International Creations in Performing Arts 2025｜Collaborative Creation beyond Borders

In this project, four artists based in Japan, the Philippines, and Taiwan will conduct research and creation focused on the multilayered and heterogeneous nature of culture and identity through the theme of “food.” The project stems from the Taipei Arts Festival’s research program “Cruising.” The participating artists are novelist Yu-Ju Wen (who was born in Taiwan and grew up in Japan), Jang-Chi (a member of the artist collective OLTA), Ness Roque (an actor and dramaturg from the Philippines), and Ming-Chen Lee (a Taipei-based artist working across performance and visual arts). Based on collaborative research conducted in Kyoto and Taipei, they will engage in collective creation and present a performance work that covers such themes as the connections between memory and food, and the expansiveness of language.

Performances
Taipei: September 12-14, 2025 (Taipei Arts Festival)
Kyoto: October 24-26, 2025 (Kyoto Experiment: Kyoto International Performing Arts Festival 2025)
For more details, please refer to Kyoto Experiment and Taipei Arts Festival.

This is a collaborative project between dancer and choreographer Kenta Kojiri and Germany-based architect and artist Hannes Mayer. To bring new perspectives to dance works, they have been collaborating with experts from various fields, including architecture, Japanese gardens, and urban design, since 2023, using the uniquely Japanese spatial concept of engawa (a kind of veranda) as a starting point to explore new mutual relationships between performers and audiences in performance environments. In this project, they will create a dance work based on their accumulated research and dialogue. They are positioning the “stage” as the final process space, serving as the culmination of their collaborative research, and will perform in two cities: Toyohashi, in Aichi Prefecture, and Yokohama, in Kanagawa Prefecture.
From the perspective of the engawa, which connects the changing seasons with our daily lives, they aim to reconsider how bodies exist in harmony with the environment and to open up new imaginative possibilities and sensations from the margins created between architecture and the body, inside and outside.

Performances
Toyohashi performances: November 29–30, 2025 (Venue: Toyohashi Arts Theatre PLAT)
Yokohama performances: December 5–6, 2025 (Venue: Yokohama Red Brick Warehouse No. 1)
*For details, please visit the SandD | Kenta Kojiri website (in Japanese)

This international co-production connects Asian countries and regions that coexist with natural disasters, such as Japan, Indonesia, and Taiwan, through culture, fostering creative power for the future. Building on the cultural exchange project “Fue LABO,” which began in 2021 to link Japan’s Sanriku region with other parts of Asia, performing arts groups from Sanriku, Yogyakarta, and Taipei will collaborate to create the new stage work Kaminaga-hime (Long-Haired Princess), using the bamboo flute—essential to Asian folk performing arts—as a common language.
The project layers a folk tale passed down in Sanriku with perspectives on disasters, marine debris, the declining birth rate, and regional culture facing a crisis of insufficient transmission, along with prayers for the future, opening new horizons for stage arts that bridge tradition and modernity. For the creation, they will build upon the performing arts exchanges fostered at the Sanriku International Arts Festival , engaging in both online and in-person dialogues, resulting in a work that merges performing arts, music, and dance from each region. The process and performances will be compiled into a video and shared in Japan and internationally. This initiative fosters the revitalization of cultural exchange, collaboration between disaster-affected areas, and the development of next-generation performing arts successors.

Performances
Showcase performance: October 12, 2025 (Venue: Rikuzen-Takata Civic Culture Center “Kiseki-no-Ippon-Matsu Hall”)
Main performances: February 28–March 1, 2026 (Venue: Hachinohe City Nango Cultural Hall)
*For details, please check International Co-production ~Fue LABO~ Folk Performing Arts Stage Work “Kaminaga-hime” - Sanriku Machizukuri ART (in Japanese)

This is an international co-production project between takumi, led by Japanese playwright and director Takuya Kato, and Taiwan’s 4 CHAIRS THEATRE company. Beginning with a 2023 performance of Kato’s work in Taiwan, the project will span from 2025 to 2026, with multiple workshops and creation residencies, culminating in a main performance scheduled for April 2026 in Taipei. With the creative theme of “Making the Curse,” actors from diverse language and cultural backgrounds will collaborate in fieldwork and creation, exploring new theatrical expressions. Beyond mere performances in both countries, the project aims to become a sustainable model for international exchange, including mutual sharing of directing methods and expression techniques, with future plans for East Asian regional tours.

Performances
Scheduled for April 2026
*Details to be announced

Contemporary dancer and choreographer Yukio Suzuki, who is active both in Japan and internationally, will collaborate with members of the world-renowned British dance company Stopgap Dance Company to present a new work. This collaboration will feature British dancers with disabilities alongside Japanese dancers from the Yukio Suzuki Project. Stopgap was the first inclusive company established in Britain, founded on the philosophy of collaboration and expression on stage, transcending the presence or absence of disabilities among both able-bodied and disabled performers. This pioneering dance company and Suzuki, who has a background in butoh—a form of physical expression created in Japan—will inspire each other while exploring the richness of diverse physicality and new possibilities in dance. The project will include work-in-progress presentations that emphasize the creative process, as well as implementing exchange programs that broadly promote this field, including audience discussions, competitive performances with the Japanese inclusive company Mi-Mi-Bi, workshops, and lectures for inclusive dance instructors.

Performances
Work-in-progress performances:
September 2, 2025 (Venue: Trinity Centre, Guildford, UK)
September 14–15, 2025 (Venue: ArtTheater dB KOBE)
Main performance: Details to be announced

Directors and actors from BIRD Theatre Company TOTTORI, which conducts theatrical activities in Tottori—Japan’s least populated prefecture—will collaborate with a poet, a musical group, and actors based in Galloway, a region in Scotland, UK, that is struggling with depopulation, to jointly create a new musical theatre centred on the theme of community disappearance. The scriptwriter is veteran poet Tom Pow, who has visited regions across Europe with declining populations, collecting stories of vanishing villages. After a performance at BIRD Theatre Company’s annual international theatre festival—the BIRD Theatre Festival—he visited depopulated villages in Tottori, and inspired by that research, the idea for this project was born. In a low-growth, population-declining society, the disappearance of small villages is inevitable. What disappears is not just the lives of the few people who currently live there, but also the accumulated legacy, thoughts, and wishes of all the people who have lived there in the past. Creating work that contemplates this is not mere nostalgia; it should become a universal endevour to consider humanity’s positive future. They will conduct initial rehearsals in summer 2025, prepare remotely, and perform in the UK and Japan in summer 2026.

Performances
Summer 2026: Scotland tour
September 2026: Two performances at the BIRD Theatre Festival (planned)
*Details to be announced