Moshimoshi City

Born in Yokohama in 1973 and based in Kumamoto, Okada is a playwright, novelist and director of chelfitsch. His works are known for overturning conventional theatrical concepts and are renowned both in Japan and internationally. His work Five Days in March won the prestigious 49th Kishida Kunio Drama Award and his collection of short stories titled The End of the Special Time We Were Allowed was awarded the Oe Kenzaburo Prize. Since 2016, he has directed the repertory program at Münchner Kammerspiele for four consecutive seasons and his work The Vacuum Cleaner was selected as one of “The 10 Selected Productions” by Theatertreffen in 2020. In 2020, he won the 27th Yomiuri Theater Awards Selection Committee Special Prize for Pratthana - A Portrait of Possession and in 2021, he won The Yomiuri Bungaku-sho (prize for literature) with Unfulfilled Ghost and Monster - ZAHA / TSURUGA. https://chelfitsch.net/

Born in 1982. In 2006, he won the best director award at the TOGA Directors’ Competition for his staging of Desire Caught by the Tail, written by Pablo Picasso. In 2018, he won the 62nd Kishida Kunio Drama Award for The Story of Descending the Long Slopes of Valparaíso. Based on his own personal episodes collected while visiting various places, his works center around people who travel and cross borders. His work as a writer has attracted increasing attention in recent years, with his scripts appearing in the literary magazine Shincho and translations of his plays receiving performances and readings in Seoul, Hong Kong, Taipei, and New York. His first novel Exiled Baseball Boy was published in the June 2013 issue of Shincho. From October 2016 to August 2017, he spent a year in Buenos Aires, Argentina, on a grant from the Agency for Cultural Affairs. His non-fiction book People who cross borders—young people of Japanese descent in South America, a reportage of descendants of Japanese immigrants in South America is currently available from publisher Aki Shobo. https://okazaki-art-theatre.com/

Born in Oita Prefecture in 1992 and based in Kobe, Nakama graduated the Rambert School of Ballet and Contemporary Dance (London) before becoming a scholarship student at dB Academy (Kobe) and receiving the Dancer Encouragement Award. While also creating her own works, she has also recently performed as a dancer in works by Mika Kurosawa, Reina Kimura, Toshiki Okada (chelfitsch) and contact Gonzo among others. Committed to the way the body is choreographed by someone or something, she pursues a phenomenon that she believes can only be called dance. She has been an associate artist of Dance Box since 2018. https://ayakanakama.wixsite.com/official

Founded in 2009, hyslom is an artist group consisting of Itaru Kato, Fuminori Hoshino, and Yuu Yoshida. Based on their experiences of confronting / encountering people and things in urban areas, and also incorporating the sense of discomfort this sometimes brings, the group practice "field play*" in various places. Through this method the group experiences a place or land with the body, video and photos and often presents this as a performance work. The group also develops memories of these performances into sculptures, theatre pieces and films. *As described by the late Yukichi Matsumoto of Ishinha http://hyslom.com/

Born in Kyoto in 1983, Masuda studied Fashion at Kyoto City Dohda Senior High School of Arts before enrolling in the film and performing arts course at Kyoto University of the Arts (formerly Kyoto University of Art and Design) where she started dancing. Recently, she is active as director of interdisciplinary performance group mimacul which mainly presents stage works. She is also a writer under the name of Mikako Saga. In 2015 she received the 33rd Setagaya Literary Award in the Poetry Division for Mi Kotoba. She belongs to 301 Kukai. She is also a part-time instructor at Kyoto University of the Arts. Her first solo exhibition will be held in Kyoto this Autumn. https://mimacul.com

Employing documentary and fieldwork approaches, Murakawa’s practice traverses multiple fields from video/film to theatre and visual art. His work, which is born on the boundary between fiction and reality, not only questions current methods of artistic expression but also inquires in to what ‘reality’ really is in the real world. His work Zeitgeber, which recreated onstage the relationship between a caregiver and the cared for, has been performed internationally in Germany and Singapore among other countries. Recent works include Independent Living (Kyoto Experiment 2017, Theaterformen 2018), Moonlight (ROHM Theatre Kyoto “Circulation Kyoto: Participatory Theatre Event Series” 2018, Festival/Tokyo 20) and Pamilya (Kibiru Fes 2020). In 2016, he stayed in Shanghai and Beijing as an East Asian Cultural Exchange Envoy for the Agency for Cultural Affairs. He is also a part-time instructor in the performing arts and film departments at Kyoto University of the Arts.