For this year’s directors’ statement, rather than a jointly authored single text, we proposed that we exchange texts in the manner of a correspondence exploring our respective ideas about the 2025 festival. We wanted to share with our audience a glimpse into the conversations we usually have during the planning of the programs, our discussions about what’s happening now in the world, and our concerns about the management of the festival. The following is the resulting three-day exchange of texts, which we hope serves as an accessible entry point to Kyoto Experiment 2025.

Yoko Kawasaki, Yuya Tsukahara
Co-Artistic Directors, Kyoto Experiment

Yoko Kawasaki (June 29, 3:25 p.m.)

This year marks the sixteenth edition of Kyoto Experiment. As I write, it is the afternoon of the last Sunday of June. The weather is hot yet fine, and the air is filled with the serenity of a non-working day. But I cannot stop thinking about the completely different temporalities existing beneath my own. Those of Palestine, Iran, Hong Kong. We live in a world where people’s lives and freedoms are threatened and snatched away, and we must never forget that ours is a festival held in Kyoto, Japan—and thus, a part of that world.

That being said, we are not politicians, and Kyoto Experiment is a performing arts festival. And so, if I consider what we should do or what should be done, it must be creating and retaining a place for freedom of expression, a place where, as the festival name suggests, experiments in the performing arts can be undertaken fully. This is what I believe is the most important thing for us and, moreover, the most urgent in Japan today. “Experimental” means something more fragmentary and personal, something that protrudes or slips off the things that are tied up with larger stories or causes. There may be many examples of such artistic expression in this year’s lineup.

Yuya Tsukahara (June 30, 11:30 a.m.)

The father of a friend I used to play with as a child was a refugee from the Middle East. My parents told me that when he first came to the United States by plane, he didn’t know how automatic doors worked, so he just stood there watching people go through, wondering if it was safe for him to do the same. I was shocked when I heard this, but the extent to which we question our daily lives through others, and broaden our horizons and imagination without taking things for granted, are questions that will always remain part of being human. This may also be related to the smells you notice in someone’s home or a friend’s bedroom, or the memories of being treated to a meal. Such forms of sensorial awareness are the basis of artistic expression. How can we get closer to something we don’t know? Modern life gives us the illusion of being surrounded by the familiar, but we actually know almost nothing. When it comes to what others think and the way they perceive things in their daily lives, it goes without saying that we know little and understand even less, yet those are the things that actually stimulate us. I think. The thing you said about “retaining” relates, I guess, to time and space; the short period for absorbing such stimulation into our bodies.

Kawasaki (June 30, 1:20 p.m.)

I agree that we are stimulated by the unknown. When we talk about contemporary art, we often use the word “imagination,” but most things and situations are completely beyond the scope of what we presume by the word, and I think that one of the powers of artistic expression is to make us realize this. “Retaining” does indeed mean the time and space during which we incorporate the unknown, just as you said. We tend to use words like “protecting” when it comes to forums for freedom of expression, but we can’t possibly do something as grandiose as protect them, so perhaps that’s why I used the word “retain.” What we can do is do our utmost to maintain the incredibly unstable and shaky time of retention, like walking a tightrope, and I think that this time of retention is necessary to create visions that transcend the imagination. And that’s why by having the time and space to retain an annual grand experiment, so to speak, like Kyoto Experiment, we can encounter many unknown and uncertain things, not just the agreeable but also doubts and discomforts about the everyday, and I think that this can create a small path that takes us beyond our imagination… We were pondering and talking about such things, and out of that appeared the conceptual phrase for this year’s festival—nameless leaf clings to the matsutake mushroom—from a haiku by Matsuo Basho.

Tsukahara (June 30, 4:21 p.m.)

I didn’t know the original haiku because of my ignorance about such matters, but it was in Travels in Lingua Franca, the 2020 book by Ryuta Imafuku that you showed me at that cafe in Bangkok, where the air conditioning was so strong I was almost shivering. I remember being struck by how clearly I could imagine the images and smells described in the poem, and notwithstanding the fact that it was written over three centuries ago, how linguistically modern it seemed (though Basho wouldn’t have cared one jot about that). Even if you substitute the mushroom with other people or a work you’ve never seen before, what seems clearly defined by the word “matsutake” is ultimately just metaphysical, to which various small, obscure things and concepts “cling” in the real world, so we decided to make a bold change in direction and use this haiku itself as the thematic phrase encapsulating the 2025 festival. Everything’s unintentionally mixed and intermingled, yet that’s how things are in the first place. I felt such a kind of carefreeness, and that seems the most impressive thing about the phrase. On the other hand, as you mentioned about the unsettling world situation, it feels like the world is heading in the opposite direction to that mindset. It seems as if the images we have of “borders” separating things—national boundaries, the self and others, right and left, and so on—are making it very difficult to cross over between territories. I think that the importance of undertaking experiments at such world lines and of creating the unknown from the starting point of the body will become even greater in the future.

Kawasaki (July 1, 9:24 a.m.)

That’s right. When I read the haiku, I suddenly realized that I may no longer have a welcoming disposition, open towards feelings like when you suddenly notice an unknown leaf clinging to you, but accept that as a matter of course, since unknown things always naturally come along. Just like when you assume you know something but don’t realize it’s actually something you don’t know, so you may stay inside the boundary in front of you, unaware that it even exists, or may draw lines without realizing it, or may not notice that not only unknown leaves but also unknown entities cling to you, and you may be unknowingly stained by this kind of insensitivity. That insensitivity might sometimes form a defense, but at least with a performing arts festival like Kyoto Experiment, featuring as it does experimental, contemporary artistic practices, I want to open my senses, even if only in a small or partial way, and be able to receive something beyond my purview. What you said about crossing borders is akin to receiving something, even though it’s sometimes scary. In that sense, the Kyoto Experiment audience fearlessly crosses borders, and I respect them greatly for it. This is something I’ve been able to experience by dint of continuing the festival for so long, and I look forward to receiving and thinking about the artists’ work together with our audience again this year.

Tsukahara (July 1, 12:54 p.m.)

I feel truly supported by our audience in Kyoto. Not only in terms of the fifteen-year history of the festival, Kyoto has always been a profoundly generous place because residents have witnessed the various artistic experiments that have taken place in the city prior to the festival. I want to share this cultural foundation with people not yet exposed to it, and we also need to pass it on to the next generation. To do that, we have to continue what we’re already doing, but also question premises, update them, and undertake the biggest experiments at each point in time. Furthermore, though such efforts are now made possible by public subsidy as the cultural right of citizens, I think it’s amazing in the first place, and I would like to work together to shape values that cannot be measured in economic terms. That is what is called culture. It is becoming more difficult literally all over the world to create experimental artistic practices with public funding, something that I both feel keenly and am hearing firsthand from people. We have the KEX Supporters scheme for individuals and organizations to support our work and enable us to continue presenting experimental work. In a world where what sells is considered right, the kind of message we can propose as a festival takes on greater importance.