Original version

BBC World Service

BBC World Service Radio

World Service Radio

The Cultural Frontline

Factual: Arts, Culture & the Media

The Cultural Frontline: where arts and news collide.

BBC World Service News Internet

BBC World Service Australasia

BBC World Service East and Southern Africa Schedule

BBC World Service East and Southern Africa

BBC World Service South Asia

BBC World Service Online

BBC World Service West and Central Africa Schedule

BBC World Service West and Central Africa

BBC World Service East Asia

BBC World Service schedule for American satellite radio and the Caribbean

BBC World Service Americas and the Caribbean

BBC World Service Europe and the Middle East

The Cultural Frontline: Experimental theatre in Tokyo

Magazines & Reviews

Experimental theatre in Tokyo

01/05/2021 GMT

BBC World Service - The Cultural Frontline, Experimental theatre in Tokyo

Immersive performances in a pandemic, but can theatre change us and how we see the world?

We go to Tokyo, where artists are creating theatre that interacts with the human body. At the experimental festival, Theater Commons Tokyo ‘21, the audience is centre stage and immersed in the action, even during a pandemic.

At Aya Momose’s Performing Acupuncture, needles turn the body into a stage. By combining art and therapy, she creates sensations which make us think about our body and relationships to one another.
 
Using VR headsets, Meiro Koizumi takes us into the nightmares of Tokyo’s marginalised migrant workers. In this unsettling virtual space, we are transported into their pandemic experiences.
 
And as the world adjusts to coronavirus, Akira Takayama and Port B use radio to transmit voices from Fukushima into the masked crowds of Tokyo streets. We are reminded of frightening contamination and radioactivity. A decade since the earthquake, and a year since the pandemic’s onset, both these stories are still unfolding.

Presenter: Kyoko Iwaki
Producer: Alice Armstrong

(Photo: Theater Commons Tokyo '21. Credit: Shun Sato)

Accessibility links

Programme Index

The Cultural Frontline

Experimental theatre in Tokyo

Genres

Formats

Brand

BBC World Service

About BBC World Service