Open Call: Intersecting Peripheries
Toyooka Theater Festival 2025
International Collaboration Project:“Intersecting Peripheries”
We are now accepting applications from artists, producers, and researchers interested in international collaboration!
Explore how performing arts can foster new connections in regions that are neither urban nor central—so-called “peripheral” areas in cultural or social contexts.
Program Dates:
Group A: Sep 12–16, 2025
Group B: Sep 19–23, 2025
Details & Application:
https://toyooka-theaterfestival.jp/wp-content/uploads/2025/06/Intersecting-Peripheries-Application.pdf
Intersecting Peripheries
The Toyooka Theater Festival began in 2020, during the COVID-19 pandemic.
As physical contact and mobility were restricted, and the very nature of how we connect with people and places came into question, we continuously reexamined the role of performing arts.
In particular, we believe that traditional performing arts, which have long played vital roles in communities, may offer important insights into how we might reconsider the function of contemporary performance today.
We are drawn to the sense that cultural practices in places that are neither urban nor central—regions often referred to as rural or peripheral—are deeply intertwined with global change.
Population decline and shifting social structures across East Asia and beyond, the increasing frequency of natural disasters and climate change worldwide, and the search for new ways to connect culture and society in a post-globalization era—these are the complex and rapidly evolving conditions we face.
This program is an attempt to create a space for international dialogue and collaboration that, through the medium of performing arts, reweaves the relationship between local communities and the wider world amid these turbulent transformations.
We are calling on producers, artists, researchers, and others who resonate with this perspective to join us in Toyooka—thinking, engaging, observing, and expressing together in the field.
Through field research, conversations with local residents, performances, presentations, and feedback sessions, we aim to cultivate a space where diverse experiences and perspectives intersect and enrich one another.