I am a curator and producer based in Tokyo and specializing in transdisciplinary contemporary art encompassing theatre, art, socially engaged art, and media arts with AR and VR technologies. Over the last 20 years I have worked a lot with festivals as a curator and festival director, for example at Festival/Tokyo, one of the biggest performing arts festivals in Japan, as well as Aichi Triennale, which is also a huge transdisciplinary arts festival. I am also the founder, president, and artistic director of Theater Commons Tokyo, an independent festival focusing on the transdisciplinary arts. This festival is among the smaller ones I have curated, but is totally independent. It is also undoubtedly the most experimental one in terms of the curatorial practice.

Theater Commons was founded in 2017 and there have already been five editions to date. The theme for the last edition, which was held in February and March 2021, was bodies in incubation. The reason I am talking about this specifically is because it is very much related to what we are proposing for the Theater der Welt festival. Bodies in incubation has a double meaning. On the one hand, it evokes images of an egg waiting to hatch, but on the other, the term incubation also refers to another state, for example when a virus has entered your body, but the symptoms are not yet noticeable. So it is actually very ambivalent. This double meaning describes our feelings and the COVID pandemic situation. And then we are in quarantine, we are isolated in a house or in a room. And we are contained within the egg, but at the same time we do not know whether or not our bodies are ill or not. This kind of feeling really inspired me somehow and of course, it was at the beginning of the pandemic. But this state might continue for a long time. That is why we tried to create the concept positively and form this reality.

For Theatre Commons, I decided to focus on the VR or AR performance. Since we could not see each other, we created something new in the limited circumstances that this reality forced us to operate in.

There was a kind of therapy performance using acupuncture, which was not VR, but a performance of that kind has a very strong impact on your brain, and this is also a kind of experience in itself. This artwork is very closely related to what we are proposing in the concept for Theater der Welt. Many of you probably already know that the festival was founded in 1981 as an initiative of ITI Germany. It is normally held in a German city every three years, and the next one will take place between the end of June and the first half of July 2023 in Frankfurt and Offenbach – two cities that have totally opposite characters. The festival is being organised by three institutions: Mousonturm, Museum Angewandte Kunst and Schauspielhaus Frankfurt in cooperation with Offenbach Council Office for Cultural Management.

We were selected from some 75 candidates as the first non-European directors and the first female co-directors of the festival (Status Dec. 2021, Ed.). The organizers of Theater der Welt want to question and redefine what theatre of the world is or what constitutes a festival in our time. I think part of the reason that we were selected is that, coming from outside of Europe, we may be able to offer different perspectives, for example as people from Japan, from Asia or as women.

I have been working with Chiaki for the past 10 years and I am currently helping her as chief dramaturg for the Theater der Welt 2023 festival.

The reason Chiaki has described the content of Theatre Commons Tokyo Festival is because it leads to what we are going to do for the Theater der Welt festival; we have developed the concept of incubation into something new and have coined the word “incubationism” to describe this approach. We created this word as a term that does not simply imply a passive state of waiting, but rather a novel mode of action. It is an -ism. For instance, when you think of potentially being sick, or when you're in a lockdown during COVID, it's like you're in stasis. It is a global limbo in which we are living right now and we tend to immediately interpret this as a negative state. But we thought that this global cessation of action could instead be the seed that brings forth positive movements. The term “incubationism” suggests, first and foremost, an action that goes against progressive or progress-oriented movements. It is more about staying in the current painful, harmful or troublesome situation. As a living human being, without even noticing, you are living and dying at the same time; you are undeniably dying day by day. When seen from this perspective, life and death are never binary but rather synchronous. When you are healthy, or when you are getting on with your normal life, you don’t really realize this fact; rather, you deliberately expel anything to do with death from your life. But when life goes off grid, which is the case with COVID, every tiny everyday life decision you make takes on a layer of performativity. Your act of going for a walk with your friend for instance, can become an action of caring; or when you fly somewhere, in the current ecological crisis, it becomes a very deliberate act of emitting CO2. And since everything becomes abnormal, you hesitate, contemplate, and halt the life of automatism.

The word curate comes from the Latin word of curare meaning to take care. From the time when modern institutions such as hospitals and zoos started to claim that they were “taking care” of others, they started to accommodate those “objects” they were “caring” for. Care was more about collecting, observing and maintaining, rather than a series of continuous improvisational actions. When adopting this notion to the realm of theatre, we have to remind ourselves that we cannot and should not collect nor observe the “other” in theatres.

