It is a delight to welcome the seventeenth edition of Kyoto Experiment, the annual performing arts festival that has brought such emotional resonance and surprising moments to our city through pioneering and experimental forms of artistic expression.

I would like to take this opportunity 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 explores the metaphor of the pebbles we carry in our pockets.

During our childhood days spent in the park or by the river, a single stone or pebble was both a tool to play with and a treasure to unearth. In adulthood too, we carry various “pebbles” around with us in our “pockets” as we go about our daily lives: aspects of culture, our beliefs, memories of encounters, and so on.

What kinds of “pebbles” will our performers and audiences bring with them to the festival? What changes will occur when performers and audiences take those pebbles out of their pockets and mix them with others? What gets created? In an age when making virtual connections through social media and other platforms has become the norm, I hope Kyoto Experiment will instill a greater appreciation for the shared live experience only possible by gathering together in person as an audience in the physical space of a theater.

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

Koji Matsui
Mayor of Kyoto

As a child, I had a vague sense of there being a right answer, a correct way; of there being a universal and absolute for everything. As I grew older, however, I realized the ambiguous and contingent nature of things, which shift according to the era, place, individual, and various other factors.

When I was a student, I once asked my teacher, a professor of aesthetics who I respected, about the value of art: If the value is relative and not absolute, what guarantees that value? What is the meaning of the work that critics and curators do? He did not hesitate to provide an answer: the power of persuasion.

This persuasiveness resonates with the philosopher Kant’s argument that while beauty is subjective, aesthetic judgment nonetheless has what he calls universal communicability. When we perceive something as beautiful, we want to share that feeling and convey it somehow (what Kant calls the claim to universal agreement or validity made by a judgment of beauty). Where does this impulse come from?

Over the course of the repeated verbal exchanges and acts of persuasion arising from that impulse, our ways of seeing the world gradually change. To question who is excluded by the concepts of beauty and humanity once deemed universal constitutes the accumulation of such dialogue. And this also includes Kant’s own thought.

A challenging aspect about publicly funded cultural projects is how to continue demonstrating the importance of particular work or form of expression for a society where diverse values ​​coexist. More often than not, the works are not compatible with indicators like equity or economic rationality, and decisions about them don’t simply come down to popularity or majority rule. In a society where different ideas and positions exist side by side, we must continue to offer new perspectives and questions.

The world today is far from peaceful. And it is for that reason that we need chances to come into contact with other perspectives and values, to have our thinking challenged. I believe that Kyoto Experiment’s programming provides a forum for such encounters. Will you be persuaded by what is presented there? Or will you embrace a different idea? That very experience is, I believe, the festival’s greatest value.

Mayumi Yamamoto
Chair, Kyoto International Performing Arts Festival Executive Committee