The inaugural edition of performing arts festival Autumn Meteorite takes the image of a meteorite to signify a cosmic pollinator and a catalytic collision of ideas where artists and cultures converge.
“The image of a meteorite evokes something foreign, unfamiliar — a presence infused with a rare power to set things in motion,” says the festival’s artistic director Toshiki Okada, active internationally as a playwright and leader of the theater company Chelfitsch.
The first iteration of the monthlong festival kicked off in Tokyo on Oct. 1, with "Another Shape of Reality/Shape of Another Reality," an outdoor performance splintered in three cacophonous parallel parts, written by Akutagawa Prize winner Saou Ichikawa, YouTuber and writer Da Vinci Osorezan and choreographer Natsuko Tezuka.
The program includes 14 diverse performances from Japan and abroad as well as a range of nonperformance events such as exhibitions, talks and workshops, mainly held at the Tokyo Metropolitan Theatre in Ikebukuro Ward. Autumn Meteorite will close Nov. 3, Culture Day, culminating in several shows over the three-day weekend such as “Planet[wanderer],” a collaboration between Kyoto sculptor Kohei Nawa and Belgian and French choreographer Damien Jalet that reimagines parts of the eighth-century “Kojiki” and “under take,” a new work by up-and-coming avant-garde theater group Sekita Ikuko that was commissioned for the festival.
The potential of the festival’s cross-pollination ethos was on display on its first weekend with “The Bathhouse of Honest Desires.” The play is a collaboration between Shakespeare’s Wild Sisters Group, a theater group based in Taiwan, and Japan’s Niwa Gekidan Penino. With a cast of actors performing in a mix of Chinese and Japanese, co-writers and co-directors Chia-Ming Wang and Kuro Tanino blend not only languages but also elements of song and dance. Their sources of inspiration range from Buddhist funerary rites and surrealist literature to S&M subcultures.
The play takes place in a dilapidated bathhouse, the crumbled central wall that usually divides the male and female baths indicating the collapsed dichotomies of man and woman, life and death, sacred and profane.
Loosely inspired by Yasunari Kawabata’s novel “The House of Sleeping Beauties," the play turns Kawabata’s power structure on its head but embraces its transgressive sexuality — everyone keeps their clothes on, but they engage in sexualized acts. Instead of impotent men paying to sleep next to drugged and helpless innocents, like in Kawabata’s novel, here the customers are the hapless ghosts of men who died in a nameless war. The young women, meanwhile, perform kink-coded therapies as they help relieve their customers of the lingering regrets and griefs preventing their rebirth.
Wang describes his collaboration with Tanino as working under the “lash of the Other,” and the audience can well imagine how such a button-pressing work might emerge as two playwrights “provoke each other, sharing small bites as they pry open dark cupboards of the mind.” With a companion, you can be goaded into going just a step further than you might otherwise have.
“To complete this errant journey, the audience’s companionship is indispensable,” Wang adds. The play is incomplete until it evokes a response in the viewer, which may then reverberate out into the world.
Some of the other upcoming shows in Autumn Meteorite are the solo performances "Jonah," a take on the biblical story performed by TV and movie actor Kuranosuke Sasaki, and “Mary Said What She Said,” depicting Mary, Queen of Scots on the night before her execution, performed by Isabelle Huppert. On Oct. 26, Okada will mount his one-day experiment "Writing Something Right There," in which he writes a piece of fiction in real time, based on what he sees around him.
In the nonverbal "Weathering," 10 performers create a sculpture composed of bodies, sounds, scents, liquids and objects, while in “You Balance,” sound engineer Toshihiko Kasai collaborates with 20 artists, from traditional instrument musicians to stand-up comedians, performing in different locations for an overlapping, immersive sonic event.
Some shows employ the use of AI technologies such as “Signal to Noise,” in which Sheffield theater company Forced Entertainment perform in sync to AI voices, and “Ergonomic Embryo — Protocell,” which will double as a public experiment exploring the relationship between body and wearable devices: As performers view footage of themselves through their head-mounted displays, AI converts their poses in real-time into various images, such as that of a chair.
The festival has made particular efforts toward accessibility to make audiences more welcome, offering some relaxed performances that may be more comfortable for children, people with sensory issues, and others who may find standard theater etiquette challenging. House lights are left on, sound and lighting effects are made less intense and leaving and reentering the theater is allowed.
“This performance art festival is a meteorite in its own right, made up of various other meteorites,” Okada says. “As long as we carry the name ‘meteorite,’ we aim to hold (questions of inclusiveness) close so we can be ready to receive you, another meteorite.”
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