Preventing droplet transmission? Social distancing? Installed at the Higashi-gomon gate, a giant canvas is a solution to such requirements, enabling visitors to communicate even in silence! Whether it’s what you want to say or know, casual conversations, and small confessions, we invite you to interact playfully in an unusual style by drawing pictures and writing letters and signs. Your offhand “post” might receive many responses and comments! Please feel free to drop in and try out the real-life social media that you can only experience by visiting in person!

Happi is a classic festival outfit. Wearing a happi makes everyone happy! We built a factory where visitors could create their happi by decorating plastic craft sheets with various materials. Whether you are an adult or a child, choose your favorite color, shape, materials, and fictional characters to fill your original happi with happi-ness! Once you’re ready in your happi, come and join the parade!

This is a musical and dance performance created in collaboration with teenagers, chosen by audition. The program is intended as a realistic portrayal of each of their everyday lives and personal development. After online rehearsals connecting Tokyo and Shizuoka, we meet in person for the first time in May at the venue in Shizuoka―it is an attempt that strives to create a performance piece in a way that reconciles with the current situation.

All of Maywa Denki’s products are instruments and machinery. This concert is a “product demonstration” using the tools and machines made by Maywa Denki. The company president (Nobumichi Tosa) and workers sing and dance to automatic musical instruments controlled by computer.

Maywa Denki presents the mechanical musical, “Hige-hakase and nonsense☆machine.” In the performance, Hige-hakase (the bearded doctor) comes up with a nonsensical idea from which he invents the nonsense machine. With his assistants Ball-seijin (aliens from outer space covering their face with a ball), Hige-hakase sings and dances to music played by automatic musical instruments to demonstrate the nonsense machine.

The Tiny Princess of the Tiny Kingdom is always teased by the Enormous Prince of the Enormous Kingdom. The Tiny Princess asks Dr. Measure, who can measure anything, to set off on an adventure together to find enormous or long things in the Tiny Kingdom. After measuring various items, they come to realize that some things cannot be measured or compared.

About “By the Window”
This production, “By the Window,” is a series of short “phone-call” dramas that excerpts video calls between people living away from each other over the course of a single night. The original production streamed on YouTube Live in April 2020 will be recreated and tailored for STRANGE SEED Shizuoka.

Synopsis
Futa and Akino, who have been good friends since high school, often catch up on video calls to chat and relieve stress. One night, when they were engaged in idle chatter…

On the stage are our main musical instrument, “dishphone,” and other everyday utensils. kajii presents “Dishes sing,” a stunning performance produced with these instruments. It is an entertaining, participatory performance that you can relish by hearing, seeing, and touching!

We will make a curious musical instrument called “bane-kan (a can with a spring)”

Participants are welcome to play various musical instruments made of everyday objects.

I discovered the following fact from my experience working part-time as a cleaner. Firstly, cleaners are “invisible” people that rarely attract the attention of most people. Secondly, anyone can look like a cleaner if they wear a cleaner-like outfit and put out a yellow “cleaning in progress” sign even if they’re not real cleaners. On this occasion, I would like to perform with Shizuoka locals in the Sumpu Castle Park. We will also install a rest area for cleaners in the park to exhibit cleaning equipment and video works.

A stranger said he is an old friend of the person who used to be my wife. I didn't know him, but he knew me. He told me that she often talked about me. My ex-wife recounted by him was a stranger to me. He came to see who I am, the person who was with her. He was probably her secret boyfriend. Her voice in my mind no longer sounds as it used to.
A stranger said she is an old friend of the person who used to be my wife. I didn't know her, but she knew me. She told me that my ex-wife often talked about me. My ex-wife recounted by her was a stranger to me. The stranger came to see who I am, the person who was with her. She was probably her secret lover. The voice of my ex-wife in my mind no longer sounds as it used to.

Strolling, marching, plodding, and scuttling―ah, the beauty of upright, bipedal walking. This is a walking pantomime. Humans walk in multifarious ways. The pantomime “Walk” creates an illusion of moving forward by stomping our feet. Even though we can’t walk freely outside, this piece makes you feel like you can go anywhere. Ryutaro Okuma and the SPAC actors recreate and tailor “Team Walk,” a work performed at STRANGE SEED Shizuoka 2020 the park, for this year’s STRANGE SEED.

The City Hall is going to tell you a story - a made-up tragedy about itself. It pretends as if it had been abused by humans, ungrateful to those who built it. You shouldn’t listen to such a lie and bring a whip instead!

We fulfill a promise to meet up.
First, we have to wear our underwear.
Resonating with ourselves, we present a dance performance to cheer you up.

