Shizuoka Performing Arts Center is Japan's first so-called European-style public theater. Founded by the Shizuoka prefectural government in 1997, it has its own company (also called SPAC) and an artistic director in residence when the norm is for public theater companies to share venues and for artistic directors to work under prefectural bureaucrats appointed as governors.
SPAC is rich in resources, with its own open-air, white-stone Udo Theater — where "Seagull-Play" (based on Chekhov's 1896 masterpiece) has just been staged by the avant-garde Enrique Diaz company from Brazil. It also boasts Daendo, a small-scale indoor theater in a hilly park area; its main venue, the high-tech, 400-seat Shizuoka Arts Theater in Shizuoka City; its own rehearsal studio; and accommodation. And these facilities are all being employed to full effect this month to put on Spring Arts Festival Shizuoka 2008.
In April 2007, 49-year-old Satoshi Miyagi put his acclaimed Ku Na'uka company on ice to become the company's second general artistic director, following on from its first general artistic director, the internationally renowned 68-year-old dramatist Tadashi Suzuki. Miyagi's mission is to attract to SPAC a wider range of audiences, both at home and worldwide To that end, as he has done throughout his career, Miyagi makes a point of greeting every audience member who comes to see a show.