She collaborated on many of famed director and designer Robert Wilson’s most revered works created during the years 1984 through 1999[2][3][4][5][circular reference].
At the beginning of the 1960s, Hanayagi arrived in the United States as a cultural exchange visitor under programs sponsored by the Martha Graham School and Japan Society.
Also during the 1960s, she participated in the performance experiments happening at Anna Halprin's workshops in the San Francisco Bay Area and in New York City with Fluxus and at the Judson Dance Theater.
[11] Over 17 years, they created 14 dance theater works, which they performed in New York City through 1966, and then in Japan and the San Francisco Bay Area.
She remained a New York resident for most of the 1960s, where in 1962 she met and married visual artist Isamu Kawai,[12] returning to Osaka in 1967 to be near her family for the birth of their son, Asenda Kiuchi.
[22] Their collaborations were mostly large-scale theater and opera productions presented internationally, beginning with the Knee Plays, premiered at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis[23] as part of Wilson's multi-sectioned work, The Civil Wars: A Tree Is Best Measured When It Is Down.
Among other artistic collaborations that occurred throughout her career, Hanayagi appeared with performance artists Yoko Ono[24] and Ayo, and in works directed by filmmaker Molly Davies,[25] choreographer/filmmaker Elaine Summers[26] and director Julie Taymor,[27][28] besides serving as coach and choreographer for classic dance performances by the popular Japanese actress Shiho Fujimura.
[29] In 2008, when her artist friends learned Hanayagi was ill with Alzheimer's disease and residing in a special care facility in Osaka, Japan, they gathered together to create a multidisciplinary live performance portrait, KOOL-Dancing In My Mind, a poetic monument fueled by their wish to help guarantee her legacy as a great dancer and choreographer.
[30] Incorporating six live dancers in reconstructions of her choreographic collaborations from works with Blank and Wilson, besides archival photographs, videos of her in performance, excerpts from various published interviews and unpublished letters to Blank, and recent images of her head, hands and feet by Richard Rutkowski,[31] it was first shown at New York City's Guggenheim Museum in their 2009 Works & Process Series and developed further at Guild Hall[32] in East Hampton, was given its international debut at Berlin's Academy of the Arts in September 2010, and was chosen by Wilson to represent his work at his 2010 Jerome Robbins Award ceremony at New York's Baryshnikov Art Center, December 9, 2010.
In a 1986 interview while in residence at American Repertory Theatre in Cambridge, Massachusetts,[37] Hanayagi commented: “When I do classical dance, I don’t want to change the movement.
When I worked on the choreography for Bob Wilson's Le Martyre de Saint Sebastien, I felt so much responsibility I couldn't sleep the night before -- I was thinking so hard about what I was doing.