Outline

date	Saturday, September 27, 2009, 19:30 – 22:00
Venue	BIRD Theatre, Shikanocho, Tottori City, Tottori Prefecture
Organizer	Artistic and Cultural Environment Studies Course
outline	Symposium: “Thinking about the future of regional theatre”

Details

As a joint project with the executive committee for the first Bird Theatre Festival, we held a symposium to consider the relationship between theatre and society. BIRD Theatre is a theatre troupe that has been headed by its director, Mr. NAKASHIMA Makoto, since 2006; it is also the name of the theatre building, the former Shikano Kindergarten and Elementary School, a disused school in Shikanocho in Tottori City which the troupe itself renovated and operates in and which serves as a base for its original plays and performances. In addition to Mr. NAKASHIMA, panelists included guest lecturers (in order of presentation, titles omitted) KOBAYASHI Mari (University of Tokyo), MATSUI Kentaro (theatre critic), ESHI Minako (Setagaya Public Theatre), ITO Yasuo (Toyama University), and GOTO Tomoko (Tottori University, member of BIRD Theatre Festival executive committee), who drew up a questionnaire and conducted a survey on the festival; NODA Kunihiro (Tottori University) served as moderator. Fifty-five people attended the symposium, including members of the festival audience as well as students and researchers in cultural policy who came from farther away. This program, part of a research project to examine the communal nature of theatrical performances and theatre buildings, is a sequel to the “Decade of Community Theatre” symposium held on the Waseda campus in February 2009, which also glanced at the communality that private theatre activities support. While the creation of high-quality works for the theatre is its primary mission, the unique activities of BIRD Theatre, which vigorously cultivates its relation with the local community, has attracted nationwide attention. The symposium was an opportunity to consider the significance of regional theatre in particular and to deepen the discussion of the issues facing a theatre that arises out of a local community and lays down roots there.
Regional cities have tended to experience the negative side of globalization. In order to enable these communities to make decisions and to act for and by themselves, urban planning that is original to each locale has become a hot topic, and it is important that high-quality artistic activities be carried out that originate from within. Among these activities, theatrical performances and theatre buildings as places for expressing and sharing physical and mental energy and as centers for the exchange of ideas and emotions epitomize many of the things that have been lost in modern society. In addition, regional, community-based activities open up new possibilities for creative activities by providing an environment in which work can be done concentratedly and by becoming an active agent in changing the future of the region through artistic activities that have a shared goal with the surrounding community. At present artists are solely responsible for the upfront investment as well as for the effort to win social acceptance for the value of drama that often can be hard to recognize. This point was made clear in the panel discussion, a lively and wide-ranging debate which covered many areas including problems with the current funding system for the arts, evaluation difficulties and new experiments, hints for running a regional theatre culled from historical research and the significance of workshops and collaboration with universities and other regional institutions.