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 ...

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

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 ...

Move to rest, sleep, and dream. Move to pass time, bloom, and linger." These are the opening lines of performing artist Eiko Otake's "Delicious Movement Manifesto."

Franco-Austrian choreographer and director Gisele Vienne is fascinated by puppets and brings a group of nine ventriloquists and their marionettes to the stage in her latest piece, "The Ventriloquists Convention." The play is part of the World Theatre Festival Shizuoka run by Shizuoka Performing ...

A bonanza is brewing in Tokyo and Yokohama for lovers of cross-cultural contemporary theater. That's because, from Jan. 25 to Feb. 5, the capital's Minato Ward hosts a new performance and workshop program named Theater Commons Tokyo. Meanwhile Yokohama's Naka Ward welcomes the seventh ...

"Good fences make good neighbors" is an often-quoted line from Robert Frost's poem "Mending Wall" about two farmers united in their effort to rebuild a wall that divides their land. Less well known is the poem's central query: "Why do good fences make good ...

Performing on deserted beaches and in villages, temples, dockland warehouses and urban railyards, few theater companies can have traversed the range of landscapes and settings that have inspired Osaka-based Ishinha. Yet though journeys real and imagined have been key themes in Ishinha's recent works, with ...

“It may be wrong to mix different wines, but old and new wisdom make an excellent mixture." So claims The Singer in Bertolt Brecht's 1944 play, "The Caucasian Chalk Circle." If so, there are few places where tradition and the avant-garde collide with more potent ...

Tokyo may be Japan's performing-arts hub, but a growing number of artists are swapping the strictures of its cultural marketplace for the creative and lifestyle benefits of life outside the capital. For the Osaka-based Ishinha theater company, however, there's nothing new about that. In fact, ...