YPAM

Takeharu Yamanaka
Mayor of Yokohama

Yokohama International Performing Arts Meeting (YPAM), one of the most influential performing arts platforms in Asia, will be fully underway again this year.

We hope that performing arts professionals, artists, and audiences who love performing arts will gather in Yokohama from across Japan and abroad for numerous new exchanges and enjoy a wide variety of programs.

Among the many performances, this year's YPAM Direction will feature a special collaboration between German artists and the Nippon Sport Science University, which has a campus in Yokohama. We hope you will look forward to a performance that only Yokohama can produce.

In addition to cutting-edge performing arts performances and meetings with domestic and international experts, Fringe performances will be presented in various locations throughout the city. It will be our greatest pleasure if you will encounter exciting performing arts works, find the city of Yokohama attractive, and make new discoveries through the various activities during the event period.

We hope you will enjoy the 17 days of Yokohama being immersed in performing arts.

Yoshinori Isozaki
Chairman, Kanagawa Arts Foundation

This year marks the fourth edition of this event being held under the new name ‘YPAM–Yokohama Performing Arts Meeting’ since 2021. Once again, we would like to extend our deepest gratitude to the many people who support this event.

Recognized internationally as one of the world's leading performing arts platforms, YPAM is committed to becoming a long-standing event with strong regional ties, strengthening collaboration and cooperation within the community even furthur moving forward.

This year, KAAT Kanagawa Arts Theatre will present a wide variety of theater and dance performances, including the YPAM Direction that invites top artists from overseas, collaborative programs with Yokohama-based organizations, and international co-productions curated and produced by KAAT, forming substantial collaborations with overseas artists. As the hosting organization, the Kanagawa Arts Theatre provides not only a venue for the performances, but also a concerted effort to support the collaborative performances between local and overseas artists.

In times of increasing global issues and heightened tension in the world, we sincerely hope this event dedicated to exploring the possibilities of performing arts beyond national borders will provide local residents the opportunity for new encounters with arts and culture, as well as international understanding and exchange.

Seiichi Kondo
President, Yokohama Arts Foundation

How do we leverage the power and the roles in which performing arts have in our community is an important issue to be addressed. One of the approaches is the need for expanding the fan base by making efforts to convey the enjoyment of the arts through performances and various programs, and ensuring their content is accessible for our audiences. The second is to transform performing arts into something more than just a hobby or pastime for individuals, but a catalyst for solving regional issues and promoting participatory placemaking to achieve regional revitalization, as has recently been the case in some parts of Japan.

In order for YPAM to strengthen its relationship with the community, the YPAM Fringe Society was established last year to build even stronger connections with people and places, ensuring YPAM's initiatives will reach every corner of the city, not only during the event period but throughout the year.

I look forward to seeing YPAM's activities serving as stimuli to identify and respond to challenges in various fields, connecting people of Yokohama with local resources and uncovering new charms for performing arts.

Photo by Hideto Maezawa

Hiromi Maruoka
President, Japan Center, Pacific Basin Arts Communication
Director, Yokohama International Performing Arts Meeting

“We the Japanese have committed terrible crimes against the Korean people. Considering these terrible crimes, there is no grounds for me to feel resentful for what he has done to my daughter.” This is a passage that is said to have been written by the parent of one of the victims of the Komatsugawa Incident that took place in Tokyo in 1958, 13 years after Korea gained independence from Japanese colonial rule in 1945 and one year before the first phase of the protest in Japan against the United States–Japan Security Treaty. To make sense of this statement, one has to understand the background of the incident and the history of atrocities. Indeed, there must have been many people who understood and agreed (not necessarily in sympathy) with those words at that time, based on their imagination of war. While on the other hand, in 2024, in our current times, the parent would most likely be criticized in the first place for determining their daughter's right to live at their own moral discretion, before understanding the background of the incident.

Theatre festivals began in various parts of Europe and elsewhere in the late 1940s. With reflection on global warfare – which continued in the form of proxy war in the Middle East and elsewhere, as well as the Cold War – and against the backdrop of the invention of omnipotent weapons, one of the main purposes of these festivals had to do with criticizing the community of the places where they were situated. In the late 1980s, these theatre festivals evolved into international performing arts festivals and began to incorporate works from outside the community. This was considered an idea to be carried on, and became the philosophy of international platforms including TPAM. Such platforms were formed and networked in various regions. In the 2000s, which began with the September 11 attacks in 2001, a series of works explicitly depicting the fresh or grotesque everyday lives and naked realities of young people were staged as a “mirror of the times” in various parts of the world, cutting through the political and aesthetic “total art” that had been prevalent. However, I feel that a different trend is emerging after the pandemic that was declared in 2020. Divide, climate change and sustainability, postcolonialism, LGBTQ – these keywords were already present before 2020. What seems to be the most significant difference is that the idea that these issues should be tackled through thoroughly individualistic approaches is becoming mainstream, even in the performing arts world.

It is not my place to discuss that trend journalistically. Instead, I would like to describe here the works to be presented in YPAM Direction this year.

