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The Tokyo Festival Executive Committee is pleased to announce that the Performing Arts Festival: Autumn Meteorite 2025 Tokyo (aka Autumn Meteorite) will take place from October 1 to November 3, 2025 at the Tokyo Metropolitan Theatre and other locations in Ikebukuro.

 

The Artistic Director will be Toshiki Okada, who is active both in Japan and overseas as a playwright, director, novelist, and leader of the theater company chelfitsch. Under a new team, led by Okada, Autumn Meteorite aims to become a truly international performing arts festival that is inclusive and open to a wider public.

 

The festival will present 15 (subject to change) diverse works of performing arts from Japan and abroad. It will also feature related programs, workshops, and initiatives to enhance accessibility, offering participants various ways of experiencing the festival. It will allow audiences to understand and relate more directly with performing arts from Japan and around the world that are happening here and now. It will create opportunities to become aware of different realities and reconsider our world through fresh perspectives. The festival will also serve as a platform to discover new domestic talent and promote international exchange among young professionals in the performing arts.

Toshiki Okada is highly acclaimed both domestically and internationally for his unique methodology exploring the relationship between language and the body as well as for his sharp insight into contemporary society. Under his direction, this Tokyo-based festival aspires to become a more globally connected event that is forward-thinking, original, creative, and international. 

 

Performing Arts Festival: Autumn Meteorite 2025 Tokyo Official Teaser Site
https://autumnmeteorite.jp

 

 

 

 

In this context, meteorite is a metaphor. It represents something that does not exist here in front of us, something totally different to what we are used to. These foreign elements come here to us — us who already exist in this place — and our paths cross. We are introduced to new forms and frameworks of thinking. Our senses and minds are stimulated in unfamiliar ways. It is this ambition of ours of wanting to become such a phenomenon that my team and I have incorporated into this name, Autumn Meteorite.

The inaugural edition of Autumn Meteorite 2025 Tokyo is curated with a strong focus on the relationship between art and reality. This is because through the lens of art, we believe it is possible and important to question, destabilize, and reframe the reality that we live in, the reality that we are confronted with everyday, and the reality that we tend to recognize as being dominant and definitive.

By taking this approach, Autumn Meteorite 2025 Tokyo seeks to change and expand the context in which performing arts can operate. We aim to ensure that experiences generated through performing arts permeate and have an impact on real life.

To truly embody the role of a meteorite, the festival will invite artists and works with different perspectives and aesthetic styles from various regions. Yet, that in itself is not enough. The performing arts are in many ways a form of collaboration, especially between the performance and its audience. Another goal of Autumn Meteorite 2025 Tokyo is to ensure accessibility and welcome a diverse audience.

This is the ambition of the Performing Arts Festival: Autumn Meteorite 2025 Tokyo. It will be a vibrant celebration of different perspectives with the aim of questioning, destabilizing, and reframing our relationship with reality. We invite you to experience it.

 

 

Toshiki Okada is a playwright, novelist, and the director of the theater company chelfitsch. In 2005, he received the 49th Kishida Kunio Drama Award for Five Days in March. In 2007, he participated in the Kunstenfestivaldesarts, held in Brussels, with his work Five Days in March. Since this debut of his work overseas, he has continued to present works not only domestically but also internationally, putting on performances in over 90 cities across Asia, Europe, North America, and South America. Okada’s work also involves many international co-productions such as God Bless Baseball in 2015 featuring a Japanese and Korean cast, Pratthana – A Portrait of Possession in 2018, which is based on a Thai novel by Uthis Haemamool featuring Thai actors and which received the 27th Yomiuri Theater Awards Selection Committee Special Prize, as well as Metamorphosis of a Living Room in 2023 commissioned by Wiener Festwochen. Since 2016, he has also consistently created and directed works in a repertory program at a renowned public theater in Germany. In 2020, his work The Vacuum Cleaner (Münchner Kammerspiele) and in 2022, Doughnuts (Thalia Theater, Hamburg) were selected as part of the Berliner Theatertreffen’s “10 Remarkable Productions.” His work Unfulfilled Ghost and Monster – ZAHA / TSURUGA won the 72nd Yomiuri Prize for Literature (Play/Scenario Award) and the 25th Tsuruya Namboku Drama Award. This play together with his opera Yuzuru received the Director Award of the 29th Yomiuri Theater Awards in 2022. As a novelist, he published The End of the Moment We Had (Shinchōsha) in 2007, which won the 2nd Kenzaburō Ōe Prize. In 2022, he received the 35th Mishima Yukio Prize and the 64th Kumanichi Literary Award for his novel Broccoli Revolution (Shinchōsha). 

