Aichi Triennale

Launched in 2010, the Aichi Triennale is an international arts festival held once every three years in Aichi Prefecture. The fourth holding of the festival with its 75-day schedule from August 1 to October 14, 2019, takes as its theme “Taming Y/Our Passion.” The program schedule involves more than 90 artists and groups from Japan and abroad. In selecting the artists to be invited this time, a primary priority was placed on gender equality. In addition to an international contemporary exhibition, the lineup includes a film program, performing arts and music programs, etc., thus covering the full spectrum of world-leading contemporary arts. The main venues are the Aichi Arts Center, the Nagoya City Art Museum and various sites around the city of Nagoya, and this year time there are also events planned to take place on the streets of Nagoya and in Toyohashi City.
The performing arts department director, Chiaki Soma, has gathered a program of 14 cutting-edge works from theatre and other genres from Japan and abroad. Foreign works on the performing arts program include director, playwright, film director, and journalist, Milo Rau’s Five Easy Pieces, a play that takes as its subject the tragic serial murders of five young girls that shook Belgian society in the 1990s. The Nature Theater of Oklahoma (U.S.) presents a work performed in collaboration with dancers and taking its title from one of the founding principles of the United States of America, Pursuit of Happiness, which portrays both the emptiness of the United States of America, and the megalomania exposed since Trump’s inauguration.
Other works include the Netherlands’ youth theater company Theater Artemis presenting the Japan debut of The Story of the Story, the work awarded the Silver Lion in the theatre division at the International Theatre Festival at Venice Biennial 2019. From Japan, Akita Takayama presents his Public Speech Project, which reinterprets public oratory through theater and performance theory; Satoko Ichihara (Q) presents a music theatre work that liberally interprets the themes and structure from the Greek tragedy The Bacchae (Euripides); and video artist Meiro Koizumi presents his first ever full-fledged theater piece using VR technology, which takes the Greek tragedy Prometheus Bound (Aeschylus) as its point of departure.
In addition, Nagoya’s Theater Urinko, a company that specializes in productions for children and youth, collaborates with Motoi Miura (director) and Ryota Kuwakubo (set designer) in a play performed by actors wearing latex body suits that become extensions of their skin and appearances by cyborgs.