Akio Nagasawa Gallery is pleased to announce the opening of William Klein’s exhibition “Dance Happening, Tokyo 1961”.

This Tokyo show is part of the travelling exhibition ”Kazuo Ohno By Eikoh Hosoe and William Klein” of works by the two photographers, which was originally put together by Akio Nagasawa for last year’s Rencontres d'Arles international photography festival in France.

The works shown in this exhibition are photographs taken in 1961, when Klein was in Japan for shootings that eventually resulted in his photo book Tokyo. Products of a collaboration between Klein and Hosoe, the pictures on display here showcase the two photographers’ keen observations of the city of Tokyo during the initial years of recovery and growth after the war, and at the same time, of the bodies of three eccentric Butoh dancers and their experimentation with a new form of dance.

The three Butoh dancers are Kazuo Ohno, Tatsumi Hijikata and Yoshito Ohno, whose “actions” in the streets can be considered as a prototype of the physical art that would later be called “happening” or “performance”. These photographs serve as valuable documents of early Butoh that was pioneering also in international terms. While some of the works shown in this exhibition were also included in the book Tokyo, most of the photographs have been lying dormant in Klein’s studio without ever being published. The “actions” that resurface now, 56 years after the event, still have the same striking visual impact that they had on William Klein when he first encountered the three dancers in Tokyo