The Rite of Spring

Min Tanaka, who heads the group Mai-Juku, is a remarkable personality of Japanese and world alternative theatre and dance, an artist whose body has become a language of the mind. The artistic documentary The Rite of Spring. was filmed at Tanaka’s farm in the Japanese village of Hokushu. There, young people from various countries come to participate in Tanaka’s workshops, to learn to free themselves from the rationality of consciousness and to work with their bodies in space and time. Some visitors to the summer workshop end up staying at Tanaka’s for several years or repeatedly returning; the decision to stay is only a question of an individual’s free will and courage. Spring Sanctification was celebrated long ago, before the development of farming, and took on various forms in different parts of the world. Using Butó dance, Min Tanaka asks himself what sanctification means for mankind today, what spring means and what is the meaning of spring sanctification.