Tokyo International Festival of Performing Arts 2000 kicked off Oct. 13 with the production "Melancholy Baby" at Aoyama Enkei Gekijo, one of the main venues hosting the festival. In truth, though, there is little "international" about this year's festival, through mid-December.
The entire event is severely pared down, with just one "international" representative in the theater and dance categories. Two foreign imports do not an international festival make. The breadth of vision that put Tokyo on the arts map has been subjugated to funding concerns and artistic differences. As if to underscore the apathy with which it is regarded by the public sector, the role played by the spanking-new New National Theatre in Shibuya-ku is minute. The term "festival" connotes a celebration of the performing arts: banners in the streets, television and radio interviews and at the very least, domestic, if not international, awareness.
Gone are the days of world-shaking collaborations, commissions and premieres of domestic plays and dance productions. Instead, this year's festival focuses on repeat performances of noteworthy productions, such as the admittedly stunning production of "Medea" by the Ku Na'uka company in Aoyama through Nov. 5. The theater section also boasts Yoji Sakate's "Whalers in the South Seas," which uses actors from the Philippines, Indonesia and the U.S., while the sole imported specimen is Richard Foreman's Ontological Hysteric Theatre in "Bad Boy Nietzsche," Nov. 16-19.