Akira Kasai (Tokyo, Japan) is now 68 years old, though much younger than the late Kazuo Ohno and the late Tatsumi Hijikata, two legends of butoh, Akira Kasai was also a pioneer of the art form in the 1960s and ’70s. He was even dubbed the “Nijinsky of butoh.” After studying modern dance, pantomime and classical ballet, Akira Kasai met Ohno and performed with him in “Gigi” in 1963. He also joined the performance of Hijikata’s “Bara-iro dansu” (Rose-colored dance) in 1965. Although he may be called a butoh dancer, Kasai’s style of dance is clearly different from what is usually associated with butoh —slow, horizontal movements at low positions deriving from the life and soul of traditional Japanese farmers. Instead, Kasai concentrates on fierce horizontal and vertical movements, using the expanse of the stage, but with some humorous or clown like elements.In 1971, Kasai established Tenshi-kan (House of Angels) in Tokyo’s western suburb of Kokubunji as an institute in which he taught dance. His interest in Rudolf Steiner’s anthroposophy and eurythmy (an art of bodily movement based on a theory that there are archetypal movements corresponding to every aspect of speech, music and emotion) led him to study in Stuttgart, Germany, from 1979 until 1985. He resumed giving public butoh performances in 1994 after some 15 years’ lapse. Since his return to Japan he has cultivated his own highly idiosyncratic style of dance; in “Pollen Revolution,” with which he toured in the United States in the fall of 2004, he first appeared as awoman dressed in a traditional kabuki costume, who eventually morphed into a hip-hop dancer. He once said that the human body is filled with material containing both the universe’s beginning and end and that when he dances, that material dances. He leads the Tenshi-Kan Dance Institute in Tokyo and has published two books of essays on dance perception and new dance techniques.