On Kyoto Experiment’s Curatorial Vision

The interdisciplinary theatre, dance, and performance art festival Kyoto Experiment (KEX) wowed me with the thoughtfulness of its curatorial vision. The three co-artistic directors—Yoko Kawasaki, Yuya Tsukahara, and Juliet Reiko Knapp—nurtured a collective exploration of public culture and artmaking aware of local and global contexts. KEX took place over three weeks, between 5-27 October 2024, and included performances, talks, symposia, formal and informal roundtables, workshops, podcasts, exhibits, and residencies (many in collaboration with other institutions). My own participation was facilitated by a residency for European critics organized by the Delegation of the European Union to Japan and operated by the Goethe-Institut Tokyo. I’m lucky to have been one of the eight European critics selected to join KEX due to my work with The Theatre Times as a critic and as the Artistic Director of the International Online Theatre Festival 2023. KEX and the Saison Foundation supported the residency, and Haruna Hirano coordinated it. The generous residency, as rare in its dedication to foster sustained dialogue as KEX was overall, enabled my stay in the city throughout the festival, giving me the chance to fully experience the strong curatorial vision behind the most important international performing arts festival in the Kansai region.

Kyoto Experiment showcased a relatively small number of performances, totaling fourteen works clustered to play three to four at a time each weekend. While the spread of performances over three weekends made it challenging for anyone not residing in Kyoto to participate in the entire festival, the scheduling aimed to make it possible for one-day visitors to see all the main performances playing that weekend. The KEX co-directors chose to spread out and vary activities to encourage a deeper engagement from local artists and residents. By not concentrating events in a short time frame to facilitate the participation of outsiders from Kyoto, KEX sacrificed some national and international exposure for the benefit of building deeper relationships between local publics and creators. Yet, at the same time, the funding partnerships, sponsored residencies, and invited guests mitigated to some extent the costs of participating in a durational type of festival for some professionals outside the Kansai region.

The airy scheduling gave space to events inviting the active participation of publics, artists, and guests. The approach signaled an intention to move away from the art festival as a market for artistic products towards a type of festival that nurtures the social aspect of artmaking, that sees artistic products as vehicles for public discussion and social experimentation as much as aesthetic experimentation, that embraces art as communication and ways of thinking together through the issues pertaining to our collective existence. Celebrating its fifteenth edition, KEX 2024 opened its doors under the banner of the motto “ētto ētto,” a playful repetition of the Japanese filler word that can be roughly translated to English as “um” or “er.” The tagline, a marker of verbal speech denoting someone in the process of composing a message to another person, concentrates both the festival’s invitation to dialogue and its dedication to co-creation and experimentation, to championing works and ideas in progress rather than serving finished, polished products. As the KEX co-directors aptly put it in the introductory message to the festival program, the catchphrase “ētto ētto” indicates the intention to transform the festival into “a space for negotiation and not knowing” and a time for interrogating the self in relation to others, the experimental in relation to heritage, and the present in relation to the past.

The 2024 lineup evidenced the vision of sustained questioning in search of viable collective futures, particularly when it came to the Japanese artists commissioned by KEX. From what I gathered in the post-show talks, the KEX co-directors had an active hand in matchmaking artists from various disciplinary backgrounds and supporting the development of commissioned projects. In Stand by Me, playwright and director Shinichi Anasako together with dancer and choreographer Pijin Neji and electronic musician Tentenko storied a journey through the spirit world of human and fish casualties of an unnamed cataclysm that merged Noh aesthetics with contemporary sensibilities. Originally from Hiroshima, dancer and filmmaker Yasuko Yokoshi choreographed a meditation on history, identity, and the nation-state in response to Yoshiro Yoda Hatori’s complex and cryptic script Lynch (a play). Osaka-born dance artist Nanako Matsumoto paired with Taiwanese visual artist Anchi Lin (Ciwas Tahos) to devise Sticky Hands, Stitched Mountains, a performance of interaction with a material installation that reflected themes such as queerness, indigeneity, and the environment.

KEX’s support for the local art scene translated also into its promotion of a Fringe: More Experiments program that included twenty-nine additional performances playing over the duration of the festival in various Kyoto venues. The Fringe program resulted from an open call for shows in and across artistic disciplines, from theatre, dance, and music to readings and exhibitions. Another ongoing program designed to sustain regional artists and to support explorations of the region itself is Kansai Studies. The program highlights the dependencies between artists, places, and societies and publicizes the type of non-instrumental knowledge disseminated by artistic practices that resists the current stronghold of commercial interests over all aspects of our lives. During my time at the festival, I checked out the current projects of Kansai Studies artists: Takuya Ishikawa’s exploration of the local club scene, Yuka Uchida’s documentation of Kyoto pigeons, and Kohei Maeda’s work with zoos.

The KEX co-directors Kawasaki, Tsukahara, and Knapp exercise the creative and generative aspects of curating performance and organizing a festival. In fact, one of the key events showcased at the festival was the result of a program for junior curators that trained them in the type of involved, intentional, and supportive curation practiced by the KEX directorial trio. The three junior curators introduced three interdisciplinary projects between young Japanese artists, which they performed one after the other during a well-attended event. Moreover, our contingent of critics in residence mingled and socialized with a contingent of international, professional curators brought to Kyoto, I imagine, in the same spirit of fostering conversations in various formal and informal settings.

