Chiaki Soma, the program director at Festival/Tokyo (F/T), needed to figure out how to proceed with the country's biggest theater festival following the Great East Japan Earthquake on March 11. She closed her office for 10 days and asked the staff to carefully consider the meaning of the festival in light of the disaster in the northeastern Tohoku region.
She then recalled her team and they decided to ditch the festival's original mission statement — "Scrap theaters and go into town" — and replace it with a new one, "What can we say?," in reference to the catastrophe.
As a result, the F/T that opens Sept. 16 will look different from what was originally planned. Many of the artists, such as 54-year-old Akio Miyazawa, modified their contributions. The founder of the Tokyo-based Yuenchi Sasisei Jigyodan theater company marks his debut at the festival with the piece "Total Living 1986-2011."