Focus Japan

The works offer a layered manifestation of questions surrounding identity and community. Themes of tradition and origin emerge alike in the refined poetics of the Kanze Noh Theater and in the choreographically interpretated creation mythology of Japan evoked in Planet [wanderer] by Damien Jalet and Kohei Nawa.

Both Akira Takayama’s project What If Berlin, which explores archived visions of a “New Berlin” along Berlin’s S-Bahn ring, and the collective Dumb Type’s technologically driven, at times dystopian reflections in 2020 on human vulnerability address questions of how societies imagine the future and negotiate the possibility of shared perspectives. Correspondingly, the search for common ground finds its live expression in the improvisational dialogue of Otomo Yoshihide’s New Jazz Quintet.

The cooperation partner of the Berliner Festspiele for Focus Japan is the Volksbühne am Rosa-Luxemburg-Platz, with two new productions and one guest performance.
 

Venues: Haus der Berliner Festspiele, Philharmonie Berlin, Berlin S-Bahn ring, Volksbühne am Rosa-Luxemburg-Platz
 

Satoko Ichihara: Mononoke

Premiere on 3 October 2026

The Japanese author and director Satoko Ichihara is one of the leading voices of a new, feminist generation of theatre makers. For Mononoke, her first production at a theatre in Germany, she invited Berlin-based South Korean artist Mire Lee to create the set design. Lee’s lifelike sculptures are usually showcased in museums. In team with costume designer Belle Santos, Ichihara draws on traditional Japanese Bunraku puppet theatre to create a modern-day interpretation of bodies fused with puppets, flesh growing from iron, and gods you’d better not anger.

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A Production by Toshiki Okada

Premiere in February 2027

The Japanese theatre director Toshiki Okada is well known for his sharp-witted, humorous plays, in which he takes a close look at the social issues facing contemporary Japanese society. In his productions, the performers on stage develop a uniquely fascinating repertoire of movement, while the characters’ conversations revolve around the both mundane and existential details of coping with everyday life. Okada made his international breakthrough in 2004 with the production Five Days in March. The piece centred on a ‘lost generation’ of Japanese youth facing a future that offers no hope. More than twenty years later, his first production at the Volksbühne am Rosa-Luxemburg-Platz will again be dealing with private fears and political despair: If you can’t make ends meet, you have to die young.ng. She is haunted by a curse cast on her when her father disappeared ath the teime she got her first period. What follows is Takako’s attempt to free herself from everything that was thrust upon her without her consent. It’s the start of a surreal heroine’s journey through a world populated by gods, dolls, and hardware, by ancient myths and endless sales pitches.

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Satoko Ichihara: Yoroboshi

Guest performance in spring 2027

With the piece Yoroboshi, which premiered in 2023, Satoko Ichihara returns to the Volksbühne am Rosa-Luxemburg-Platz in spring 2027. The guest performance reimagines the Japanese legend of the “blind weakling” (Shuntokumaru), unfolding a moving story about loneliness, violence, and sexuality.