Suzushi Hanayagi

Suzushi Hanayagi (花柳 寿々紫, Hanayagi Suzushi^?), (August 15, 1928 – October 1, 2010), was a Japanese dancer and choreographer. Born in Osaka, Japan, she found her way in the international art world through her Japanese classical dance theater forms and experimental performance art forms. For over fifty years she actively performed, taught and choreographed in classic Japanese dance forms and contemporary collaborative multimedia performance works. She appeared in Japan, the United States and Europe as a choreographer. She collaborated on many of famed director and designer Robert Wilson’s most revered works created during the years 1984 through 1999.

Suzushi Hanayagi was born Mitsuko Kiuchi, in Osaka, Japan, in 1928. At the age of three she started her dance training with her aunt, Suzukinu Hanayagi, learning the Hanayagi style, a traditional Kabuki school of dance founded in Japan’s nineteenth century Edo Period. At the age of twenty she became a natori, receiving her Hanayagi name, after mastering 100 dances. She subsequently began studying with Takehara Han, a master dancer based in Tokyo who developed her singular classic salon style related to mai styles started in Osaka and Kyoto during the Edo Period, and incorporating techniques related to Noh theater. Interested in these more abstract and poetic styles, Ms. Hanayagi later added studies with Yachiyo Inoue, headmaster of the Inoue school, a Kyoto-based dance style utilized by geishas, with whom she continued to study until 2000, when she ceased actively performing.

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