This spring, IETM, the International Network for Contemporary Performing Arts, organised a three-day conference in Tokyo, in conjunction with TPAM, the Tokyo Performing Arts Market. During IETM@TPAM (March 3-5) around 300 professional cultural operators met together: directors of festivals, representatives of performing arts and producing companies, key figures from funding organisations, choreographers, artists, and others, all wishing to network and explore the meeting theme, “Reconsidering the Contemporary in Performing Arts”, in relation to Japanese and non-Japanese contexts. Most of them hailed from Japan, a large part came from the rest of Asia, a smaller proportion from Europe and several specialists arrived from other parts of the world.

Being a Belgian arts operator, writer and journalist I was curious to find out how performing arts work in Japan and Asia today; a subject that I knew little about before the meeting. As a membership organisation, IETM aims to stimulate the quality and development of contemporary performing arts on an international level by facilitating professional networking, communication and exchange of information. And this goal was, as far as I was concerned, achieved quite well– after a hectic three days in Tokyo, I returned to Belgium with more questions than answers and plenty of food for thought.

The location of the meeting was Yebisu Garden Place, a globalised city within a city made up of a mixture of offices and meeting spaces, a shopping complex, restaurants and even some exhibition platforms. On the morning of March 3 the keynote session, ‘Contemporary Performing Arts’, was led by a panel of speakers: Christophe Slagmuylder, the Director of KunstenFestivaldesArts (Brussels); Toshiki Okada, a playwright, director, novelist and founder of the theatre company chelfitsch (Tokyo); and Tadashi Uchino, Professor of Performance Studies at the University of Tokyo. The talk between the three presenters focussed on their past experiences and brought up a lot of interesting issues: notions of how to maintain ‘cutting edge culture’ in the context of the institutionalisation of the arts, notions of exoticism, orientalism and globalism, migration and mobility of artists, of ‘high’ and ‘low’ art tradition, of the disappearance of genre borders, of openness towards other cultures. The flow of the discussion seemed somewhat stilted due to the continuous alternation between English and Japanese and the time taken for translation – an issue that recurred throughout the meeting – but this session provoked significant questions that stayed with me after the it had finished: ‘What does it mean to “live” a city as an artist, and what influence does your “home base” have on your artistic work?’ and ‘What are the implications when a work is moved from one cultural context to another?’.

In subsequent sessions, the speakers’ presentations – often heavily interspersed with video clips – sometimes seemed to stand in the way of in depth discussion. As soon as the debate started to kick off, the allocated time ran out. Bringing together five people from totally different parts of the world and giving them free reign to present their views in just two hours is ambitious in itself, let alone starting a dialogue between them. But hey, this was a networking thing. So later in the bar, the face-to-face talks got a lot more interesting and fruitful, bringing up issues such as: what are the differences and similarities between Western and Asian production? Where does Japan stand in relation to this? How can we construct a network for the arts in Asia, and link it to other parts of the world?

From both these informal chats, and the organised sessions, I learned some of the main current concerns of Japanese performing arts professionals. One of these is that the Japanese identity can be seen as ambivalent: Japanese are considered “Eastern” by those in “the West” and “Westernised” by those in “the East”; these clichés lead to a modified behaviour in order to fulfil expectations. Another issue to arise was the problematic situation in Japan concerning funding and audience development: performances attract much smaller audiences than their Western counterparts as the Japanese seemingly prioritise other activities. A third issue to emerge was an apparent rupture between the traditional art forms and the “modern”, where ancient forms are given an elevated status, and traditional performing artists are almost likened to magicians.

Although the speakers’ discussions seemed to disregard work created from the nineties onwards, the Japanese dance critic Ishii Tatsuro thoroughly described the social, political and artistic contexts of the Butoh genre, in his lecture ‘Extension of Butoh and Emergence of Contemporary Dance: The Body in Dance in Japan Today’. His talk made fascinating links between the ideological roots of this movement – such as the ‘Anti-aesthetic body’, the ‘immediacy or site-specificity’, and the will to disturb institutions and establishments – and the works of European, Russian and American avant-garde writers and artists (Bataille, Genet, De Lautréamont, Allan Kaprow, Nijinski, Martha Graham and Maurice Béjart).

And what is the situation for the performing arts in Japan today? Tatsuro did not provide the answer. As the days went by and the lectures, talks and discussions accumulated, my vision became more and more fragmented, complex and problematic. Despite my frustration at the lack of a description of performing arts after the nineties, this multiplying of questions was always a good thing.

Expanding our thinking about the ‘contemporary’ beyond Japan to the rest of Asia, and the whole world, things became even more complex. “In Asia, traditional and modern cultures co-exist. I think we are now in the position to be able to create a common definition of what tradition is, even in the performing arts. The situation is different for every country in Asia, but exchanging encounters is easier than before and this has already had a tremendous impact on all parts of the world. Therefore networking is highly important”, said Matsui Kentaro, dance critic and Director of the Tokyo-based Setagaya Public Theatre. Christopher Bannerman, head of ResCen, a research centre at Middlesex University, U.K., which works with artists to research their creative processes, underlined the ‘up and coming’ position of Asia in the globalised performing arts market. “Contact with Asia is becoming more relevant for Europeans as the hegemony of the West in the performing arts field is fading,” he said. “Asia will be dominant again as it has been in past eras. The West is slowly realising that globalisation is becoming Easternisation.”

So what about bridging Asia and the “West”? In the final session, ‘Networking in the Age of Mobility’, the functioning of current networks was explored. And collectively, we (the session participants) brainstormed what needs to be done. We have some work ahead of us, it seems. Indonesia-based Amna Kusumo (founder of Kelola, a national non-profit organisation that promotes Indonesian art) explained: “We Asians don’t know anything about the other countries and cultures in Asia. So basically, the first step for a network for performing arts in Asia getting to know each other.” This possible lack of knowledge might be considered to be rooted in several issues, not least the language barriers and the totally different cultures and histories from country to country. The positive thing is that this current situation also creates a great feeling of freshness. During the last days of IETM@TPAM, not only did Asian participants seem to feel a strong(er) curiosity for learning more about developments in other countries, but there was also a shared feeling amongst all the participants that we were on the verge of some new beginning, which was a quite unique experience. “The ingredients are there to improve networking in Asia and introduce new possibilities,” explained Mary Ann DeVlieg (Secretary General of IETM), giving concrete examples of funding organisations like the Japan Foundation in Europe, and the Korea Arts Management Service in Seoul.

Now let’s hope that during IETM@TPAM, some operators found themselves in the lobby making plans to turn these reflections into reality, planting the possible seeds for long term relationships that will connect and reinforce the various existing networks in Asia and the world. In the end, we had come together to get to know each other (better) and think about networking. Afterwards, action should be undertaken, pushing this into a continuous process of knowledge exchange and reciprocal learning, strengthened by the awareness that there are many people out there who find themselves in more or less the same situation that you’re currently in.