Announcing New Co-Artistic Directors

Kyoto Experiment has introduced a new directorship system from 2025. Kyoto Experiment’s program director serves a five-year term, with the option to extend a further five years. From 2020 to 2024, the role of program director was served by a collective of co-directors comprising Yoko Kawasaki, Yuya Tsukahara, and Juliet Reiko Knapp. Following the departure of Knapp at the end of her five-year term, Kawasaki and Tsukahara will oversee programming from 2025 under the title of co-artistic directors.

We will continue striving to develop the festival, harnessing the qualities we have built to date as a pioneering performing arts event unparalleled in Japan.

The full program for Kyoto Experiment 2025 will be announced in late July. We look forward to welcoming you to Kyoto Experiment this autumn.

 
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For five years as co-directors, we explored what it means to hold a performing arts festival like Kyoto Experiment that features international and contemporary artistic practices. Following a change in the directorship, we now enter the sixth year of this endeavor: continuing to engage in international exchange through the performing arts all while the world lurches ever further toward nationalism and isolationism; proposing complexity and fluidity through the contemporary performing arts and their polyvalent perspectives, even as binary, simplistic, and easy-to-understand values hold sway; and initiating dialogue that comes from presenting such artistic practices to audiences in all their complexity, without dumbing them down. Kyoto Experiment aspires to be a place for thinking about such things in playful, experimental ways. Over the course of this, we have discovered how the festival functions as a platform encompassing our various failings, the process of generation, and debates that have no easy solution. And it is this failing, generating, and debating that creates encounters with in-between things, with disquiet and the invisible, and begets footholds for living today and visions of what is to come.

For the 2025 edition of Kyoto Experiment, we are preparing a program that uncovers the appeal inherent to disquiet and uncertainty within the continuity we have demonstrated until now. We look forward to announcing the festival program in July.

We have also launched a training program for the next generation of artists to ensure the legacy of the festival. We hope you follow how Kyoto Experiment develops in the future.

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

 
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It has been a huge honour to co-direct Kyoto Experiment from 2020-2024 alongside Yoko Kawasaki and Yuya Tsukahara. Over these five years I believe we successfully built upon Kyoto Experiment’s ten year history to further evolve into a festival for radical, daring and boundary-pushing artistic experimentation.

We faced (and the festival continues to face) many challenges, including the knock-on effects of Covid, cuts in public funding and a weakening yen, which have put the festival in an increasingly precarious financial situation. Creating an experimental performing arts festival in the current economic and political environment is immensely challenging, and it is something that is impossible to do without the support of each and every person that contributes to building the festival. I am so proud of the artistic works, spaces and experiences created, the interactions and meetings made possible, and the questions that we have asked and thought about together.

Although I am sad to be stepping down, I am also looking forward to a new chapter and am happy to be leaving the festival in the capable hands of the festival team. The last five years have been an incredibly rich experience and Kyoto Experiment and its artists, audiences and staff have taught me so much. I’d like to extend my deepest thanks to everyone that contributed to making the festival possible.

Juliet Reiko Knapp
Former Kyoto Experiment Co-director