The opening quote about the Komatsugawa Incident is from Yuni Hong Charpe's proposal for ENCORE – violet. Yuni-san (as we call her) was born and raised in Tokyo as a third-generation zainichi Korean, and later obtained French nationality. Yuni-san began working on ENCORE, a lecture performance trilogy, because “I'm about to turn 40, and I want to say what I wanted to say before I die.” While exposing the finite nature of research and generously sharing its contents with the audiences, Yuni-san takes control of the narrative before we know it, which is a lot more meticulous than what I have expected from an artist at her age would be, and she is obviously too young to think about death. This mastery can be seen as an artistic achievement, and I would not say that Japanese audiences do not have the right to enjoy it, but we might also have to think about what made Yuni-san so well-versed. The first work, premiered at the Kinosaki International Art Center in 2022, is about a research during the pandemic on the Korean dancer Choi Seung-hee who worked in Japan and Korea during the Japanese colonial rule, and in China and North Korea during the Cold War. The work will be presented at YPAM with new updates. The second work about the massacre of Koreans in the metropolitan area in Japan in 1923 and the above-mentioned Komatsugawa Incident will be premiered. After the final performance, ideas for the third work will be shared.

Ong Keng Sen might be one of the most well-known international contemporary theatre makers in Japan, and he has also contemplated on the international environment of performing arts and worked concretely to improve it more than anyone else. Especially the Singapore International Festival of Arts, which he directed for five years from 2014, has significantly influenced the Southeast Asian focus of TPAM. When he participated in TPAM in 2017, he said in an interview, “Let's just talk about the art world for now, but, for example, the visions of, say, Shuji Terayama in Japan or Sardono Kusumo in Indonesia offered perspectives or anchor points. We need such perspectives precisely because the world continues on the path of globalization ever more rapidly. Anchor points are always seminal, visionary, and singular, even if they grow from a particular creator and in a specific context, they can become trajectories that nurture the future. I think the difference between art and culture lies there: culture surrounds us, but art does not.” He also said, “The way in which I curate programs is specific to my identity and history as an artist. In that sense, the festival is not a generic model for art business.”

While we supported the belief that artists are creating innovative works of art from a singular, rather than an individual point of view, and that international festivals should be programmed from a historical rather than an industrial perspective, we had not yet presented Keng Sen's own work (although there had been plans to do so) at TPAM or YPAM. We are very pleased to be able to do so this year. While based on his rich experience as a director and his many projects that decolonized European materials, his new work Dido and Aeneas possesses a radical “lightness” that reminds us of the immediacy and speed of the theatre as a medium. Themes of life, love and desire, which he attempts to explicate without resorting to the authority of “universality” through collaboration with volunteer performers gathered around Yokohama, seem to have the same, or in some cases, even more political resonance than in his previous works.

Nam Hwayeon has been engaged in long-term research on Choi Seung-hee, whom Yuni Hong Charpe talks about in the first piece of the ENCORE trilogy, and has produced a number of related works including A Garden in Italy, which premiered at Festival Bo:m (Seoul) in 2012, and Dancer from the Peninsula, which was presented in the Korean Pavilion at the Venice Biennale in 2019 and later in Yebisu International Festival for Art & Alternative Visions (on the other hand, it may not be so well known in the performing arts sector that she has also created highly conceptual performances that question the ideas of “choreography” or “rehearsal.”) Her new piece 2 about Choi Seung-hee and Taiwanese dancer Tsai Jui-yueh who, as Choi did too, studied with Japanese modern dancer Baku Ishii during the Japanese colonization, is a speculative and poetic work that distinguishes itself from research-based documentary approaches, giving a sense that the artist has reached a whole new level. The work was commissioned by the National Museum of Contemporary Art in Seoul and the Asian Art Biennial in Taichung, and will be shown in the “Connecting Bodies: Asian Women Artists” exhibition at the same museum from September to March and the Biennial from November to February. It is a great pleasure for us to be able to present this work in parallel with these two exhibitions, even though the exhibition period at YPAM is short.

Richard Siegal, who is going to collaborate with about 70 students practicing “collective action” at the Nippon Sport Science University's Yokohama Kenshidai Campus, was appointed ballet director in Nürnberg this July. He will also be involved in the direction of the new opera house being built on the former Nazi Party Rally Grounds that remains in the city. As the title suggests, his previous work, Ballet of (Dis)Obedience, created with his company's dancers based on research into “collective action,” involved political and ethical questions about the relationship between discipline, command and the individual. Developing on this, I expect Collective Action, for which he will actually be working with the students of the sport university, will become an important work in his career and have a significant impact on his mission in Nürnberg, drawing the potential of “collective action” that is essentially different from totalitarian indoctrination, in the context of contemporary art. After the premiere, the work will be filmed without audience to explore the possibility of a video installation version.

YPAM is centered on YPAM Exchange, a meeting program for professional networking, and its performance programs consist of YPAM Direction, the official performance program, YPAM Fringe, an open call program, and YPAM Joint Program in special cooperation with arts organizations in Yokohama, Kanagawa and overseas.

YPAM Fringe accepts registration of shows presented in Yokohama and Kanagawa, and this year 50 shows have been registered, with 30% coming from overseas artists, a number comparable to the previous TPAM Fringe when we accepted shows in Tokyo. YPAM Joint Program includes an East Asian dance platform, showcases by a dance house in Yokohama, proposals for new uses of public space, presentations of good practices in international co-production, and a festival of exhibitions and performances utilizing local resources. Details can be found on the respective pages, and I assure you will encounter a wide variety of works/projects during the 17 days of YPAM.

Last but not the least, I would like to express our sincere gratitude to everyone who has kindly supported us and to those who attend or participate in the program of YPAM2024. We look forward to welcoming you in Yokohama.