japanese Contemporary Art Show, Marseilles, and Butoh Festival in Berlin.
1985 Started Body Weather Farm in rural Hakushu; holds Dance Hakushu Festival annually with artists, musicians and dancers since 1988.
1984 Solo performance, Foundation of Renai Butoh-ha (Love-Dance School), directed by Hijikata Tatsumi; worked with Hijikata at plan B, Tokyo’s first artists-run spot, 1983 till his death in 1986.
1983 Sonorite de Violette (Kandinsky), Venice Biennale, collab with
Giulio Trucatto and Luciano Berio.
1982 Participated in Sydney Biennale; wrote an homage to Hijikata
Tatsumi, I Am an Avant-Garde Who Crawls the Earth.
1981 Started Maijuku Troupe and Body Weather Lab world-wide; MMD
improvisation project with guitarist Derek Bailey and percussionist
Milford Graves; collab with them, Cecil Taylor, Haino and Otomo,
and composers such as Iannis Xenakis has gone on for decades.
1978-79 Founded Body Weather Laboratory; one-month performance in
Espace-Temps—MA, at the Louvre Decorative Art Museum, Paris
Autumn Festival; NYC debut at P.S.1, the Kitchen, Soho streets;
met Anna Halprin in Tamalpa, Calif. and kept close ties with her
collaborated with artists and musicians in Western, Middle and
Eastern Europe and the Americas, and more recently in Asia, for
over three decades ever since.