AFTER THE CRISIS, THE STAGE

A Japanese theatre festival responds to a natural disaster. Might Thailand follow suit?

'A festival should be a place to present works of art that create debate or discussion," Festival/Tokyo programme director Chiaki Soma told me during her event held this autumn as part of the Tokyo Culture Creation Project.

And discussion it certainly created - chiefly about the earthquake-tsunami-reactor meltdown last spring.

Soma said the first three editions in 2009 and 2010 sought to boost the festival to an international standard, based on the European model. This year the goal was an "interactive relationship with Asia - what can we present about Asia, from Asia?"

Soma travelled to festivals around the world with a theme in mind, selecting shows that would fit. The main theme for 2011 was "taking theatre outside the theatre space, physically as well as conceptually".

Also the emerging artists were selected - with the help of "younger festival staff members" - on the basis of submitted documentation and DVDs and follow-up interviews.

"For me, rather than production values, the most important criterion is whether they're aware of what they're trying to do. I'm concerned with the message they want to express and new ways of expressing it."

Asia is a "very broad" region, Soma noted. "Each artist comes from a very different society, context and reality. So of course their sense of social issues varies quite a lot. When we look at their DVD samplers, it's not just whether we Japanese can understand their reality. We need to look at the 'how' - the conceptual planning and production style, for example."

I asked Soma about the natural disasters last March that centred on Fukushima.

"It's difficult to put it in words, but what we now refer to as '3/11' has had a bigger impact on me than anything else in my 35 years. For the first time I realised that the country where I live wasn't safe and that the future was in jeopardy. Many people around the country felt the same.

"After things calmed down I started to question whether the government was really functioning, if it would be able to stop the radiation. That's why the festival's slogan was 'What can we say?'"

Many of the performances this year reflected the widespread Japanese concern over the future. The opener was a double-bill, "The Phenomenon Called I" directed by Italy's Romeo Castellucci and "Ground" by Japan's Norimizu Ameya, who is also a visual artist.

"Looking at Japan from outside, Castellucci created a kind of theatrical requiem and recounted what actually happened in a theatrical way."

In "The Phenomenon", some 600 white chairs were arranged in orderly fashion in a public park, but in a moment during the show, they were thrown about chaotically.

"Japanese watching this had no choice but to consider it a representation of the tsunami," Soma said. "Castellucci was looking for images and theatricality to share and to critique the sense of confusion and chaos Japan was experiencing."

Ameya's "Ground" focused on the nuclear crisis that followed the catastrophe, complete with a large floating balloon that resembled the atomic bomb dropped on Nagasaki in 1945.

Then there was "Total Living 1986-2011", in which Akio Miyasawa dispensed with television-style dramatisation of the crisis to raise the challenge "How can we make sure we don't forget what happened?"

Another site-specific performance had the Tokyo Tower as a backdrop. "Referendum" by the Peachum Company, part of the Emerging Artists programme, also tackled the nuclear emergency and what it's done to Japan.

Applications are being accepted until January 22 for the 2012 Emerging Artists programme from Asian artists no older than 40 years. Download the guidelines at www.Festival-Tokyo.jp.

No Thai groups were among the 11 selected this year from some 150 applicants around Asia. It will be interesting to see what they come up with for the Bangkok Theatre Festival from mid-February to early March, especially since Thailand has had a natural calamity of its own.

The writer was one of the 10 critics-in-residence at Festival/Tokyo and the only one from Southeast Asia.