Theater writer/novelist Toshiki Okada will assume the position of artistic director of the Tokyo Arts Festival, which is held annually in the Ikebukuro area of Tokyo in the fall of 2025.
In 2024, the ninth year of the festival, “Metamorphosis in the Living Room” by chelfitsch, which Okada presides over, and Dai Fujikura with Ensemble Nomade will be staged at the Tokyo Metropolitan Art Space Theatre Theatre East. In addition, it was announced that “San-nin-kichi-sa-kurano-tsugai” by Kinoshita Kabuki would be performed at the Tokyo Metropolitan Art Space Playhouse, and an outdoor performance composed/choreographed/directed by Ryohei Kondo would be presented at the GLOBAL RING THEATRE (Ikebukuro West Exit Park Open-Air Theatre). The Tokyo Performing Arts Festival will be held at the Tokyo Metropolitan Art Space in 2018.
The “Tokyo Performing Arts Festival” has been directed by internationally acclaimed director Satoshi Miyagi for six years from 2018 to 2023, and from 2025, under the leadership of Okada Okada, who has attracted attention in Japan and abroad for his unique methodology based on the relationship between words and the body and his eye on contemporary society, a new concept will be developed. Okada, who has garnered attention both in Japan and abroad for his unique methodology based on the relationship between words and the body, as well as for his eye on contemporary society. A statement from Okada was also released at the time of the announcement.
In the frame of the special festive mood of an international performing arts festival, we will invite artists from various regions and aesthetics. Some of them were created from the reality unique to contemporary Tokyo. Others are fresh and different because they were created outside of Tokyo, and they are filled with the power to stimulate Tokyo intellectually and sensually.
Scopes that let us encounter the unfamiliar hidden in the familiar. Cross-cultural humor. Narratives waiting to be shared and visualized. The previously unformed has been given form… We hope to make the Tokyo Art Triennale a time when all of these things intersect. I hope to resonate with the myriad of contexts that lie within and around the huge city of Tokyo, to respond to the contexts of the world and of the future, and to unravel, even if only slightly, the super conundrum that lies before us today, the “division” of our time. As artistic director, together with the staff, artists, and audience, I would like to create a banquet of contexts in the name of Tokyo Art Festival.
Toshiki Okada
Okada will become the new artistic director of Tokyo Metropolitan Art Space (Performing Arts Division) on April 1, 2026.
