Centre for Contemporary Performing Arts

Min Tanaka performed in Prague for the first time secretly in 1984. During the Communist regime in Czechoslovakia, his performance would not have been allowed by the censorship. Only the audience that was invited personally and confidentially saw his clandestine performance. Tanaka was the first to present to a Czech audience the dance of the Japanese avant-garde. In the following years, Tanaka visited Prague on multiple occasions and his performances influenced dissident and underground artists who opposed the totalitarian regime. "His dance is based mainly on an extreme focus on space and time," said Ondřej Hrab, who organized Tanaka's secret performances in the 1980s. "It is important for him to see the dance as something happening 'here and now'. His body is a seismograph, reacting to all tectonic impulses of our spiritual environment. Tanaka's dance relativizes all physical principles and creates a poem of the body. It is dance without form, full of unexpected events and at the same time strongly rooted in the ground. His gestures stem from the agricultural work that he has been doing for several decades on his farm in the heart of the Japanese mountains."

After the revolution Hrab presented Tanaka's choreography The Rite of Spring at the National Theatre in Prague (1992) and at the Slovak National Theatre in Bratislava. In 1994, when he opened the Archa Theatre he asked Min Tanaka to share the stage with John Cale at the grand opening of this new centre for the contemporary performing arts.

In 2003 when the Archa Theatre was destroyed by floods, Tanaka performed solo at the State Opera Theatre to fundraise money for the reconstruction of the theatre. When the theatre was re-opened, Tanaka symbolically danced in the cold waters of the Vltava River. In the late 1990s he created choreography with Czech dancers, choreographers and musicians. This choreography had several versions and was performed not only in Prague but also in Japan. Since then Min has performed several times in the Archa Theatre with his productions Standing on the Edge, Locus Focus, Step Into the Shadow, The Happy Tree and most recently Destination of the Stone.

More at http://www.min-tanaka.com/