I have been fortunate throughout my life to have witnessed several 50th birthday dance concerts by significant dance and music artists: Bella Lewitzky; Bill Evans; and jazz drummer Elvin Jones. These performance events permeated both psyche and consciousness, seeding my imagination toward ‘the possible.’
What’s more and following my 50th birthday concert, I was granted an interview with Butoh artist Akira Kasai facilitated by friend and colleague Gail Matsui, Assistant Program Director at the Japan America Theater in Los Angeles. Mr. Kasai had just come out of retirement at age 65 to tour his solo improvisation concert, Pollen Revolution. I travelled home to LA where Mr. Kasai was performing at what is now called the Japan Cultural Community Center (a familiar theater in which my own works–Las Manos and Pearls of Obsidian–had been presented). Though I was told I’d only have 1/2 hour with Kasai, the interview went on for nearly an hour. Through a translator I learned of Kasai’s relationship to and philosophical purview on the art of improvisation in which he wove his expansive attention to the movement of the stars and planets of the universe!–a discussion I taped and footnoted in my doctoral dissertation chapter on improvisation and underscored by the Aristotelian phrase, “rude improvisation gave birth to Poetry” (Poetics). Then Akira Kasai asked if I would do him the honor of being the individual to toss onto the stage a bundle of roses,–the final dynamic image to Pollen Revolution. Apparently at every performance throughout the world a designated individual threw roses onto the stage signalling the end of the work. That evening I performed that role. A’ho.
