High on a mountain top covered with tea bushes in Shizuoka Prefecture, Kim Itoh is dancing his solo piece "Nerve Maze Garden 2" in one of the most aesthetically pleasing venues in Japan. Designed by architect Arata Isozaki as part of the Shizuoka Performing Arts Park, Daendo Hall is a small oval theater with a high-arching ceiling reminiscent of sail rigging in the way the beams of cypress support the entire structure. The floor, polished black and sibilant as befits a theater that can be used for traditional Japanese performing arts such as noh, mirrors the vaulted ceiling and shoji-spaced walls.

But this performance is as far from the traditional arts as it is possible to get. Itoh, dancing and communicating in monosyllabic grunts with a chair, is one of the solo dancers participating in the season of solo dance by Japanese performers April 23-May 4. It was held as part of the ongoing Theatre Olympics, a festival of performance bringing together stage artists from all over the world that started April 16.

Japan is the second country to host the festival after the first held, appropriately enough, in Greece in 1995. The next festival will be held in Moscow in 2001. As befits the largest festival of performing arts ever to be held in this country, the event demands expert planning, applicable venues and facilities that can handle visitors in waves.

Shizuoka City was the obvious choice. Its new Shizuoka Convention and Arts Center near Higashi-Shizuoka Station, also designed by Isozaki, accommodates performances, conferences and exhibitions. It looms up just beside the station in rather bedraggled surroundings of small distributor warehouses, but this lack of aesthetic considerations is more than compensated for by the 21-hectare performing arts village that takes up the nearby mountainside at the foot of Mount Udo.

Isozaki has built the rehearsal rooms, outdoor and indoor theaters, offices, accommodation and other constructions of natural materials and blended the whole into the mountainside. The winding gravel paths and roads throughout the complex exploit the gradients of the fields of tea (for which Shizuoka is famous), groves of bamboo and fast-running streams.

The integrity of this design is aided by Isozaki's close collaboration with playwright and theater director Tadashi Suzuki, who as artistic director of Shizuoka Performing Arts Center, is the Japan representative on the committee of the Theatre Olympics. Suzuki's enthusiasm for the regionalization of theater in Japan also makes him artistic director of the drama company at Art Tower Mito, the SCOT company at Toga, the Mitsui Festival in Tokyo and involved in a dizzying number of collaborations and projects overseas.

Akira Kasai also performed April 29 in the new work "Tinctura." This was unfortunately a garbled, self-indulgent piece of work for himself and two young women dancers that juxtaposed furious bursts of kicking and screaming energy for the master and semiwobbly poses for the acolytes. Yet taking the risk of presenting a new piece, especially for such a major and prestigious festival as the Theatre Olympics, earned Kasai a measure of respect from an easygoing audience and may well have occasioned some measure of hope among the die-hard optimists.

The exhibition for this festival, ongoing through June 13, is "Heiner Mueller Theater," by Wolfgang Storch, using texts by Mueller, etchings, photographs and video interviews with the late German theater director at the convention and arts center.

Upcoming theater performances include "Fire and Poetry" by Tony Harrison, May 14-15; Brecht's "La Noce de chez les petits-bourgeois" directed by Georges Lavaudant, May 15-16; Shakespeare's "King Lear" directed by Tadashi Suzuki, May 26, 28-30; Garcia Lorca's "Noces de Sang" interpreted as "La Oscura Raiz" by Lluis Pasqual, June 3-6; a Greek/Turkish company performing Mueller's "Hercules 2, 13, 5" directed by Theodoros Terzopoulos, June 4-6; Moliere's "Don Juan" directed by Pawel Nowicki with a Colombian company, June 6; a Russian company in Dostoyevsky's "The Brothers Karamazov" directed by Yuri Lyubimov, June 10-13; and a Brazilian company in the Euripides play "The Trojan Women" directed by Antunes Filho, June 11-12.

Other productions include the dance piece "Discordantia" by Daniel Desnoyers, May 22-24, Robert Wilson's version of Puccini's opera "Madama Butterfly," June 5, 7, and the concert "At the Edge," by Rodger Reynolds, May 21-22. Call (054) 202-3399 for information.