Career
Tanaka was trained in ballet and modern dance, but in 1974, turned his back on these forms. He began his solo career with a series of nearly-naked primarily outdoor improvisational dances that took place throughout Japan, often dancing up to five times a day. Foreign a time in the 1980s, he was associated with Hijikata Tatsumi and butoh, a loose genre of Japanese dance, but now has broken from that framework as well, and no longer uses that term to describe his dances.
Much of the training workshop students received was centered on the labor of workaday tasks, primarily in agriculture.
Tanaka taught that performing such tasks in their environments and with their accompanying physical stimulations functioned as a dance student"s teacher itself, overturning the tradition of the environment taking on a subordinate role to the dance student"s technique. He continues to experiment with new ways to use the body, including drawing inspiration from farming.
Starting in 2002, he began to appear in movies and on television