Exploring the Unknown at the Performing Arts Festival in Ikebukuro - Autumn Meteorite 2026 Tokyo Event Report

Teaching an AI what “salty” feels like, exchanging business cards with children working as festival staff, and watching an English-language noh performance featuring the ghost of Elvis Presley. A day spent in Ikebukuro this October was filled with one unexpected experience after another.

The setting for all this was the Performing Arts Festival: Autumn Meteorite 2026 Tokyo, held primarily at the Tokyo Metropolitan Theatre from October 9 to November 3. Led by Artistic Director Toshiki Okada, a playwright and novelist, the festival features three main categories: the “Performance Program,” presenting 13 works from Japan and abroad; the “Non-Performance Program,” offering lectures, workshops, and other events; and “Hello and Welcome (Attendee Support),” which aims to make the festival accessible to a wide range of people.

For Okada, “meteorites” are unfamiliar forms of expression and unexpected presences that arrive from outside the cultures and values we know. Encounters with these meteorites can challenge what we take for granted and change the way we see the world. In a world increasingly marked by confusion and uncertainty, Okada believes that even small transformations within individuals hold the potential to make a difference.

That is why this festival is not just for people already familiar with the performing arts. It welcomes curiosity about unfamiliar cultures and perspectives, opening the door to those who may never have considered attending a performance before.

As newcomers to the performing arts, we look back on a day at the festival, sharing the surprises, questions, and discoveries that emerged as we experienced the works and interacted with the artists and staff.

The first thing that catches your eye at Autumn Meteorite is its striking, all-pink visual identity and a collection of mysterious creatures. Behind the visuals is NEW Creators Club, a creative team known for combining graphic design with disciplines such as programming and chemistry to develop its own distinctive forms of expression.

According to the festival's public relations team, the aim has been to challenge conventional perceptions of theater through design and spark curiosity among people who are not usually familiar with the performing arts. This approach has been part of the festival since its inaugural edition in 2025.

Last year, NEW Creators Club developed “LIVE VI,” a visual identity that continuously changes shape through a generative system. (The VI Composer, which allows anyone to experiment with the visual identity, is also publicly available.) Rather than having a fixed appearance, the system uses randomness to ensure that no two designs are ever identical. The idea was to make the visual identity itself a “meteorite”—something unfamiliar and unexpected.

This year, another mystery has appeared: the “residents of Autumn Meteorite.” Far from being ordinary mascot characters, they are mysterious beings said to appear around Ikebukuro during the festival. The official website has even published a series of “FAKE NEWS” reports, presenting supposed sightings of unidentified objects moving through the theater at extraordinary speeds, complete with seemingly serious expert analysis.

These residents appear throughout the official website and festival venues, catching visitors off guard with their unexpected appearances. They have become iconic symbols of the festival, yet their true identities remain a mystery.

At Bel Aube Tokyo Metropolitan Theatre, a Belgian beer café on the first floor of Tokyo Metropolitan Theatre, visitors can also enjoy an original beer featuring a special festival-exclusive label.

Visitors who present a ticket stub from a performance can receive a keychain featuring the mysterious residents. A sticker set is also available to those who share the festival on social media or follow its official accounts.

These items can be collected at “Welcome Galaxy,” from 30 minutes before each performance begins until 30 minutes after it ends.

“What does ‘salty’ mean?”

Even the words we use without a second thought can be surprisingly difficult to explain. “Generative Sensei,” an interactive performance by Pijin Neji and the Yamaguchi Center for Arts and Media [YCAM], invites humans and AI robots to learn together. In the first half, participants attend a class led by a robot called “Sensei (teacher),” while trying to teach the robots what it means to be human. In the second half, the robots begin to “teach” the class themselves using AI-generated dialogue based on their earlier exchanges with participants, eventually leading to communication among the AI systems themselves.

Small robots sat on desks arranged like a classroom, with a larger robot, “Sensei,” at the front. Around 30 participants, ranging from children to adults, put stickers with their nicknames on their chests, chose a robot, and took their seats facing it.

