During the 1960s, Suzushi Hanayagi ventured alone to New York in an unusual act of courage for a Japanese woman of her generation and armed only with training in traditional dance to forge a new form of Western-style modern dance.
Now 80, she sits in a wheelchair in a home for the elderly, a frail woman with gray hair, a shadow of her former robust self. She mutters and smiles, lost in her own world, a victim of Alzheimer's disease. But her influence is still felt.
Avant-garde theater director Robert Wilson, who worked with Hanayagi in the United States, has created what he calls their "last collaboration," titled "KOOL — Dancing in My Mind."