 

 

 

 

NEW Creators Club (NEW), established in 2019, has been appointed to handle the creative direction of Autumn Meteorite with their main focus on developing a communication tool for the festival. Embracing the festival’s concept of challenging definitive perceptions of reality and of expanding the context in which performing arts can operate in the face of reality, the visual design will reflect this mission.

As the first step, NEW will establish the visual identity (VI) of Autumn Meteorite 2025 Tokyo. Based on this VI, visual expressions and designs associated with the festival will be presented in the form of logos and key visuals. These designs will not be fixed graphics, but will act as a generator—a dynamic system that can change its appearance depending on the users who experience the visuals.

By using this generator, the visual design of Autumn Meteorite 2025 Tokyo will constantly evolve, reflecting a particular occasion or medium of expression. This concept of an ever-changing VI, dubbed LIVE VI, will support the festival from a visual perspective.

 

 

 

The name Autumn Meteorite was unexpected but powerful. In terms of visual communication, a conventional logo would have sufficed, but we believed that the VI system itself should embody Mr. Okada’s idea of a meteorite (something that does not exist here, something totally different to what we are used to). The result is LIVE VI — a concept that suits a live performing arts festival. So what is LIVE VI? It is a system that is not defined by a single shape or motion, but one that morphs continuously. To create this VI system, we developed a generator built with various sensors and parameters. The generator is installed with a preset function that can be used as a feature of standard asset management, however, random numbers are always used for the design output, ensuring that no two visuals are ever the same. The question is: how receptive are we to this meteorite?

 

 

Profile: NEW Creators Club
NEW Creators Club is a full-stack design organization that brings together a diverse group of creators with various specialities and insatiable curiosity. As a creative partner to enterprises that strive for a new society, culture, and environment, NEW develops various branding strategies both in Japan and internationally. It supports projects by clarifying their missions and defining unique design systems to achieve their goals. Furthermore, NEW aims to make a strong impact on existing norms. It is dedicated to presenting a vision to business brands by combining new missions and new creative outputs.

Instagram: @new__jp X: @neeeewjp Podcast: NEW Podcasters Club
NEW Creators Club (NEW) Website here

 

 

 

 

Festival Name: Performing Arts Festival: Autumn Meteorite 2025 Tokyo

 

Dates: Wednesday, October 1 – Monday (national holiday), November 3, 2025
Venues: Tokyo Metropolitan Theatre, GLOBAL RING THEATRE (Ikebukuro Nishiguchi Park Outdoor Theater), and additional venues

 

Organizer: Tokyo Festival Executive Committee [Tokyo Metropolitan Government, Tokyo Metropolitan Theatre (Tokyo Metropolitan Foundation for History and Culture)]
Support: Agency for Cultural Affairs, Government of Japan Japan Arts Council
Sponsor: Asahi Group Japan, Ltd.

Number of Programs: 15 (subject to change)

Performing Arts Festival: Autumn Meteorite 2025 Tokyo

Official Teaser Site: https://autumnmeteorite.jp

X: @autumnmeteorite（https://x.com/autumnmeteorite）
Instagram: @autumnmeteorite（https://www.instagram.com/autumnmeteorite)
Facebook: @autumnmeteorite（https://www.facebook.com/autumnmeteorite） 

 

 

※Full program details will be announced in July 2025.
※Please note that event details are subject to change.