Dialogue spaces and conversation opportunities mushroomed across Kyoto pre, during, and post-festival. A series of three talks invited university professors to connect the “ētto” theme with larger aspects of culture and society. Mariko Arata, Professor in the Department of Gastronomy Management at Ritsumeikan University gave a talk on “Umming over Eating: Hospitality and Miscommunication.” Michio Okada, a Computer Science and Engineering Professor at Toyohashi University of Technology, talked about designing intentionally useless robots. Another Engineering Professor, Hiroshi Kawakami, argued for the benefits of inconvenience. Besides the invited talks, the talkbacks, and the artist-led workshops, the informal Festival Share Café gatherings welcomed spectators to chat about the shows. The screening of the documentary “Ghada: Songs of Palestine,” followed by a lecture and a discussion brought together a substantial number of people. Podcasts complemented the discussions across physical spaces. Hiroshi Watanabe talked with guests about the local community and the performing arts during KEX Radio: Community Channel broadcasts. Among the efforts to include and widen the KEX public, a notable initiative provided childcare services during a selected number of performances.

So far, I’ve summarized some of the programming designed to connect local artists and publics. Next, I want to highlight the efforts to connect Japanese artists, publics, and cultural workers with their international counterparts. I will conclude this part with observations on my own residency. The second strong presence in the main lineup was formed by a group of shows from other Asian countries, plus a Middle Eastern performance. Indonesian artists worked on two separate shows. Performance artist Melati Suryodarmo came to Kyoto prior to the festival to train the twenty-eight young women living in Japane (some of them were university students, others were respondents to an open call) for a local iteration of Sweet Dreams Sweet, a durational performance that questions patriarchy. Jakarta-based dancer and choreographer Siko Setyanto shone in the multi-sensorial, immersive performative installation on indigenous whaling practices called Ocean Cage, directed by Beijinger artist Tianzhuo Chen. South Korean theatre-maker, videographer, composer, and performer Jaha Koo added to KEX’s artistic explorations of insular and peninsular Asian identities with his endearing performance Haribo Kimchi. Mehr Theatre Group’s Blind Runner, written and directed by Amir Reza Koohestani, stood out in the lineup due to its more distant geographical origin and its theatrical aesthetic centering language.  Blind Runner shared a story about freedom and repression in contemporary Iran.

The rest of the six performances completing the lineup came in a bulk package of European dance artists liberally sponsored through the Dance Reflections program by the French luxury jewelry brand Van Cleef and Arpels. The public in Kyoto had the opportunity to see works from some of the most renowned contemporary European choreographers and groups: Alessandro Sciarroni, (LA)HORDE × Rone with the Ballet National de Marseille, Ola Maciejewska, Christian Rizzo, Mathilde Monnier & Dominique Figarella. However, the different institutional frameworks between the European and the Japanese shows became apparent. If the latter premiered at KEX and retained the “ētto ētto” flavor of a work in progress first meeting an outside public, the Europeans brought finished, polished, widely presented and toured shows. As Santa Ramere, one of my residency colleagues, aptly put it: “We don’t bring dialogue, we bring statements.” The differences between the European and Japanese shows in terms of resources, place in a process of exploration and development, manners of engagement with the public, and ideas of the social role of art confronted me with aesthetic and ethical quandaries when I had to write reviews of all these shows. It is impossible to hold all the shows to identical standards, to measure them all against fixed criteria.

For once, though, I wasn’t alone in navigating the treacherous waters of cultural criticism. The Critics in Residence program gave me the rare chance to parse and waddle through difficult questions together with other European, Japanese, and Taiwanese critics. Together with Luca Domenico Artuso, Laura Cappelle, Freda Fiala, Kosuke Ikeda, Nabi Ito, Tamás Jászay, Naoko Kogo, Michael Lanigan, Santa Remere, Aistė Šivytė, Kenta Yamazaki, and Tai-Jung Yu,  we held symposia on various topics (such as media landscapes, political divisions, or marginality), recorded podcasts, and invited the KEX public to an interactive event where we drew written questions and observations from the audience like in a lottery. The length of the residency allowed us critics to get to know each other well, mining beyond the larger, continental, or global aspects that we share. We discovered points in common at the very first symposia, where journalist and activist Daisuke Tsuda talked about the challenges posed to discourse and dialogue by contemporary media and political developments. Conversely, we explored our unique standpoints and backgrounds as the very ground on which to build solidarities. I extend my thanks and gratitude to my fellow critics, organizers, artists, and spectators who contributed to an unforgettable experience that left a permanent mark on my professional outlook. Ētto, I hope we can continue to keep the dialogue alive.

KEX Poster, © Aiko Koike.

This text was drafted by the author during the “Critics in Residence @Kyoto Experiment 2024” program organized by the Delegation of the European Union to Japan and funded by the European Union.