Akira Kasai (1943)[1] is a Japanese butoh dancer and choreographer, who despite being significantly younger than mentors Kazuo Ohno and Tatsumi Hijikata, is considered to be pioneers of the art form along with them.
He did not dance professionally at the time and for years after his return to Japan in 1986 he stayed off the stage stating that he felt too disconnected from Japanese society to perform.
He has since performed, choreographed and taught in Asia, the Americas and Europe, but his choreography is sufficiently different from most other butoh that its authenticity has been questioned.
He describes European culture as having the ability to take dualistic concepts and reunite them, something he says is missing in Japanese monistic thinking.
One of his sons, Mitsutke is also a dancer, combining butoh, hip hop and break dance, appearing solo and with his father both in Japan and abroad.
[4] Today is one of Japan’s butoh masters, and has been called “angel of butoh.”[5][6][7] His career has had him both perform, choreograph and teach butoh, modern dance, contemporary dance, and Eurythmy in the Americas, Europe and Asia, in countries such as Chile, Argentina, Mexico, Germany, France and South Korea, as well as his native Japan.
[1][2][7] Kasai began his butoh dancing career after meeting Kazuo Ohno, performing Gi-gi under him in 1963 and then working with Tatsumi Hijikata in 1964.
[1][2] He worked with Hijikata until 1971, performing productions such as Bara-iro dansu (Rose colored dance) (1965) and Emotion in Metaphysics (1967).
[1] One reason for starting Tenshikan was that he was looking for something very radical, something that could exist without a social power structure or centralized authority, separating modern dance from political or religious thought.
The methodology was to not teach dance to avoid authority and allow creative freedom (although training of the body was strict), which lasted for about seven years before he shut it down to move to Germany.
After this he began to present his own solo pieces along with choreographing for other butoh artists such as Kuniki Kisanuki, Kim Ito, Naoko Shirakawa and Ikuyo Kuroda, as well as ballet dancer Farouk Ruzimatov.
[3][7][8] In this piece, he appeared as a woman in a kabuki dress from Kyokanoko Musume Dōjōji, morphing into a hip-hop dancer.
[4] His work returns repeatedly to two themes: apocalypse as both destructive and generative and the struggle between the energies of organic and inorganic matter.
[4] Through what he calls “voice power” the body is not “I” or “you” but rather an impersonal pronoun that transcends dancer and spectator to a total consciousness.
[1] Kasai states that his is music-oriented and weak in visual images, and that when he hears music, movement flows naturally.