Stage Without Borders

The Japan Foundation (JF) has started the project “STAGE BEYOND BORDERS—Selection of Japanese Performances,” which presents outstanding Japanese stage performances online for people throughout the world who are seeking opportunities to enjoy Japanese stage performances amid the spread of COVID-19.

Performing arts is one of the earliest forms of entertainment that through strangers and various environments stirs the imagination about ongoing stories and provides hopes and hints about the real world. The Japan Foundation’s online project “STAGE BEYOND BORDERS—Selection of Japanese Performances” is expected to encourage hope for all people who enjoy performing arts by presenting outstanding Japanese stage performances beyond borders in multiple languages. The Japan Foundation hopes to cultivate new fan bases for performing arts and also approach theater professionals in order to hold performances at overseas theaters once interactions among people are allowed to resume.

Please visit the following website for upcoming performances: https://stagebb.jpf.go.jp

Past Performances

Kyogen: The Humor of Frailty & Tolerance 【EN/簡中/繁中/FR/ID/RU/ES/JP】
We will focus on the play “Kirokuda (Six Ox-Loads of Wood)” which shows the travails of a house servant who must deliver a gift for his master despite a heavy snow. Kyogen is earthy comedy, but it also explores what it means to be human with great profundity. The program will also demonstrate some of the stylized patterns that are used to express ordinary emotions and movements.
 

【TEASER】STAGE BEYOND BORDERS -Selection of Japanese Performances

Shizuoka Performing Arts Center “Grimm’s Fairy Tale – The Girl, the Devil and the Mill”【EN/FR】
In this original play-with-music, the French playwright, director and actor Olivier PY presents “The Girl Without Hands,” a folklore story about a girl whose hands are chopped off by the Devil that was gathered by the German brothers Jacob and Wilhelm GRIMM and first published in 1812.
 

Hiroaki Umeda “Median”
In “Median,” sets of monochrome images and lights transfigure like cell division from moment to moment accompanied by intermittent electrical buzzing and pulses of white noise. Amid these effects UMEDA’s body appears dancing eloquently — sometimes powerfully and sometimes softly — even as it flashes into and out of view in flickers.
 

Hisashi Watanabe "Ojami-hyon series Episode 1 Ojami-hyon"
These three episodes are a video series created by WATANABE Hisashi, a physical researcher, circus artist, and the founder of the company Atama to Kuchi, performed in more than 15 countries. This is about the adventures of a juggling monster, Ojami-hyon, who appears and plays with his balls in various places around the world. (beanbag balls known as “ojami” in the western Japan dialect).
 

Hisashi Watanabe "Ojami-hyon series Episode 2 Ojami-RUN"
 

Hisashi Watanabe "Ojami-hyon series Episode 3 Ojami-nchu"
 

Kuro Tanino "Fortress of Smiles"【EN/簡中/繁中/DE/FR/RU】
In “Fortress of Smiles, RE-CREATION,” which is set in two small, shabby adjoining apartments in a coastal village, lively fishermen meet day after day in one to drink and enjoy themselves — while next door an old lady with dementia is living quietly alone with support from her son and granddaughter. Then as audiences follow the routine lives in these two rooms they become aware that something has actually gradually and quietly changed.
 

Toshiki Okada "Five Days in March Re-creation in Yokohama"【EN/FR/DE/PT/簡中/繁中/RU】
OKADA Toshiki’s re-creation of his 2004 masterpiece “Five Days in March” brings today’s Japan into focus. Just as it always did, the work still describes five days in March 2003 in Tokyo’s youth-culture mecca of Shibuya where some people are demonstrating against the Iraq war. On the other hand, a young man and woman who met at a music club in upscale Roppongi instead opt to spend three nights in a love hotel where they shut themselves away from society in one room while the world situation outside is changing from day to day. This new version of the play will bring the current “real Japan” into focus by comparing it with those 2004 versions of how things were.
 

Hideto Iwai "WAREWARE NO MOROMORO (Our Stories…)"【日/EN/簡中/繁中/KR/PT/RU】
A Japan-France collaboration by the T2G Théâtre de Gennevilliers and IWAI Hideto. In 2018, IWAI was invited by the Festival d'Automne à Paris to create a play based on the life stories of four amateur and three professional French actors aged from 20-plus to 82 he could select by audition during visits to the Gennevilliers suburb in northwestern Paris that is home to many immigrant families and their children. Afterward, during extended stays there he put together this beautiful piece of moving human drama by carefully picking out episodes in his actors’ lives — such as one person’s story about being able to make ghosts appear ever since his mother died when he was 4, and a Moroccan immigrant’s account of plunging into a labor dispute to improve working conditions. First performed as part of Japonismes 2018 in conjunction with Festival d’Automne à Paris.
 

Satoko Ichihara “The Question of Faeries” 【EN/FR/KR/PT/RU/ES】
ICHIHARA Satoko confessed that she used to look down on some people before she even knew them, while herself feeling how difficult and frustrating life was in Japan. That was until she set out to inspire audiences, through this play, to look positively on every other person’s life — with the word “faeries” in the title representing “invisible things and people.” Comprised of three different stories titled “Busu” (“Ugly Woman”), “Cockroach” and “Mangurt” (which she describes as “Yogurt made up of women’s bodily fluids”) that are each told either using Rakugo (traditional Japanese comic storytelling), song or a seminar style, ICHIHARA’s work casts light through her critical gaze and indiocyncratic, cynical jokes on the normally unseen lives of people on society’s margins.
 

Dumb Type “2020” 【EN/FR/IT】
Dumb Type is an artist collective of members with different backgrounds including in video, dance, music, design and computer programming who have been active since 1984 in various fields of performance and installations spanning these categories and beyond. In 2022 the collective will be the Japanese representative at the 59th Venice Biennale international art exhibition in Italy.
 

Shizuoka Performing Arts Center “Grimm’s Fairy Tale – The Real Fiancée” 【EN/FR】
Directed by the globe-trotting dramatist MIYAGI Satoshi, General Artistic Director of Shizuoka Performing Arts Center (SPAC) , the work tells the story of a young girl forced by her cruel stepmother to work nonstop every day until she finally escapes from the house and runs into the woods where she meets a prince and falls in love.
 

BATIK “THE RELIGION OF BIRDS” 【EN/FR/RU/SP/KR】
In “THE RELIGION OF BIRDS,” which had its world premiere in January 2017 in Sendai, Miyagi Prefecture, KURODA drew inspiration from the central role of birds in Tibetan Buddhism through their simple acts of living, eating and dying. The result is a profoundly soulful dance that seems as if it is actually being performed by birds.
 

Noh: Mystery, Myth & Movement 【EN/簡中/繁中/FR/ID/RU/ES/JP】
The Noh play “Tatsuta” is on the theme of a Shinto shrine to the goddess of the red autumn leaves. We will explore how this play evokes the feeling of the autumn landscape through extensive footage of an actual performance of this play. Also, the program will further look at the world of Noh by seeing how its aesthetics have inspired the traditional fabrics and brocades of the craftspeople of Kyoto.
 

【TEASER 2】STAGE BEYOND BORDERS —Selection of Japanese Performances