Performing Arts across Borders: Exchange among Three Neighbouring Countries

Takehito Mitsui*

BeSeTo Festival 29 + Bird Theatre Festival 18 in Tottori, Japan

The 29th BeSeTo Festival was held together with the 18th Bird Theatre Festival in Tottori, Japan, in the autumn of 2025. Each year, the East Asian theatre festival is hosted by a city in one of three countries—China, South Korea or Japan. What made Tottori distinctive as the host city was that it was the smallest city ever to host the event, with a population of only about 180,000. By contrast, the previous years’ hosts were the South Korean city of Gwangju, with a population of roughly 1.4 million, and the Chinese city of Shenzhen, with about 18 million. In addition, the main venues of the festival were located in a rural area called Shikano, half an hour’s drive from the city centre. The venues included a renovated former school gymnasium and a disused assembly hall, both of which had been abandoned due to depopulation in the area. This short review starts with a discussion of two iconic performances presented during the first week of the festival (20 and 21 September 2025).

Tom (Naohisa Nakagaki) is talking to his mother, Amanda (Wang Yinan) in *The Glass Menagerie*. Photo: Courtesy of the Festival

The opening performance of the festival was a multilingual production of Tennessee Williams’s The Glass Menagerie, directed by Akifumi Shiga. Chinese, South Korean and Japanese actors collaborated with the Japanese director, spending over five weeks creating the work for the festival. Originally set in St. Louis in the late 1930s, this multilingual production can be read as transposing the story to the Shanghai International Settlement before the Second World War, a cosmopolitan space where multiple languages coexisted in daily life. The Chinese-speaking actor Wang Yinan, dressed in Western-style attire of the period, portrays Amanda—a casting and costume choice that particularly underlines this interpretation. Her Amanda, inconsiderate yet self-determined, responsible and lovable, acts tirelessly for the sake of her children, the Japanese-speaking Tom and the Korean-speaking Laura. Her fast-paced speech and expansive gestures, contrasting with her children’s restraint, accentuate Amanda’s dominance and their inability to confront, although her authority fails to bring any true success or fulfilment to the family. It may be said that this uneasy familial hierarchy within the multilingual setting metaphorically reflects the precarious political tensions that characterized Shanghai during that period.

Tom (Naohisa Nakagaki) observes his sister Laura (Kim Yubin) through a semi-transparent curtain in *The Glass Menagerie*. Photo: Courtesy of the Festival

At the beginning of the scene in which Tom (Naohisa Nakagaki) begins to narrate the story of the family he has left behind, a semi-transparent curtain (Stage Design: Koichi Ishii) veils the entire stage behind him. As the story unfolds, this curtain, which restricts the audience’s view and prevents them from fully witnessing the events taking place, moves back and forth across the stage from scene to scene throughout the performance. The shifting curtain cleverly suggests that the episodes told by Tom are filtered through his fragile and wavering memory, which is fading due to his drinking problem and his possible tendency to conceal or reshape the truth for his own convenience.

Meanwhile, the South Korean performer Kim Yubin’s Laura appears timid even in front of her family, as if there were a language barrier. When speaking with the Japanese-speaking Jim (Daiki Takeuchi), her anxiety deepens, seemingly revealing a quiet doubt about being understood, even though she naturally converses between three languages at home. Her anxiety gradually dissipates only when the two draw closer in front of the glass menagerie—just before she realises that what prevented her from truly communicating with Jim was not language, but, more painfully, her innocence and inexperience in recognising that he has been already engaged to another woman.

Chidori returns to her hometown to open her own hair salon in 1956 in *Shikano Time Travel Tour: Chidori’s Dream—Deluxe.* Photo: Shinji Nakashima

Shikano Time Travel Tour: Chidori’s Dream—Deluxe, directed by Makoto Nakashima, stood out as one of the festival’s most distinctive and memorable productions. Categorised as an immersive and site-specific performance, the piece invites the audience to journey through time and space, tracing the life of Chidori, who was born in the small historic town of Shikano, where the theatre is located, as they wander through the town’s streets. The story begins more than four hundred years ago, when a castle stood on the mountain overlooking the town. As the audience is guided through the streets, the everyday lives of the townspeople, who laid the foundations of the present-day historic town, and their warm, affectionate relationship with their lord are comically portrayed. Then, after the narrative passes through a subtle dislocation of time and space, blurring the boundaries between different periods, the main story begins in the years following the end of the Second World War, during the American occupation of Japan. Chidori, the daughter of a single mother who works as a hairdresser, is born.

