‘When the opportunity came to work at Theatre Cocoon in Tokyo, I was so excited about the great dramatist Yukio Ninagawa being the artistic director there,” the English director Jonathan Munby declared. Of course that was before Ninagawa died, age 80, in May this year. Nonetheless, speaking during a recent ...
Japan’s musical dance-theater form known as noh was honed to its sublime simplicity in the 14th century by a father and son named Kan’ami and Zeami, and since then it has changed very little. Performed on a roofed stage with open sides and posts ...
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, ...
To celebrate its 35th anniversary, the internationally renowned Kodo drumming troupe staged three days of performances at Tokyo’s Suntory Hall in mid-August, with a different theme for each show. On the first night, Kodo played together with the New Japan Philharmonic; on the second, ...
To be clothed, or not to be clothed? That was a no-brainer for members of an all-female cast in Brooklyn who stripped down to celebrate their freedom of expression in a nude version of Shakespeare in the park. The Torn Out Theater company of ...
While many junior high school boys spent their summer vacations on the beach in their swimwear, Ichikawa Fukutaro III got very little fun in the sun, spending much of his day in a kimono in the backstage dressing room of a kabuki theater. But ...
Surrender to the heat of September as the Antonio Gades Company brings its sultry blend of ballet and flamenco to Tokyo, showcasing three of its classic works in two separate programs at Bunkamura’s magnificent Orchard Hall. Japan has long been a hotspot for ballet ...
Since studying visual arts and sculpture before taking up ballet at the age of 20 in 1973, Saburo Teshigawara has become a world-renowned choreographer and dancer whose unique style and aesthetic sense has even drawn him commissions from the Paris Opera Ballet, Frankfurt Ballet ...
A robot-themed theater production in Kyoto has attracted packed houses since opening in 2012. “Gear,” a 75-minute nonspeaking performance that combines music, projected images and human movement, tells the story of humanoid “Roboroids” who continue to make dolls at the assembly line of an ...
For gamers and lovers of sheer theatrical spectacle alike, the summer’s hottest ticket seems sure to be for “Dragon Quest Live Spectacle Tour,” whose 40 shows nationwide are set to be attended by some 400,000 people — with everyone receiving a wristband enabling them ...
“Gloomy,” “eerie,” “vulgar,” “avant-garde” and “conceptual” are adjectives often used to describe butoh, the genre of Japanese modern dance started in 1959 by Tatsumi Hishikata and Kazuo Ohno in which performers usually paint their near-naked bodies white. In contrast, Ikko Tamura — a core ...
Kabuki never used to be performed in August at the Kabukiza Theatre in Tokyo, but in 1990 two of its late, great actors, Nakamura Kanzaburo XVIII and Bando Mitsugoro X, instigated the staging of short programs during that sweltering month to help expand the ...
For fans of musicals in Japan, the buzz surrounding Teppei Koike and Haruma Miura is reaching a peak thanks to the pair’s newest production: the first-ever Japanese version of the award-winning hit “Kinky Boots.” It doesn’t hurt that the media refer to them as ...