This is so obvious to us as, within us, there are multiple viewpoints that queer various binary relationships: oppressed/oppressor, deprived/privileged, minority/authority, destroyer/creator, caregiver/care receiver, and so on and so forth. Again, these binaries become moot when you shift your perspective, including to the world beyond humans. Considered from a Renaissance, male-oriented viewpoint, we Japanese women are non-humans, but we definitely rank among human oppressors when we examine the interrelationship between nature and culture. So, for us, caring is not only about taking care of “objectified” others; rather, we are also vulnerable people who need care just as much as those who need to take part in the caring action. In this world of COVID, nobody can stay completely safe. You might need help tomorrow as much as you need to help others today.

To put these concepts into concrete practice, we have implemented five strategies as part of the festival. One is exploring new performances or performance art that captures the world from the perspective of sickness. Again, this is not the sickness that is located at the opposite end of the spectrum to health, but rather the sickness that is almost always within us in a state of perpetual incubation. Second, we want to shed light on and explore the sense of touch in performances, by going against the vein of ocularcentric representation. This, again, comes from the desire to queer the binary between subjects (audience) and objects (performers) in theatre, as for the past few decades, especially in German-speaking countries, post-dramatic theatre, as it is known has exploited far too many narratives that rather forcibly made the subalterns speak of their victimhood on stage. The political mechanism of gaze only doubles down in these ocularcentric theatres, and we therefore want to go beyond the visual by emphasizing the sense of touch, which already goes beyond the binary. When you are touching someone, you, too, are also being touched. Thirdly, we will introduce a lot of works using VR headsets, which create not only virtual reality but also vulnerable, vicarious, and vacillating realities.

As I mentioned in relation to the second strategy, the reason we are using the VR devices is not for the sake of strengthening the power of the visual. Rather, we are adopting the VR technology precisely because we want to present the failure of bodies. No matter how fully your brain is absorbed in the meticulously created matrix of virtual reality, your body stays behind and drags on all the issues attached to the humdrum reality of life. So, again, we want to queer the binary, this time of the body-mind dichotomy, in order to understand what it means to appreciate the failure, impotence, inability of our very human bodies. Our fourth point, kind of sums up what I have been saying, but it is about queering the festival by practicing what we call the “eco/echo-curation”. Obviously, we are living in a world where we cannot deny or negate the environmental issues we face. For the past few years, the issue of eco-criticality has been omnipresent in the art world as well. But when we say eco-curation, we are not talking about becoming quasi-activists by flying less, reducing and reusing plastic or becoming vegans. Rather than becoming like these vegan activists, we want to become ecocritical in the sense of foregoing the capitalist approach of build-and-scrap curation where new works are constantly demanded – mainly to satisfy the avarice of curators who want to present world premieres at their festivals so that they can win the power game.

This has already been done to a certain extent by various programme directors in the past, but we want to focus even more closely on it. In the visual art context, in museums, taking care of past works has always been the main part of the curator’s job – so why can’t we do this in the world of theatre as well? So that is our fourth point.

And then the fifth point develops organically from the previous point, as it is about the spatio-temporal deconstruction of institutions such as museums: this time around, we are focusing specifically on the Museum Angewandte Kunst (Museum of Applied Art) in Frankfurt. When we started thinking about how to use this museum, what immediately came to mind was the different temporality that museums retain compared to that of theatres. In theatres, time is restricted and designated to the audience. You go to the theatre at 8:00 PM, stay until 10:00 PM, and then you leave. In museums, however, time is more elongated and liberated: the visitor can decide when to go to an exhibition. We want to expand this aspect of temporality that is affiliated with museums and expand the duration to 24 hours. We are thinking of opening the Museum Angewandte Kunst for 24 hours on some weekends – like those convenience stores in Tokyo, or, rather, like emergency hospitals or caregiving facilities around the globe – so that visitors can come and go as they wish. Countless hospital beds will be set up in the museum so that visitors can lie down to rest, to meditate, or even take a nap. As Apichatpong Weerasethakul once said when I went to his retrospective film festival at the Tate Modern, “sleeping is a political act against capitalism”.

In any case, I think the audiences’ bodies will become performative. Mind you, we are just in an inchoate stage of thinking about all these things right now, so it might change in the future.

Theater der Welt means “theatre of the world” in English, and it feels kind of arrogant to say that I am directing the theatre of the world. So we are proposing that we pluralise the name of the festival, at least for this edition: Theater der Welten (Theatre of the Worlds). If we were to do that, I think it would be a little bit better than saying that it is the theatre of the world in Germany, so it becomes the plural worlds we are living in right now anyway. We want to queer the world as much as possible. I don’t say that I only come from Japan. I lived in various countries when I was growing up, just like many other people who are living a nomadic life right now.

