People | 20 QUESTIONS Feb 22, 2020

Jonah Salz: What's life without the drama?

Theater scholar and director Salz on Beckett, kyogen and teaching in Japan.

People | WHY DID YOU LEAVE JAPAN? Jan 25, 2020

Hiroko Tanahashi: A journey from film studies to multimedia art

Inspired by manga featuring New York, Francis Ford Coppola's "The Godfather" and the diversity of Western cities, Hiroko Tanahashi moved to the U.S. and Germany to pursue multimedia arts.

Stage Nov 6, 2019

The theater hoping to create a 100-year legacy

Months after it opened its doors, Theatre E9 Kyoto is pressing on with its plan to foster local talent and stage local theater productions in the city

Stage Sep 24, 2019

Kyoto Experiment marks the end of an era

The 10th edition of Kyodo Experiment kicks off on Oct. 5, promising a range of overseas and domestic performers at a number of venues across the city

Stage Aug 13, 2019

The Theatre Olympics goes back to its roots for ninth iteration

Since the late 1970s, people from all over the world have traveled to the village of Toga in rural Toyama Prefecture to attend Tadashi Suzuki's renowned acting classes or to see the Suzuki Company of Toga (SCOT) and other invited artists perform at the ...

Stage Jul 30, 2019

Diving into the world of political performance at Aichi Triennale

The political function of art is a perennial question in the field of aesthetics. In classical Athens, Plato argued that art as a form of imitation was limited in its ability to communicate knowledge about political life. In contrast, Aristotle saw this mimetic gap ...

Stage Oct 4, 2018

The experiment continues on Kyoto's stages

The #MeToo movement has been gaining momentum in Japan over the past year, though its impact on public life hasn't been anywhere near as strong as in other countries. Still, the efforts of journalists such as Shiori Ito and BuzzFeed's Keiko Kojima have helped ...

Stage Feb 20, 2018

Contemporary dance festival puts modern 'Genji' front and center

How do you make a thousand-year-old story resonate with an audience in Osaka today? Tell them that you plan to radically modernize one of the most famous literary works ever to come out of Japan to fit present concerns. The centerpiece of "Asia.ai" is an ...

People | WHY DID YOU LEAVE JAPAN? Jan 13, 2018

Artist Naoko Tanaka uses light, space and objects to explore the 'unknowable inner outside world'

Performance artist feels immense pressure to fit into a mold in Japan.

People | WHY DID YOU LEAVE JAPAN? Oct 21, 2017

Cultural disorientation is dancer Yumi Umiumare's artistic drive

At a certain level, the act of resettling overseas unsettles the idea of home itself. It ruptures the narrative of belonging that we construct through attachments to people and places. For the immigrant, home is no longer an immutable fact, but a space between memory and desire — always elsewhere. This sense of estrangement is perhaps most strongly felt when returning "home" after a long period of leave. As Czech novelist Milan Kundera once put it, going back reveals "the substantial strangeness of the world and of existence." ...