A spotlight shines on a miniature primary school chair. Its steel frame is crumpled like a child's body cowering in fear. Soon, other chairs of differing sizes come into view, lit by a solitary woman, who crawls among them with a torchlight. She casts their mangled shadows onto a clinical white curtain, creating an eerie symbolic landscape of "uninternalized" repression.

"Each time I come back to Japan, I feel immense pressure to fit into a mold," says Naoko Tanaka, 42, a Berlin-based Japanese visual and performance artist behind the production, which is titled "Uninternalized (light)."

The piece was presented at the Rohm Theatre Kyoto as part of the Kyoto International Arts Festival in October 2017.