Critics in Residence @Kyoto Experiment 2024 / Tamás Jászay

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.

━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━

Tamás Jászay: East is East? Personal highlights of Kyoto Experiment 2024

The Kyoto Experiment (KEX), first held in 2010, is the Kansai region’s premier performing arts festival – when I arrived in Kyoto in early October 2024 with seven other critics selected from across the European Union, this was pretty much my general idea of what to expect. A month here has both nuanced and deepened this sentence. Starting with the festival’s key phrase, ētto ētto, which in Japanese means “well, um,” “so”, “how shall I say”. In the European festival scene, call words like this are also common. Mostly, festival directors organise their programmes around lofty, general terms such as freedom, war, peace. I still feel it is better to admit our uncertainty in the middle of an unstable world.

The eight European critics of the inaugural Critics in Residence @Kyoto Experiment 2024 had some time to relax after a long day of travelling, but then had to watch three productions in a row. It was a European-style festival opening, if you like: while in Europe it’s quite normal to see many shows per day, in Kyoto it was the exception that proved the rule. The Showsmain programme of the month-long festival featured fourteen different works in all: we had plenty of time to think, analyse and ponder. And that’s good.

KEX stands on three pillars, and the shows (mainly theatre and dance performances) are only one of them – due to space constraints, I will only report on the most important ones for me below. My summaries on all the other performances are available in Hungarian here and here.
The second pillar is called Kansai Studies: in its framework the organisers invite artists from the Kansai region to conduct their own research projects during the festival and publish the results on an ongoing basis. Of the three artists invited in 2024, I mention here the most exciting: dancer and choreographer Yuka Uchida, who has been studying the existence of Kyoto/Kansai-specific birds by observing pigeons in the immediate vicinity of the ROHM Theatre KYOTO. It sounds odd, I admit, but it works, and the creator admits that it will have an impact on her own artistic career when she recycles the movement patterns of the pigeons she has studied at length into her own stage movements. The project reflects on the interaction between animals and humans, the coexistence of the natural environment and urban civilisation.

The third pillar, Super Knowledge for the Future (SKF) includes talks, live or radio-recorded conversations, and similarly aims to draw an interpretative context around the invited performances. The interactive exhibition Future Dictionary is an ever-expanding collection by Shanghai-based curator Ophelia Jiadai Huang, which was on display for one day only, reflecting on the interconnections between language and culture by creating a virtual dictionary. The exhibition reveals the reality behind the words by attaching lengthy footnotes and historical-theoretical explanations to the concepts, showing that behind the laconic conciseness of the English terms there is a complex experience that cannot be fully understood.

The KEX fringe programme More Experiments presented a series of interdisciplinary encounters. My favourite was tsu-tsu’s performative video installation, entitled 01-25-1997 Kyoto. According to him, born on 25 January 1997, some 200,000 people around the world were born on that day: he wants to connect with them, exploring and registering the similarities, differences and intersections between different life paths. In recent years, he has appeared in busy public squares around the world, holding a piece of cardboard with the said date on it: would I go up to him if I saw my own date of birth written on it? Probably yes, and if I did, the adventure would begin – as I later learn, there have already been three dozen contacts with people born on that date, an impressive number. In Kyoto, we see a few minutes of a muddy yet endearing conversation between tsu-tsu and a young Brazilian man: a cautious introduction between two men born on the same day, speaking basic English, trying to harmonise each other’s words and realities. The dialogue, which is replayed and then performed live by tsu-tsu, is finally typed up, corrected and commented on: prejudices and expectations suddenly become transparent.

After more than two decades of experience, I dare say that if ten percent of the performances at a performing arts festival are in the memorable or remarkable category, then it’s worth going. In conclusion, I present the last three of the twelve performances of the Shows main programme at KEX, which for different reasons, with different aesthetics, but which make this category on my list.

Ocean Cage is a project of breathtaking scale by Beijing-born, Berlin-based artist Tianzhuo Chen, who is at home in visual arts, performing arts and all kinds of associated arts, and Jakarta-based dancer-choreographer Siko Setyanto. We are witnesses and participants of a just under two hour one-man show in which there is no boundary between stage and audience from the very beginning. We race from an Indonesian fishing village to the depths of the ocean and back in pursuit of whales. Archival photos and video footage, stunning video montages, hypnotic music performed live and on tape, very real props, all line Setyanto’s bizarre, sexy, magical, exhausting dance performance. He is a true ‘in-between’ creature: undecided whether mortal or deity, male or female, land or water creature, who inhabits the sea world, drawn in startling detail, and who also teases the audience, who at first wander in the dark space, then follow the ‘guru’ more and more determinedly.

If I was praising the difficult overflow of images, I must acknowledge the minimalist restraint of Iranian Amir Reza Koohestani and the Mehr Theatre Group. The Blind Runner starts from a true story, as so often with Koohestani’s outspoken political theatre: we hear at length the nervous, tired, incomprehensible dialogue of a woman arrested at an anti-government protest in Iran and her husband. The woman is in prison, the man is visiting her, but the regime is very consciously grinding up their resistance as well as their sanity. Although they are close together in space, the projected images captured by cameras placed at different points on stage push them cosmically apart. He is persuaded by his wife to become a blind runner’s helper at the Paris Paralympics. Running: adrenaline, running: life, running: happiness – and in the powerful final image, we understand that running is the only key to survival.

The most memorable performance of the 2024 edition of Kyoto Experiment is undoubtedly Jaha Koo’s Haribo Kimchi, born in South Korea and currently living in Ghent, Belgium. The nation is alive in its food and flavours: a young man moving from South Korea to Western Europe packs ten kilos of kimchi in his suitcase as a farewell gift from his grandmother, against all protests. You are what you eat, says the ghostly voice, and Jaha Koo’s adventures in Korea, Germany and Belgium really do revolve around a single dish, from aperitif to soup and main course to dessert. On stage, a typical street food vendor’s stall, with projectors next to and behind him. Two spectators are seated at his “table” at the beginning of the performance, and can smell and taste at close quarters the full menu prepared live by Koo, who adds entertaining and poignant additions with a superb dramaturgical sense. The personal stories are rounded off by singing snails, talking eels and, of course, the singing gummy bear. And the latter’s lyrics could be the motto not only of this performance, but of a month-long intensive Japanese experience: “East, West, / Home is best, / That’s what people say / My home has no location.”

Tamás Jászay
Tamas has been writing theatre reviews since 2003. For a long time, he did not choose a single style or aesthetic, but rather wanted to understand and feel everything connected to theatre. Over the years, his position as a critic has become both simplified and complex. On the one hand, he became interested in independent theatre initiatives, reflecting the boom in independent theatre in Hungary in the 2000s. On the other hand, as a theatre historian, he recognised that this was the last chance to enter into a dialogue with the creators of the stylistic endeavours of the 1970s and 1980s. Thirdly, as a curator and festival selector, he has also come into close contact with innovative, experimental forms. He regards the participation in the residency programme as a chance to bring the knowledge he has acquired into contact with the experience of a theatre culture that is very different from the European one.