What makes this site-specific production unique and iconic is that the main character, Chidori, is portrayed by several actors, including ten local volunteers who, like Chidori, grew up in the area. This casting choice is slightly puzzling for the audience at first, but gradually it becomes clear that her story is not told by a single professional actor, but collectively by the members of the local community. They are certainly not professional actors, but what makes their performances truthful and convincing is their inner confidence, drawn from local knowledge and from having shared similar experiences to those of Chidori. In other words, this casting choice reinforces the sense of a collective local narrative.

Chidori eventually decides to follow in her mother’s footsteps and become a hairdresser, leaving behind her irreplaceable friends and family to move to Tokyo, the nation’s capital. Life in the city is full of stimulation and opportunity, and Chidori thrives to the point of becoming an assistant hair and makeup artist in film productions. At this stage, the audience might expect the story to continue unfolding in Tokyo. However, Chidori eventually returns to her hometown, where she opens a beauty salon that blends the latest Tokyo trends with the local sensibility, and she finds success once again. This trajectory contrasts sharply with the depopulation crisis faced by many rural regions in Japan, where young people often leave for education or work and never come back. The work’s intention to celebrate the vitality of local life and community is powerfully conveyed.

The most surprising revelation comes at the end, when the real son of the woman who inspired Chidori appears on stage, standing beside the actor portraying him, both dressed in identical costumes. In fact, one of the scenes showing Chidori at work as a hairdresser was performed in front of this very salon, though many in the audience, including myself, possibly did not realise that it was the actual shop founded by the real Chidori. The production reminds us of the importance of inheriting local stories and highlights the vital role of the theatre that stands within the community. Shikano Time Travel Tour: Chidori’s Dream—Deluxe is truly a work that could only be performed by the local residents in the town.

The son of Chidori’s real-life model (right) stands beside the actor (Yoriaki Saito) who has been portraying him in *Shikano Time Travel Tour: Chidori’s Dream—Deluxe.* Photo: Shinji Nakashima

Another notable performance was South Korean Theatre Company Haddangse’s The Time Painter, which offers a striking portrayal of ordinary young people’s involvement in the 1980 Gwangju Uprising, employing paper craft in the style of object theatre. The performance first comically depicts everyday life, but this ordinary reality is abruptly torn apart, like paper ripped in two, by the eruption of violent conflict, exposing the fragility of their daily lives and evoking the event’s profound emotional and historical resonance.

Finally, I wish to emphasise that the three neighbouring countries share a complex historical and political relationship that has often hindered cultural exchange. The BeSeTo Festival therefore serves as an important platform for fostering cultural connection and mutual understanding today. Furthermore, living in Japan today, I feel that opportunities to experience overseas theatre productions have decreased compared to before the pandemic, due to inflation. Likewise, the increasing costs of travel and accommodation have made international theatre festivals abroad less accessible. Although Tottori, where the festival took place, is rather far from major cities such as Tokyo and Osaka, its affordable accommodation, beautiful natural surroundings, and the warm hospitality of local volunteers are deeply appealing. The experience also reminded me of the need to reconsider the excessive concentration of theatre in urban areas.

*Takehito Mitsui is a theatre critic and Adjunct Lecturer in the Department of Informatics at Kindai University, Japan. He began his academic career after working briefly as an assistant producer with an international theatre company. While teaching English, he regularly publishes theatre reviews in both English and Japanese. He is also a core member of the International Association of Theatre Critics Japan Centre.

This work is licensed under the
Creative Commons Attribution International License CC BY-NC-ND 4.0.

Share this: