Critics in Residence @Kyoto Experiment 2024 / Aistė Šivytė

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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Kyoto Experiment: living a festival

How does one even begin to put into words an experience of staying in Kyoto for almost a month for a stage arts festival, when for many Europeans Japan still holds a meaning similar to “the moon” – a far, foreign almost unreachable place. After months of anticipation, dozens of white jealousy drenched congratulations and a 12-hour flight, the month began and passed in a surreal daze, like a fabulous mirage, and now as I’m back in my European home, I sit at my desk trying to patch everything into one coherent article and make sense of what have I experienced during the “Critics in Residence @Kyoto Experiment 2024” program. In the spirit of this year’s festival’s key phrase, a lot of “etto…” was uttered under my breath while writing this text.

Kyoto Experiment stretched over a period close to a month, with performances situated on the weekends and all sorts of events during the work week, offering an experience of a truly vast festival. Besides two main programs the festival offered (artist) talks, exhibitions, research presentations and many other events. To write about it all in a sensible number of characters would prove an impossible task so this text is merely a reflection of the highlights.

The first one would easily be Ola Maciejewska’s piece Bombyx Mori. Maciejewska’s work takes an important classic of modern dance – the Serpentine Dance by Loie Fuller – and by deconstructing it, adding some stage lights and sensitive microphones, creates an astonishing contemporary reimagining. Three dancers on stage perform a version of this dance with cold, inhumane precision. Microphones catch the flutter of the fabric, louden it and distort it, creating a striking audiovisual experience: the dancers seem to disappear leaving only the entity of movement that gives the imagination of the spectator lots to play with. We are offered to see the abilities of the fabric way beyond the imagination of Loie Fuller – not only flowery blossoms, but also chilling visuals of expanding entities, unreadable, eerie sculptures. Bombyx Mori is a striking work – Maciejewska conjures an opportunity for us to experience the dance of Loie Fuller with the same awe and effect as the people who saw it for the first time, 100 years ago.

There was an interesting opposition happening between the works of Christian Rizzo and Alessandro Scarioni. While both stem from traditional dance and offer a route to think about masculinity D’apre’s une histoire vraie was surprising in how being moved and inspired by men dancing can result in such a bland performance. The drums are intense, the movement of eight barefoot men is constant and yet… the beauty of masculinity, the fun of observing traditional machismo found in Mediterranean dance that often ends up seeming homoerotic is nowhere to be found here. In the end there is only one thought that stays with you pestering your mind – why was there a chair and a plant in the “room” if its purpose was only to be taken away in the midst of the performance? Meanwhile one of the first shows of the “VanCleef and Arpels” program Save the last dance for me (by Alessandro Sciarioni) achieves what Christian Rizzo fails to – a work that spins a thread of vulnerability, connection and masculinity, derived from a piece of traditional dance. Sciarioni’s choreography stems from the Polka Chinata – a dance performed only by men and very demanding of mutual trust as well as physical stamina. It becomes a potent ground to reconsider in the context of today’s masculinity.

During our time in the festival there was a lot of discussion among the fellow critics of the program about if we have the right to critique the work from a completely different geographical background, since we might fail to fully understand it. Yet I found out quite soon that a truly good and immersive work transcends the barriers of understanding and goes straight for the feeling. One such work was Ocean Cage by Tianzhuo Chen and Siko Setyanto. A free to walk stage space meets the spectator with a symbolic setup of an Indonesian fishing village: a rack of drying fish, a sail, a small plot of beach, a metal shell of a turtle. The inspiration of the performance is the village of Lamarela where traditional whaling practices bound with ritual and spirituality are still present. Chen offers us a surprising clash of tradition and modernity: a thick collage of whaling songs and crisp 3D projections, live energy of Setyanto and an immersive carousel of big screen video work – an aesthetic inhumane mixed with the most humane emotions known to man.

A lot of the success of this work must be given to Silko Setyanto who is the main figure of the piece. A performer whose character appears overly self-confident, almost egoistic, borderline crazy and also immensely captivating to watch. His energy sends sparks through the air somehow never becoming dull or tiring. Setyanto carries an hour and a half performance almost solely on his shoulders, emitting an amount of energy I have never seen in theatre before, filling the space with godlike fury and ecstasy, a cathartic joy and despair shared between humanity and nature, man and whale. Ocean Cage is a ritual of ecstatic worship and a dazzling display of power a single performer is capable of.

Another great highlight and one of the last performances of the festival was Haribo kimchi by Jaha Koo. The piece can be easily summarized: Koo opens a cozy Korean street food stall on stage, invites two guests to join him and, while cooking food from his home country of South Korea, tells them (and us) his story of living away from your culture. This simplicity of the concept makes a striking piece of work – funny anecdotes of exploding kimchi, quirky video projections and nostalgic aromas of Koo’s cooking tells a bittersweet and touching tale of living away from your culture.

Kyoto Experiment left an impression of a festival you can live in – it seems to have a little bit of everything in almost every single day of its duration. There’s a lot of room for knowledge exchange – it was great to see research as a big part of the festival and that the festival itself claims a responsibility to encourage and preserve research: from the interactive exhibition Future Dictionary to the events of Kansai Studies where Yuka Uchida’s “New Fieldwork” (Kyoto edition) that researches the pigeons of Kyoto, left an everlasting impression of a fun and intriguing work.

Aistė Šivytė
Aistė Šivytė is a professional critic of stage arts based in Vilnius, Lithuania. They have been working as a freelance stage arts critic for the past 5 years and written over 70 reviews and interviews about theatre, dance, contemporary circus and street theatre performances for various culture magazines, newspapers and internet portals.