He is one of Asia's foremost theater directors, and Ong Keng Sen looked to be enjoying his latest challenge when we met in Tokyo in March during rehearsals for "Sandaime Richard," Japanese dramatist Hideki Noda's iconoclastic adaptation of Shakespeare's "Richard III." The Singaporean dramatist was ...
"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 ...
Hot on the heels of Hideki Noda's radical adaptation of "Richard III" being staged by Singaporean director Ong Ken Seng at Shizuoka Performing Arts Center from April 29 to May 1, another intriguing transformation of Shakespeare's Machiavellian king will follow at Theatre Fuusikaden in ...
“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 ...
Marking four centuries since the death of William Shakespeare in 1616, the 101-year-old all-female Takarazuka Revue company is currently staging a new musical titled "Shakespeare: The Sky Filled With Eternal Words" at its Takarazuka Grand Theater in Takarazuka, Hyogo Prefecture, ahead of a Tokyo ...
More than half a century since it opened in 1960 as one of Japan's first multipurpose cultural centers, and almost exactly four years after its doors last closed, the Kyoto Kaikan will be reborn transformed on Jan. 10 as the ROHM Theatre Kyoto. Sited against ...
Aiming to foster regional theater links through research, fieldwork and creative exchange, Festival/Tokyo last year launched its new Asia Series, focused then on South Korea. This year it's the turn of Myanmar, with three artists from the evolving scene there being introduced to F/T ...
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, ...
The sixth Echigo-Tsumari Art Triennale is set to start July 26 in Tokamachi City and Tsunan Town in Niigata Prefecture, north-central Honshu. Though this mountainous region is known for picturesque wintry snowscapes and lush green summer rice fields, it is beset with the socio-economic effects ...
