It is with great joy that I welcome the sixteenth edition of Kyoto Experiment, the annual performing arts festival that has brought such emotion and surprise to our city through cutting-edge forms of artistic expression.

I would like to convey my deep gratitude and respect to Mayumi Yamamoto, the chair of the executive committee, as well as everyone else involved in the festival for all their tireless efforts. This year’s festival programming is inspired by a famous Matsuo Basho haiku, “Nameless leaf clings to the matsutake mushroom.” This boundless world that unfolds within a mere seventeen Japanese syllables continues to arouse our creativity today.

What kinds of performance will appear when up-and-coming artists from Japan and beyond interact and resonate with the people and culture of Kyoto? Those remarkably ambitious experiments invite us to enter the unfamiliar and the new.

I hope visitors truly enjoy the singular and unexpected encounters the festival has to offer. By sharing time and views with different kinds of people, I hope Kyoto Experiment 2025 proves a unique experience for all.

Our city is striving through culturally focused community building to realize a society where all manner of people are able to interact and harness their individuality. I hope we can continue to receive your generous support and cooperation with our endeavors.

Koji Matsui
Mayor of Kyoto

Today, we valorize not failing and remaining safe and secure, as a way to avoid conflict, disaster, and the many stresses embedded in daily life—by which we have managed to attain a certain kind of happiness. Our world, however, seems increasingly oppressive, a place where everything is micro-organized and nitpicked.

The management theorist Ikujiro Nonaka once remarked that the true cause of the stagnation that has affected Japanese society for thirty years is excessive planning, analysis, and compliance.* In the PDCA cycle, the P and C parts (plan and check) have become bloated at the expense of the D and A (do and action). Such a society excludes not only failure, but also discomfort, leeway for chance, and uncertainty.

Kyoto Experiment is a place for experimentation in such an era, for employing the performing arts to launch tentative sensations and ideas that go beyond those modes of correctness and accuracy. Instead of showing the solution or right way to do something, we want to linger a while over what we don’t understand, to stir up sensations with an audience and open up new perspectives.

This year’s festival is inspired by a famous Matsuo Basho haiku, “Nameless leaf clings to the matsutake mushroom.” It evokes the moisture, smell, and texture of soil, the uncertainty at your feet, the menace of the mountains. Basho’s poem stimulates the senses, simultaneously arousing both disquiet and curiosity about the unknown.

When I heard that this year’s core concept would be that poem, I immediately recalled those childhood occasions of foraging for matsutake with my grandmother: her hands finding a treasure trove lurking in the warmth beneath fallen leaves, my nerves as I walked up the gloomy slope thick with trees, taking care not to slip and fall. As memories and sensations blur, the outline of the world suddenly shifts. I hope to share such moments once again with our many audiences this year in Kyoto.

Mayumi Yamamoto
Chair, Kyoto International Performing Arts Festival Executive Committee