Critics in Residence @Kyoto Experiment 2024 / Ilinca-Tamara Todoruţ

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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On Kyoto Experiment’s Curatorial Vision

The interdisciplinary theatre, dance, and performance art festival Kyoto Experiment (KEX) wowed me with the thoughtfulness of its curatorial vision. The three co-directors—Yoko Kawasaki, Yuya Tsukahara, and Juliet Reiko Knapp—nurtured a collective exploration of public culture and artmaking aware of local and global contexts. KEX took place over three weeks, between 5-27 October 2024, and included performances, talks, symposia, workshops, podcasts, exhibits, and residencies (many in collaboration with other institutions). My own participation was facilitated by a generous residency for European critics.

KEX showcased a relatively small number of performances, totaling fourteen works clustered to play three to four at a time each weekend. The airy scheduling gave space to events inviting the active participation of publics, artists, and guests. The approach indicated a type of festival that nurtures the social aspect of artmaking, that sees artistic products as vehicles for public discussion and social experimentation as much as aesthetic experimentation, that embraces art as communication and ways of thinking together through the issues pertaining to our collective existence. Celebrating its fifteenth edition, KEX 2024 opened its doors under the banner of the chosen key phrase “ētto ētto.” The catchphrase shows the festival’s invitation to dialogue and its dedication to championing works and ideas in progress rather than serving finished, polished products. The festival opened a space for interrogating the self in relation to others, the experimental in relation to heritage, and the present in relation to the past.

The 2024 lineup evidenced the vision of sustained questioning in search of viable collective futures, particularly when it came to the Japanese artists commissioned by KEX. In Stand by Me, playwright and director Shinichi Anasako together with dancer and choreographer Pijin Neji and electronic musician Tentenko storied a journey through the spirit world of human and fish casualties of an unnamed cataclysm that merged Noh aesthetics with contemporary sensibilities. Originally from Hiroshima, dancer and filmmaker Yasuko Yokoshi choreographed a meditation on history, identity, and the nation-state in response to Yoshiro Yoda Hatori’s complex and cryptic script Lynch (a play). Osaka-born dance artist Nanako Matsumoto paired with Taiwanese visual artist Anchi Lin (Ciwas Tahos) to devise Sticky Hands, Stitched Mountains, a performance of interaction with a material installation that reflected themes such as queerness, indigeneity, and the environment.

KEX’s support for the local art scene translated also into its promotion of a Fringe: More Experiments program that included twenty-nine additional performances. Another program, Kansai Studies, highlights the dependencies between artists, places, and societies and publicizes the type of non-instrumental knowledge disseminated by artistic practices. Yet another key event showcased at the festival, Echoes Now, was the result of a program for junior curators that trained them in the type of involved, intentional, and supportive curation practiced by the KEX directorial trio. Dialogue spaces and conversation opportunities mushroomed across Kyoto pre, during, and post-festival. A series of three talks invited university professors to connect the “ētto” theme with larger aspects of culture and society. The informal Festival Share Cafe gatherings welcomed spectators to chat about the shows. Among the efforts to include and widen the KEX public, a notable initiative provided childcare services during a selected number of performances.

Next, I want to highlight the efforts to connect Japanese artists, publics, and cultural workers with their international counterparts. The second strong presence in the main lineup was formed by a group of shows from other Asian countries, plus a Middle Eastern performance. Indonesian artists worked on two separate shows. Performance artist Melati Suryodarmo came to Kyoto prior to the festival to train the twenty-eight young women for a local iteration of Sweet Dreams Sweet, a durational performance that questions patriarchy. Jakarta-based dancer and choreographer Siko Setyanto shone in the multi-sensorial, immersive performative installation on indigenous whaling practices called Ocean Cage, directed by Beijinger artist Tianzhuo Chen. South Korean theatre-maker, music composer, and videographer Jaha Koo added to KEX’s artistic explorations of insular and peninsular Asian identities with his endearing performance Haribo Kimchi. Mehr Theatre Group’s Blind Runner, written and directed by Amir Reza Koohestani, stood out in the lineup due to its more distant geographical origin and its theatrical aesthetic centering language. Blind Runner shared a story about freedom and repression in contemporary Iran.

The rest of the six performances completing the lineup came in a bulk package of European dance artists liberally sponsored through the Dance Reflections by Van Cleef & Arpels program. The public in Kyoto had the opportunity to see works from some of the most renowned contemporary European choreographers and groups: Alessandro Sciarroni, (LA)HORDE × Rone with the Ballet national de Marseille, Ola Maciejewska, Christian Rizzo, Mathilde Monnier & Dominique Figarella. However, the different institutional frameworks between the European and the Japanese shows became apparent. If the latter premiered at KEX and retained the “ētto ētto” flavor of a work in progress first meeting an outside public, the Europeans brought finished, polished, widely presented and toured shows. As Santa Ramere, one of my residency colleagues, aptly put it: “We don’t bring dialogue, we bring statements.” The differences between the European and Japanese shows in terms of resources, place in a process of exploration and development, manners of engagement with a public, and ideas of the social role of art confronted me with aesthetic and ethical quandaries when I had to write reviews of all these shows. It is impossible to hold all the shows to identical standards, to measure them all against fixed criteria.

For once, though, I wasn’t alone in navigating the treacherous waters of cultural criticism. The Critics in Residence program gave me the rare chance to parse and waddle through difficult questions together with other European, Japanese, and Taiwanese critics. Together with Luca Domenico Artuso, Laura Cappelle, Freda Fiala, Kosuke Ikeda, Nabi Ito, Tamás Jászay, Naoko Kogo, Michael Lanigan, Santa Remere, Aistė Šivytė, Kenta Yamazaki, and Tai-Jung Yu, we held symposia on various topics (such as media landscapes, political divisions, or marginality), recorded podcasts, and invited the KEX public to an interactive event where we drew written questions and observations from the audience like in a lottery. The length of the residency allowed us critics to get to know each other well, mining beyond the larger, continental, or global aspects that we share. We discovered points in common at the very first symposia, where journalist and activist Daisuke Tsuda talked about the challenges posed to discourse and dialogue by contemporary media and political developments. Conversely, we explored our unique standpoints and backgrounds as the very ground on which to build solidarities. I extend my thanks and gratitude to my fellow critics, organizers, artists, and spectators who contributed to an unforgettable experience that left a permanent mark on my professional outlook. Ētto, I hope we can continue to keep the dialogue alive.

A longer version of this article appeared on The Theatre Times international performing arts online news portal. Reprinted with permission.

Ilinca-Tamara Todoruţ
Tamara Todoruț is a theatre critic, scholar, dramaturg, and translator based in Romania. She earned her doctorate from Yale School of Drama, and now teaches at the Faculty of Theater and Film at Babeș-Bolyai University. Her articles can be found in journals such as Theater, TDR: The Drama Review, Performance Research, Journal of Poverty, European Stages, and Theatre History Studies. She contributed to The Routledge Companion to Dramaturgy, and authored Christoph Schlingensief’s Realist Theater (Routledge 2022). She regularly collaborates with theatre publications such as Scena.ro and TheTheatreTimes.com, and served as Artistic Director of the 2023 International Online Theatre Festival (IOTF).