Critics in Residence @Kyoto Experiment 2024 / Laura Cappelle

The Delegation of the European Union to Japan has held “Critics in Residence @Kyoto Experiment 2024” to explore the possibilities of criticism in culture and the arts during the international performing arts festival Kyoto Experiment 2024 (held 5-27 October). This initiative is organised by the Delegation of the European Union to Japan, operated by the Goethe-Institut Tokyo, and supported by Kyoto Experiment and the Saison Foundation.

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Was I a critic in Kyoto? (ētto ētto…)

On a Sunday in early October, I found myself on the rooftop of Kyoto City Hall. I had landed less than 24 hours earlier, my first time setting foot in Japan; between the jetlag and midday heat, nothing seemed quite real yet.

Melati Suryodarmo’s cast of performers shuffled unhurriedly into the open-air garden, high above the city. There was nowhere to hide from the sun, and quite a few Japanese audience members had taken refuge under parasols. They are an unusual sight in Europe, yet the idea struck me as so practical that I opened my own umbrella. It looked wrong – black instead of white, too sturdy. I was protected, but still out of place, somehow.

I remembered the leitmotif the directors of Kyoto Experiment had selected for this 2024 edition. ētto ētto… “Um,” or “er,” so often an expression of uneasiness.

Ever so slowly, the women of Suryodarmo’s Sweet Dreams Sweet scattered around the rooftop with metal buckets. Hidden under layers of white – veils, knee-length dresses and stockings – they brought to mind the ghostly ballerinas of the French Romantic era. Or Catholic nuns. Wait, my inner critic paused. What if women in white meant something entirely different to Suryodarmo, who grew up in Indonesia? In small groups, deliberately moving at a snail’s pace, the performers then dipped their feet into the buckets, staining them blue. What might blue symbolize, then?

ētto ētto…

Critics aren’t used to feeling clueless in their cultural environment. Deciphering clues is arguably part of the job: nods to art history, winks to anything from politics to pop culture often add up to a knotty web of references, which underpins a work’s inner logic. Over the next three weeks, as Kyoto Experiment unfolded, I felt as if I was working blind. So much was new to me as performers from Japan, South Korea or Taiwan took to stages around the city, from the musicality of their individual languages to the snippets of East Asian history they brought to the fore. So much was thrilling, eye-opening.

Did I feel like a critic, however? ētto ētto…

The lineup of the festival provided helpful reminders of my life as a newspaper reviewer. For this edition, Kyoto Experiment partnered with Dance Reflections by Van Cleef & Arpels, a program launched in 2020 by the jewelry maison Van Cleef & Arpels to support dance artists and institutions around the world. Out of 13 stage productions in total, 6 were directly sponsored by Dance Reflections, the majority of them from France.

Having already written about Alessandro Sciarroni’s Save the Last Dance for Me or (LA)HORDE × Rone with the Ballet national de Marseille’s Room with a View, I took to listening to the reactions of the audience in Kyoto. What compelled a standing ovation, in Japan? The festival’s post-show talks – with live Japanese/English interpretation – proved a fascinating window onto what is altered when artists perform for an audience they know relatively little about. What does a nearly forgotten Italian dance, the polka chinata Sciarroni endeavored to revive evoke on the other side of the world? And does it matter, if the performance is impressive enough?

There was lively, unpredictable debate among my fellow European critics, too. Christian Rizzo’s D’après une histoire vraie, a 2013 work for a group of men, has become such a classic of French contemporary dance that some of their perplexed reactions stopped me in my tracks. Yes, the dancing was loose, casual, but – ētto ētto – that performances style is such a fixture in France, a part of the country’s recent dance history. It’s easy to forget it can be an acquired taste, even for our close neighbors.

Many critics have operated on the basis that they could pass judgment on any work of art, regardless of its origins – as if the measure of a good show was somehow universal. I have handed out my fair share of stars since the late 2000s, assessing artistic success overnight on a scale of zero to five. Thankfully, that wasn’t a requirement in Kyoto, because I wasn’t that writer there. I couldn’t be. On some nights, the shows felt oddly impenetrable – fortresses of clues that I struggled to access. (ētto ētto, I wanted to say, when others asked for my thoughts.) I was engrossed by other productions, like Shinichi Anasako and Pijin Neji’s Stand by Me, a thoughtfully constructed meditation on life and death. Still, I lacked context for the nuanced performance of its Noh specialist, Haruna Tanaka.

In that sense, Kyoto Experiment heightened questions I have been grappling with for years. Does a critic have any authority, if her understanding of art is shaped by social conditions – her country of origin, background, training? Over the years, I have increasingly aimed to contextualize my opinions, in pointed or subtle ways. This is a five-star show, a review will hopefully spell out, for this particular writer, based on their particular understanding of the art form.

Is it enough? Perhaps on occasion, instead of a critic, the right call is to be an observer, a witness, eager to learn, delaying or forgoing judgement. Perhaps that’s who I was throughout these weeks in Kyoto, as I wandered streets that slowly grew familiar. In her introduction to the festival’s program, Mayumi Yamamoto, the chair of Kyoto Experiment’s executive committee, wrote that ētto ētto, as a phrase, “serves as a buffer while your mind adjusts.” It took time, conversations and shared experiences, but in Japan, my mind adjusted and my world expanded – with no stars, an open heart, and plenty of new clues.

Laura Cappelle
Laura Cappelle is a French arts writer, sociologist and dance scholar. She has been the Financial Times’ Paris-based dance critic since 2010 and a regular contributor to The New York Times since 2017, writing a column on French theatre as well as culture features. Additionally, she is an editorial consultant for CN D Magazine, a bilingual publication founded by France’s National Centre for Dance, and a mentor for Springback Academy, a European program for emerging dance critics. An associate professor at Sorbonne Nouvelle University since 2023, she edited an award-winning French-language introduction to dance history, Nouvelle Histoire de la danse en Occident (Seuil, 2020), and co-authored its adaptation into a graphic novel (Histoire dessinée de la danse, Seul, 2024). She is also the author of Créer des ballets au XXIe siècle (CNRS Éditions, 2024) and has been an associate researcher with the CCN-Ballet de l’Opéra national du Rhin since 2022.