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New Art Director and Festival Logo Announcement!
2020.10.26
Our next festival, Kyoto Experiment 2021 Spring, marks the first program by our three co-directors, Yoko Kawasaki, Yuya Tsukahara and Juliet Reiko Knapp. In conjunction with this, we are pleased to announce the appointment of our new Art Director, Aiko Koike and our newly designed logo. We are sure not only the festival’s program but the festival’s design identity will develop and evolve experimentally.
The full festival program will be announced on Tuesday December 15th.
Until then we’ll be uploading and sharing various content here on our website.
☞Overview
Dates ☞ February 3rd (Weds) – March 28th (Sun) 2021
Venues ☞ ROHM Theatre Kyoto, Kyoto Art Center, Kyoto Art Theater Shunjuza, and others
Organized by ☞ Kyoto International Performing Arts Festival Executive Committee
[Kyoto City, ROHM Theatre Kyoto (Kyoto City Music Art Cultural Promoting Foundation), Kyoto Art Center (Kyoto Arts and Culture Foundation), Kyoto Performing Arts Center at Kyoto University of the Arts]
☞A Message from our Directors
We are thrilled to announce that we will be welcoming Aiko Koike on board as our new art director. To mark a fresh start for the festival, we have also asked Ms. Koike to design a brand-new logo for us. This year, we made the decision to postpone our 2020 edition of Kyoto Experiment to February and March of 2021. As we weighed and debated one possibility after another, the idea for the logo underwent transformations too. It was under such circumstances that Ms. Koike conceived this new design, a logo imbued with a greater sense of freedom, resilience, and experimentation than ever before. We’re delighted to share it with you all now. It is precisely its indeterminate form that gives the symbol its vibrancy. As such, it captures just what Kyoto Experiment’s next stage promises to be about. More information about Kyoto Experiment 2021 Spring will be announced on December 15th. The whole festival team is working hard to bring you all the details, so please stay tuned!
Yoko Kawasaki, Yuya Tsukahara and Juliet Reiko Knapp
(Co-directors, Kyoto Experiment)
☞Logo Concept
Canceled, postponed, to be streamed online.
Seemingly endless notices of plans altered. The anxiety and difficulty of dealing with an uncertain future.
In this environment of constant change, we found it impossible to decide on a single logo for the festival.
It’s as if this chaotic world is moving in squiggles, not unlike those movements we see in dance and performance.
Our logo can be drawn offhand in two seconds, and is flexible enough to adapt to social and emotional shifts.
Let us put our anxiety, hope, and love into each squiggle.
Just as the world is squiggling around, so too are the performing arts.
But though platforms may change, performance itself will never disappear.
This will be an experiment to see what shapes the squiggles can take,
breaking away from the conventions of performing arts festivals.
Aiko Koike
Born in Tokyo in 1989. After graduating from Central Saint Martins with a degree in Graphic Design, she joined village®. Independent from 2016, she provides art direction and graphic design.
http://aikokoike.com/