The aim is that we will be a source of multiple narratives. That is another form of eco/echoing curation, involving the entanglement of a lot of narratives from many different places and to achieve it, we cannot be the only agents. So in order to create these little satellite festivals synchronously while the festival is happening in Frankfurt and Offenbach, we are trying to reach out to our trusted partners and curators across the globe so that they can create their own events. It is just a tiny grain of an idea now, but we are trying to develop it as time goes by.

We are currently developing a concept, but we also need to embody it and implement it in the realities of both cities, and this is very difficult. We would like to do research around the zoo. After all, it is not only human beings who have been colonised but animals as well. We are trying to use the zoo as a research framework and are starting to do this research in collaboration with a number of Asian artists. And why not? We can organize some satellite Theater der Welt assembly somewhere around the zoo or somewhere that is symbolic of it.

What is the festival in the 21st century? We cannot truly answer this question because it is such a huge topic, but we wanted to start thinking about it. Decentralizing and queering the gaze of a single curator is one thing. Needless to say, the Western model of theatre festivals originated largely after the war. In accordance with the intention of demonstrating the recovered strength of national power after the war, many European festivals invited artists from non-Western worlds to attend. These festivals were run by often charismatic curators who flew to other cities and collected what they discovered like unknown treasures. For me, this mode of curation reflects a colonial mindset: a single white curator flying over to third world countries and collecting them in a European city.

Along the same lines, we will also be collaborating intensively with local professionals to tap their specific knowledge, which will not be united to form a singular universal pool of knowledge. In a time when Facebook is creating a Metaverse in which anyone can claim any kind of identity, I think it is doubly important, as theatre people bound to a physical medium, to situate ourselves in our own local knowledge. While we can be creative by using online technology for global communication, we also have to be aware of our situatedness. In this sense, the future of the festival should be smaller and more subtle, rather than bigger and better. As a third point, festivals should become a part of a longer process for showcasing artworks within a longer time frame. At the moment, festivals are like fireworks. It is  lavishly beautiful for a few seconds, but disappears the next moment. Then, everyone goes back to normal with their mundane lives.

Oddities, irregularities, and exceptions constantly pop up within the everyday. We are living in a durational crisis right now as we speak. As people working in the art world, I think we should adopt this temporality and create festivals that respond to and reflect the passing of time in our real life. Last but not least, as an Asian female agent I feel that festivals in the future should make use of intimate, restorative, regenerative and reflective energy rather than loudly announcing their inventive, innovative and progressive concepts, as the latter approach is very closely connected with a modern European mode of creation. Redefining the mode of creation in the context of festivals might also be one crucial task for reimagining the festival in the 21st century.

I think you are trying to decolonise the festival in itself in many directions. Do you already have any specific strategy for extending the festival from firework to a durational festival?

The fact is that I am now based in Tokyo and the COVID situation may not allow me to travel back and forth. So how can we curate the festival from a distance? This is a very challenging issue. Of course, we can plan some things in advance of the festival, but maybe we can also come up with a new model of doing that. Maybe we can show our process of creation with the artists. We are not planning to organize a big event that just disappears afterwards; instead, we want to produce something new.

I was always a big fan of Theater der Welt or Theater der Welten. By the way, the name of the first festival was already plural, it was called Theater der Nationen (Theatre of the Nations). It has come a long way since then. The name has shifted to Welt, so more to a decolonised world, but we are still in a state of coloniality of course. And I think it is great that you are trying to address that.

And here comes a question from the audience: Do you have any visions on how to perpetuate your ideas, especially on decolonising the festival in itself, for future editions of the festival?

First of all, I deliberately did not use the word decolonise. I really do not want to say that the only mode of decentralisation is through the decolonisation narrative. As we all know, that is a narrative that we should be extremely careful about as it is already muddled with certain politics, history, and contestations. At least from our side, we want to use decentralising or queering rather than decolonising. For me, the over-usage of the term decolonial in the context of art is a very German phenomenon. So in that sense, I want to nuance the word of colonisation or decolonisation a lot more. When you think about decolonising in a Japanese perspective, we always think about how we, the Japanese, colonised other Asian countries. That kind of narrative never comes into the German context. So those narratives should be addressed as well; we are not the colonised, we are actually the colonisers in the Asian context. In that sense, the Japanese colonial narrative is already extremely convoluted. We are, perhaps, imperialized to a certain extent by the Western perspective, but from an Asian perspective, we are the aggressors. Again, the binary is queered and diffracted. We need to introduce these kinds of queering narratives. We need queering notions of colonialisation to be addressed through the artworks.

Thank you very much for your contribution and for starting a dialogue.