This is an elusive dance performance that comes and goes like a phantom. Two dancers of Aguyoshi will appear somewhere at the venue, dance, and disappear. They will present short performances intermittently in many locations of the venue, tailored to each environment. You are invited to take pictures of the dancers. You are lucky if you can spot them. Please take pictures and share them on social media.

I just want WORLD PEACE.
I'll do something for WORLD PEACE.
I'll do performances for living things all over the world.

When a family traveling the Atacama Desert rejoices at the sight of Magellanic Clouds, and lovers talk about the future of love at a table with game dishes, there might be a girl frightened by a bleeding man at an underpass in Paris. An endless sorrow hid underneath a great joy and a great joy that devours the boundless sorrow. From the past, present, to the future―in search of something that connects happiness and sorrow.

In times gone by in the Warring States period, there lived ninjas in the Hitoyoshi village.
One day, Nobunaga Oda, with a force of one hundred thousand men, attacked Hitoyoshi after confusing it with the neighboring Iga. With their strong will to protect “ohitoyoshi (soft-hearted people)” in the land of the rising sun, Hitoyoshi villagers, all of whom are “ohitoyoshi,” confront the troop of a hundred thousand in a “theatrical” battle.

That day, our god gave up on us…
GODHELL, a highly received play performed in 2019 and currently available on Z・A’s YouTube channel, will be rewritten and tailored into a new script for STRANGE SEED Shizuoka.
Although it sounds grandiose, the piece is a comedy after all, so please feel free to watch and enjoy the show.

--- The eight kingdoms of the Far East, the kings who chose their sacred beasts, and the people who received blessings. When did the kingdoms originate?
The performance unit HORIZON presents a Chinese-inspired fantasy drama in which you can enjoy traveling around fictional kingdoms. HORIZON introduces two of the eight kingdoms: "Zōng cha," the land of the earth and craftsmen, and "Jú hóng," the country of flames and martial arts. This is a story told by a bard named Huáng-guǎn, and the inhabitants of a beautiful world, deliver with music, words, and dance.

Selfies, someone-elsies, and dance - a subtle yet profound desire for self-assertion was shot with a shotgun, unashamedly visualized.

Dancers twist their bodies in contortion based on the sounds, chords, beat, and fragmented phrases that encapsulate them, while a rock band uses syncopation to control the speed of dance performance.

Someone was born, and then he was gone.
The next time I met him, he looked different. But it was certainly him.

I thought I had come a long way and turned back, only to see that I had just walked out the entrance door.

I get hungry and sleepy, but I find myself doing something.
Hello, hello. I’m right here.

Let’s go on a short, great journey.

We make a cup of tea and take a break.
Based on pantomime and clowning, we present a silent performance that comically depicts a slow time associated with tea.
The story develops rapidly according to the environment, unexpected happenings, and reactions of the audience, creating a show made possible only at this very moment and place.
It may not be a simple teatime, but we assure you that, at the end of the show, you will have a heartwarming sensation as if you just finished your cup of tea.

We are pleased to present the fourth work of the “Shoal of Crimson Fish series” created by SEKAIGEKIDAN’s Yukako Honbo as her life’s work! A shoal of white-painted fish appears around Tenko, a girl who is depressed by modern society, and starts swimming in the city of Shizuoka. Don’t miss out on the opportunity to see this alternative and pop open-air performance! Let’s fly in the immaculate sky and reconnect to the world!

I dance with my face painted white.
I also juggle and swallow swords.
The plot of my performance is as follows.

Feel a sense of nostalgia for unfamiliar landscapes.
The environment and cultural climate and tell us the history of the land.
When we feel the moisture in the soil and the warmth of wind and dazzled by the setting sun peeking out the edge of a mountain, we see a landscape devoid of form and time before us.
As we strip off our clothes and walk barefoot, the world was entirely natural.
There is a place, but not a self.
After a long day of dancing, all we do is sleep.

The Shizuoka-born manga artist Shiriagari KOTOBUKI will host a YouTube radio program, broadcasting from a radio booth at the Festival Garden in Sumpu Castle Park and a public space in front of the Higashi-gomon Gate. The “Kaoru Radio Station,” which was specially set up using timber from Oku-Shizu (a mid-hill area in Shizuoka City), welcomes performers, members of staff, and other guests involved in the WORLD THEATRE FESTIVAL SHIZUOKA and STRANGE SEED Shizuoka to deliver behind the scenes stories about the creative process and report on the day’s events from the venue.

Sponsor: Shizuoka City　Co-organizer: SPAC-Shizuoka Performing Arts Center