International Creations in Performing Arts 2026｜Collaborative Creation beyond Borders

Kyoto-based choreographer YAMASHITA Zan, Hanoi-based poet, author and independent publisher Nhã Thuyên, and Project Đây Sàn, an artist collective based in Ho Chi Minh City, have created a book that gives rise to dance, recording dialogues, poems, and dance notation. The performance traces a new creation unfolding alongside a longing for freedom of expression.

The title giọt-giọt, Vietnamese for “drip-drip,” evokes the continuous fall of droplets. As the audience moves through the book, each turn of a page adds a droplet-like pulse to a rhythm filling the quiet. Led by this collective cadence, dance, reading and dialogue unfurl.

Performances
October 22-25, 2026 (Venue: Auditorium, KYOTO ART CENTER)
For more details, please refer to the website of Kyoto Experiment.
*Available from August 1.

An international collaborative production by Surreal SoReal Theatre based in Montreal, Canada, and Co. Un Yamada in Tokyo.

It will be a work of physical theater spanning dance, drama, and text, guided by J. D. Salinger’s novel The Catcher in the Rye. With about five performers taking on the novel’s numerous characters and scenes, the story will serve as a springboard for tracing the cultural milieu of the postwar United States as well as its music, expressions, and people’s sensibilities, capturing youthful alienation and confusion that still resonate today.

The creative process will include interviews with educators in both Canada and Japan as part of research on the current situation surrounding education and youth. While overlaying the perspective of the novel’s protagonist, Holden, on present times, the sensibilities of young people living in a complex reality including screens, social media, environmental issues, and political turmoil will be examined, with the voices and experiences of those living in Canadian and Japanese society, respectively, applied to the creative process.

The opposing themes contained in the novel written in the wake of World War II, such as love and rejection, life and death, nature and urbanity, and innocence and artifice, will be defined through the performers’ bodies and voices, multiple languages, and spatial transformations. Through the intersection of literature and theater, the past and present, and individual and societal memories, the work will question the nature of human existence and emotions that reverberate across borders and eras.

Performances
*Details to be announced

An international collaborative dance production by the New Zealand Dance Company (NZDC) based in Auckland, New Zealand, and the Tokyo-based, globally active choreographer UMEDA Hiroaki. Dancers from NZDC and the Somatic Field Project in Japan will be featured as performers. The creative process will include fieldwork on the Māori people indigenous to New Zealand. This will be blended with Japanese elements to create an approximately thirty- to forty-minute work based on Umeda’s “behavior design” (choreography).

In the work, Umeda will collaborate with the NZDC dancers on continued pursuit of the movements reflecting each dancer’s individuality and cultural background that he has consistently sought in his activities to date. Further liberated by Umeda’s “doutai (kinetic) method,” the dancers will freely use their bodies, and Umeda will draw out their movements with improvisation through direction and tasks. Together, they will aim for a work distinctive of Umeda’s choreography and an international collaborative production, reflecting Umeda’s characteristically Japanese minimalist style, the research in New Zealand, and the performers’ individuality.

Performances
*Details to be announced

An international collaborative production by DAVRA, a collective led by acclaimed Central Asian filmmaker and artist Saodat ISMAILOVA, and evala, a Japanese sound artist and composer. Under the theme of "Memory and Theatre," the project will create and present a new performance connecting Uzbekistan and Japan.

The work takes as its point of departure the Alisher Navoi State Academic Bolshoi Theatre in Tashkent, as well as other public buildings and infrastructure constructed with the labor of Japanese prisoners of war interned in the Soviet Union after World War II. In collaboration with the Tashkent Museum of Japanese POWs, the project will research the histories inscribed in these sites and the memories preserved by local communities. By reconstituting this collective memory within the contemporary theatrical space, the performance will transform the theatre itself into a medium for transmitting memory across generations, creating an interdisciplinary work in which history, memory, sound, and performance resonate together.

Performances
*Details to be announced