Akira Kasai

Quick Facts

Full Name	Akira Kasai
Occupation	Politician
Date Of Birth	Oct 15, 1952(1952-10-15)
Age	72
Birthplace	Tokyo
Country	Japan
Birth City	Tokyo
Horoscope	Capricorn

Akira Kasai Biography

Akira Kasai is one of the most popular and richest Politician who was born on October 15, 1952 in Tokyo, Tokyo, Japan. Akira Kasai (1943) 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. Kasai trained in other forms of dance, but turned to butoh in the 1960s when he met and began to work with these two men. He started his own studio in 1971 but closed it in 1979 to move and study Eurythmy in Germany. 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 returned to professional dance in 1994, with the work Saraphita and revived his studio Tenshi kan, now influenced by Eurythmy and other dance principles. 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 returned to Japan permanently in 1986, but he felt lost and unable to reattach to the people and places he knew before. Without social connection, he felt he could not dance and did not do so again until he worked out a way to reconnect to his native land. From 1986 to 1994, he did not return to professional dance, but rather lectured anthroposophy of Rudolf Steiner and held workshops on Eurythmy. Between Germany and this period, Kasai had a fifteen-year lapse from public performances.

Despite his success, his work has been criticized as not be butoh. In his first performance in San Francisco in 1994, a heckler shouted “This is not butoh!” to which Kasai responded from the stage “This is my flesh, this is my blood.” Similarly, at the premiere of Butoh American in 2009 at the New York Butoh Festival, several in the audience states it was more like modern dance. “Claudia la Rocco in The New York Times wrote of that evening, “This was Butoh with a big wink. Or maybe it wasn’t Butoh at all.”

After Saraphita, Kasai produced My own apocalypse (1994) followed by Work Exusiai (1998) .

His butoh career began at this time but he took a hiatus in the late 1970s to move to Germany with his family. He stayed in this country from 1979 to 1985, studying at the Eurythmy School in Stuttgart and studying European culture in depth. He describes European culture as having the ability to take dualistic concepts and reunite them, something he says is missing in Japanese monistic thinking. In particular he studied he philosophy of Rudof Steiner, which rebelled against dualistic thinking. He studied Eurythmy to answer two questions, “Is consciousness born or established by the body, or the other way around?” and “What is a life that is a life? Is life coming from a material or from somewhere else?” His goal was to deconstruct his Japanese notion of body to construct something new.

Akira Kasai Net Worth

Akira Kasai is one of the richest Politician from Japan. According to our analysis, Wikipedia, Forbes & Business Insider, Akira Kasai 's net worth $5 Million. (Last Update: December 11, 2023)

Although of a younger generation, Kasai is considered an originator of butoh, and a pioneer of the art in the 1960s and 1970s. He is acknowledged for coining the name butoh (later ankoku butoh, or dance of utter darkness) . Today is one of Japan’s butoh masters, and has been called “angel of butoh.”

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. He worked with Hijikata until 1971, performing productions such as Bara-iro dansu (Rose colored dance) (1965) and Emotion in Metaphysics (1967). In 1971, at the age of 28, he founded his own studio called Tenshi kan in Kokubunji, just west of Tokyo. The name means “House of Angels”, named after Rome’s “angel castle” Santanjiero, which had meaning for Kasai because of its history of housing both prisoners and paintings. The studio trained butoh artists Setsuko Yamada, Kota Yamazaki and others. 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.

Kasai considered butoh to be more of a philosophy than a dance movement. His work returns repeatedly to two themes: apocalypse as both destructive and generative and the struggle between the energies of organic and inorganic matter. The latter is often embodied as the working of Earth itself, with its organic and inorganic components/forces as well as the interaction of humans and technology. Kasai has also been working with temporal themes since his return to the stage in the 1990s, stating that his butoh philosophy is future- oriented.

Height, Weight & Body Measurements

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Who is Akira Kasai Dating?

According to our records, Akira Kasai is possibily single & has not been previously engaged. As of December 1, 2023, Akira Kasai’s is not dating anyone.

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The philosophy is most evident in Kasai’s thoughts of the body, movement and language. Like Hijikata, Kasai believes that the body, words and choreography are intricately related but in somewhat different ways. Kasai considers dance to be an inherently social activity and the dancer should strive for a “between space” which is an intersection between the dancer and the audience that happens when the rational mind quiets and the body begins to move. He states that dance eliminates the physical self, with humans becoming “bodies of sensation.” Since words live in the air, as the body moves, it is the way to understand the body. 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. Kasai’s butoh is strongly influenced by Eurythmy but it is also the extension of Hijikata’s butoh, especially in the role of language, and the concept that the body is something that is created, rather than given by nature.

Facts & Trivia

Akira Ranked on the list of most popular Politician. Also ranked in the elit list of famous people born in Japan. Akira Kasai celebrates birthday on October 15 of every year.

Kasai was born in Japan, and grew up in the Mie Prefecture. His family was upper middle class which he says was very education conscious. His grandfather spoke good English and was an interpreter for foreign cultural figures and visitors. His father was a banker and both his parents were active Christians. He began dancing as a child, listening to his mother’s organ music at church. Later, Kasai went on to study modern dance, ballet and pantomime before discovering butoh in the early 1960s.

Top Facts about Akira Kasai

1. Akira Kasai is considered to be originally of the Japanese form of butoh dance, along side Kazuo Ohno and Tatsumi Hijikata.
2. In the 60s, Kasai studied and trained in forms of modern dance, ballet, and pantomime before turn to butoh.
3. In 1971, he founded his own studio called Tenshi-kan meaning ‘House of Angels’
4. His career spans further than the 60s, making butoh performances, choreography, and teaching in Europe, the Americas, and Asia.
5. He coined the name ‘butoh’ (later ‘ankoku butoh’) meaning ‘dance of utter darkness’
6. Kasai temporarily left butoh in late 70s to move to Germany where he studied Eurythmy and European culture
7. Kasai returned to Japan in 1986 and did not return to professional dance until 1994, with the work Saraphita.
8. In one of his most successful performances, Pollen Revolution (2001), Kasai appeared as a woman in kabuki dress
9. He has been considered the ‘Ninjinsky of butoh’ and ‘part Marcel Marceau, part Mick Jagger’ by critics
10. Kasai’s butoh philosophy is transnational and transcultural, envisioning dance not to be solely Japanese, but incorporating movements of Commedia dell’Arte and other western performers
11. Kasai believes choreography to be a collective body concept rather than internal individual dancer
12. He promotes a different body aesthetic than traditional butoh, favoring quicker movement, vertical orientation and eyes engaged
13. Kasai’s focus as a choreographer is on form and style rather than story and movement
14. He promotes a “between space” in which the rational mind is quieted and the body moves
15. Kasai views dance as a social activity, bringing impersonal pronouns through the body and language to transcending dancer and spectator in total consciousness.