“The ground is shaking.
It’s the energy of the earth; it’s the destructive energy of dropping bombs. And at every moment, somebody stands upon this ground, shaking. They are shaking from cold, shaking from hunger. They are shaking in anger, they are shaking in grief, they are shaking from all the indescribable feelings bottled up inside. Life itself is shaking. […] The world is tearing apart everywhere, inflamed and shaking in severe pain.”

Has the world changed at all since I wrote these words a year ago? Far from it: structural violence has further escalated, and we have reached a breaking point in the severity and number of massacres and humanitarian crises, let alone any hopes of a ceasefire*. We have also become accustomed to clearly abnormal situations caused by catastrophic natural disasters and climate change, brushing them aside as “just the way it is.” Even if we rationally understand that something is clearly not right, we have been made to succumb to a sense of helplessness that does nothing to rewrite this abnormal reality. Even in the art world, it feels as though this tendency to avoid confronting the underlying issue permeates like air. Having thrown our trauma of the coronavirus pandemic into oblivion, we pretend not to see the endless inflammations experienced all over the world. Where exactly are we aiming to go?

In response to this constant, ubiquitous disorientation, even a year ago I had written: “It is virtually meaningless to pat ourselves on the back by asking what art can do [...] However, we can still harness the wisdom (commons) of theater (spaces) to continue opening imagination’s door for these realities, while also realistically accepting the fact that we are at a loss.” In some ways, this year’s Theater Commons Tokyo responds to these words as we cautiously share the outcome of a year’s worth of trial and error and conflicted feelings.

Participating artist duo Kyun-Chome’s performance title, Breath in the Dark for Peace, resounds as a poetic expression of the most ethical and positive approach that we can practice in these tumultuous times. Breathing—the series of motions to inhale and exhale—is an act shared by all animals, not simply humans. Going further, it is a system of air exchange that involves plants as well, and all forms of life. “Breath” (iki [息]) is “life” (iki [生き]), and our breath sustains our life from birth to death. However, this very structure is at risk in urban spaces that continue to be developed into megacities, or “managed societies” intensified in nature and meticulously controlled by AI technologies. We suffocate under this stifling state, and, upon opening our eyes, our vision fills with indescribable videos of war and fake AI-generated images, indiscriminately shown with equal weight. At a time when such visual overstimulation furthers the deterioration of our “breath/life,” can choosing to breathe deeply in the dark help us attempt to build new relationships between the self and earth, body and nature, here and world? In addition to providing a sense of rest and solace, this gesture will surely revive our “breath/life.” Adopting Kyun-Chome’s artistic concept as this year’s overall theme, we attempt to amplify the act of “breathing in the dark” throughout Theater Commons Tokyo.

What kind of artistic expression is possible today for those who come from regions where people are under the constant threat of actual suffocation (extinction), apart from documenting and sharing their unbearable realities? Lebanese filmmakers and artists Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige present the story of Orthosia, a legendary Roman city that was unearthed below a Palestinian refugee camp in 2007. The ancient city had vanished due to a tsunami over 1,500 years ago, its stratum covered by the Palestinian refugee camp, which was born out of the Nakba in 1948. With the camp’s destruction in war, the ancient past is ironically connected with the present. What poignant wish for the future can we gather from the fissures of today’s Middle East, filled with contradictions and disorientations?

Our painful memories of the pandemic, during which we were prohibited from simply breathing together, have been merely reduced to oblivion and erasure. Yet the artist Mei Liu confronts the traumas and tragedies experienced across her home country of China during the mandatory lockdown, sublimating them into a work of speculative fiction through a lecture performance. The “wait time” that many experienced with the pandemic connects to “another world” that could exist in the future. Emerging from a liminal space between fiction and reality, Liu’s performance delivers a narrative that represents Asia’s new generation, seeking to overcome past experiences to connect with a sense of hope for the future.

For the past three years, Tomoko Sato has developed Index for Obake Tokyos, a series based on her research of the Minato area. In her latest installment, she presents a walking performance that re-examines Tokyo through historical traces of East Asia. How have the vestiges of Japan’s colonial occupations—wherein the country preyed upon Asia as a “ghost”—been kept and erased by its victims and perpetrators, rewriting the urban space that is Tokyo? As the Minato area further develops into a welcoming gateway to Asia, Sato embarks on a new challenge to reconstruct and layer multiperspective narratives of East Asia.

In this year’s contribution, Satoko Ichihara also tackles the global issues and absurdities that Asia faces today, in collaboration with actors from Japan, South Korea, and Hong Kong. In this work, she interrogates the structures of capitalism and patriarchy, the nonsense and farce of our distorted system of mass production and consumerism, and the global homogenization of desire. How will this absurdist play—featuring a cat named Kitty and its family—pierce through our human animality, which continues to vanish under our self-made systems, and the contradictions that it encompasses?

The German theater director and playwright René Pollesch radically confronted the relationship between theater and society throughout his career. Marking exactly a year after his sudden passing, Ayaka Ono and Akira Nakazawa from Spacenotblank take on the challenge of performing a play that encapsulates his dramatic theory. How will the prophetic words of Pollesch—a groundbreaking artist who led the field of postdramatic theater in the 2000s—speak to us now, in 2025, as we are thrown into a volatile world? We invite you to experience his words firsthand by joining us in reading them aloud.

In line with previous years, we present three forums to facilitate multidisciplinary discussions around critical and social issues that underlie many of the participating performances and artists’ practices. Commons Forum #1 “Theater and Care” examines the relationship between engaging in theater and caring for one’s mental and physical well-being—as well as finding a sense of belonging—incorporating examples of artistic practices that even delve into realms adjacent to therapy and religion. We hope to collectively envision future possibilities for theaters to provide practical spaces of mutual care and where people can feel they are seen and heard. In Commons Forum #2 “Theater and Society,” we consider the potential of theater as media to enact social change, reflecting on the dramatic theory of René Pollesch, who was committed to confronting this question. In Commons Forum #3 “Theater and East Asia,” we focus on how contemporary artists in East Asia are currently grappling with the realities and histories across the region in creating theatrical works.

The “Commons Tour,” which was well-received as an endeavor to collectively experience Theater Commons Tokyo, will also be revived across two weekends. The tour will provide an opportunity to actively enjoy the festival in various ways as a group, beyond attending the performances and artist talks. This will include conversations with the guides and fellow tour-goers before and after the programs, as well as photo ops. We hope many of you will join us.

Held annually since its inception in 2017, Theater Commons Tokyo enters its ninth edition this year. As an independently-run project, we have operated with a total budget based on fundraising across public, private, and foreign cultural institutions, in addition to ticket revenues. This year, we were denied funding from one of the grants that had been consistently supporting us, which led to drastic cuts and changes in our scheduled program, as well as an unfortunate yet unavoidable necessity to increase the ticket fee. While this situation reconfirmed my sense of responsibility in and commitment to running an independent festival despite being in the red, I also view this as a moment to think about our new vision and strategy for the next decade. From the festival’s initial stages of 2017–2019 to the pandemic era of 2020–2023, it now begins to enter its next phase, in which we implement the “Theater Commons” that have accumulated throughout these years more deeply into wider society. We hope to work towards revealing a concrete vision for these plans at our 10th anniversary edition next year. Breathing deeply amid a transitional darkness, Theater Commons Tokyo ’25 raises its curtain as it looks toward the upcoming decade.

*This text was written in early January 2025.