Sylvie Guillem

Min Tanaka

(C) Annie-Leibovitz

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 practicing 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. Presently, as for the cooperation agricultural style it closes. It continues independently. Through this ongoing experience he has come to be convinced that dance is deeply and irreversibly rooted in the humanity’s practice of agriculture.

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. But, Tanaka says. I am a dancer and I am not the 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.

(http://www.min-tanaka.com/wp/?page_id=1412)

Body Weather

Min Tanaka sums up the artform he has named 'Body Weather' as "The body that measures the landscape, the body in intercourse with weather, the body kissing mass of peat, the body in love-death relation to the day. For me the dance has been a symbol of despair and courage." This is the basis for his Body Weather Farm, a unique approach to communal living, working and creating.

Tanaka has evolved the traditional, slow-moving Japanese dance form of Butoh into a new method intended to connect dancers deeply to the space and landscape around them. Like Butoh, Body Weather often depicts cycles of birth, death and renewal, but unlike its predecessor, the primary focus is on the intersections of the dancers' bodies and the environments they inhabit. Each body is conceived as constantly changing, like the weather, in complex relationship to its surroundings, as "physical geographical details [are] experienced with intimacy, like an extension of the body."

Tanaka founded Body Weather Farm in 1985 in the mountain village of Hakushu (outside Tokyo) to explore the origins of dance through farming life. Dancers who come to live there spend several hours every day doing hard labor in the fields, raising rice, vegetables and chickens, followed by many hours of daily dance training. The farm is a cooperative living environment, where everyone pitches in and everything is shared among participants. Members of the community learn new patterns of social engagement by taking part in the communal living environment. While throughout the process, the landscape seeps into their bodies and influences their art.

(http://bodyweather.blogspot.dk/2009/02/body-weather.html)

http://www.cavearts.org/

http://www.bodyweather.net/

http://www.lynchcompany.dk/

http://www.forsoegsstationen.dk/

http://bodyweatheramsterdam.blogspot.dk/

Masai

Milena Sidorova - Spider

Sayoko Onishi

Natalia Cuéllar

Min Tanaka - Biography

http://virali.wordpress.com/2010/01/15/min-tanaka-biography/

[JOURNAL] Breaking the Fast Cycle

http://dancenycjcomm.wordpress.com/2010/03/29/feature-breaking-the-fast-cycle/#more-289

Key words: Body Weather Farm, Min Tanaka, Slowlab, Julia Mandle, Italy "slow cities movement, Japan "slow life movement", Hannah Arendt  

Slow Lab om Body Weather Farm

Min Tanaka sums up the artform he has named 'Body Weather' as"The body that measures the landscape, the body in intercourse with weather, the body kissing mass of peat, the body in love-death relation to the day. For me the dance has been a symbol of despair and courage." This is the basis for his Body Weather Farm, a unique approach to communal living, working and creating.

Tanaka has evolved the traditional, slow-moving Japanese dance form of Butoh into a new method intended to connect dancers deeply to the space and landscape around them. Like Butoh, Body Weather often depicts cycles of birth, death and renewal, but unlike its predecessor, the primary focus is on the intersections of the dancers' bodies and the environments they inhabit. Each body is conceived as constantly changing, like the weather, in complex relationship to its surroundings, as "physical geographical details [are] experienced with intimacy, like an extension of the body."

Tanaka founded Body Weather Farm in 1985 in the mountain village of Hakushu (outside Tokyo) to explore the origins of dance through farming life. Dancers who come to live there spend several hours every day doing hard labor in the fields, raising rice, vegetables and chickens, followed by many hours of daily dance training. The farm is a cooperative living environment, where everyone pitches in and everything is shared among participants. Members of the community learn new patterns of social engagement by taking part in the communal living environment. While throughout the process, the landscape seeps into their bodies and influences their art.

At a time when media and telecommunications often propels us into disembodied virtual spaces, Body Weather acts to root the body firmly in physical space and in meaningful connection to one's immediate environment, be it a remote span of desert or an urban cityscape. Body Weather Farm takes this to the next level, addressing the inherently social and communal aspects of being human, and encouraging ways to express those too.

(http://www.slowlab.net/body%20weather%20farm.html)

Interview med Min Tanaka

http://www.thememagazine.com/stories/min-tanaka/

Botuh net

http://www.butoh.net/Butoh_Net/Butoh_Artists.html

Sankai Juku in Paris - Butoh dance (buto)

!!!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?NR=1&feature=endscreen&v=z5phfF4qUlU

Butoh SE MEN TE - parte 2 "Devir-feto"

SU-EN

http://www.ne.jp/asahi/butoh/itto/method/butoh_training.htm

Imre Thormann

Maher Shalal Hash Baz - This is Our Music