Born in Tokyo in 1945, Min Tanaka is a pioneer within 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. Tanaka has collaborated with renowned artists from various fields--- composers such as Luciano Berio, Werner Henze, Toshi Ichiyanagi, such as 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, wirters such as Susan Sontag, Kenji Nakagami and Colin Wilson. He has been awarded Chevalier des arts et des lettre from France.
In addition to his won 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 1990-1992, and with Russian folk dancers in Moscow in 1997. He was appointed in 2003 as Master of the new dance department at the School of Dramatic Art in Moscow headed by Anatoly Vasiliev. With the dance company in Moscow he staged an original dance work “Goya—Guests from the Dark” which will tour in Europe in 2005.
The past few years have brought Min Tanaka many chances to be involved in projects around the globe, including: solo within the Yoko Ono retrospective exhibition in New Yorand MIT, Mass., choreography for a version of Werner Hentz's opera "Venus and Adonis" in Tokyo, an extensive tour in Europe and USA with series of works inspired by Goya's print work Los Caprichos. In March of 2004 created an original dance work “Towards Csontvari” for the Central Europe dance Theater in Budapest.
In 2002 he received the Best Supporting Actor’s Award from the Japanese Academy Award for the film “Twilight Samurai”(directed by Yoji Yamada; nominated for 2003 US Academy Award for Foreign-Language Films) and is active also as a film actor. In the winter of 2004 he traveled to the islands of Indonesia for a research into their ritual folk dance and music, and released a film based on the experience.