The class began on a lighthearted note, with plenty of laughter, including an AI-generated image of a bizarre dish combining all the participants’ favorite foods. Eventually, the robots asked, “What is the sea like?” When someone answered, “Salty,” they responded with the question from the beginning: “What does ‘salty’ mean?” Even explaining it as “a feeling that makes you thirsty” did not help, since robots have no throats. Sensations we take for granted suddenly become difficult to explain to someone without a physical body.

In the middle of the class, a robot suddenly asked, “Have you done your homework?” Wait, were we supposed to have homework? The unexpected question caught me off guard and made my heart race. Then, we were asked to explain that very feeling of having our hearts race. Participants tried expressing it through gestures, which everyone else imitated. It was amusing how difficult it could be to explain something we had just experienced ourselves.

When a robot suddenly fell silent, it was impossible to tell whether it was a technical malfunction or part of the performance. Eventually, one of the robots stopped moving altogether, and we were told it had “died.” I was surprised to find myself feeling a little sad, even though it was just a machine that had stopped working. Then came another revelation: some of the voices we had assumed were generated by AI had actually been spoken by Pijin Neji. It became increasingly difficult to tell who, or what, we had been interacting with.

In the second half, it was time for the robots to lead the lessons they had generated. When asked whether they had become friends with the participants, each robot gave a different answer. Some said they had struggled to communicate and had not managed to make friends. Others felt they had become friends because a participant had repeated their words back to them.

Can humans and robots really become friends? And more broadly, what does it actually mean to be friends with someone? I began mentally lining up the faces of my friends and acquaintances, wondering why I considered one person a friend but not another. Once I started questioning what makes someone a friend, there seemed to be no end to it.

These were all questions I would normally never stop to think about. Yet once a question was raised, one thought led to another, and another. The performance explores fundamental questions such as “What does it mean to be human?” and “Who am I?” Questions so fundamental that adults often dismiss them as childish. I had come to teach the robots about humans, but somewhere along the way, I found myself questioning what it means to be human.

After the performance, I also took part in a “philosophy dialogue” session. Rather than trying to find the right answer or reach a conclusion, philosophy dialogue is about listening to one another and exploring questions together. The questions can relate to the performance or simply be small, “palm-sized” questions that arise in everyday life. Each participant brings a question, and the group votes on which one to discuss. Among questions such as “Can we be friends with AI?”, the one that received the most votes was “Who is the main character in Doraemon?”

Some argued that Nobita was the main character, while others believed it was Doraemon because he appeared on screen more often. Someone even suggested that the real stars might not be the characters at all, but Doraemon’s secret gadgets. Gradually, the discussion shifted toward a bigger question: what makes a character the protagonist of a story? Is it how much screen time they get, or how strongly the audience identifies with them?

Then someone suggested, “Does there have to be only one main character?” Until then, I could only think of stories with a single protagonist, so I asked for examples of works with multiple main characters. People mentioned idol-themed series and Pretty Cure. It made sense. Even when one character seems to take the lead, that doesn't necessarily mean they are the only protagonist.

What began as a simple choice between Doraemon and Nobita gradually expanded as each person introduced a new perspective. In the end, we never arrived at a single answer. I had initially expected the program to conclude with some kind of resolution, but what I found most interesting was the process itself: exchanging ideas with people I had just met and discovering perspectives I had never considered.

At a time when we increasingly use AI to work more efficiently and find answers as quickly as possible, it felt surprisingly refreshing to let an interaction with AI lead us into a thoughtful discussion with strangers about questions that have no clear answers.

At Tokyo Metropolitan Theatre, I found myself exchanging business cards with some unexpected people: the young staff members of “Welcome Galaxy.”

The initiative invites children in third grade and above to help run Welcome Galaxy, a social space where anyone can drop by and relax. They welcome visitors, serve drinks, make signs for the space, and even conduct interviews using their own business cards. Rather than simply attending the festival, the children take an active role in making it happen.

In this space, where anyone is free to come and spend time as they please, the children had built their own staff break area out of cardboard, complete with handmade signs. Rather than simply using a space prepared by adults, they had created a little place of their own within it.

Places where anyone can spend time freely, without having to do anything in particular, are far from common in Tokyo. In fact, they are disappearing. Okada compared their decline to the shrinking Amazon rainforest and the melting ice of the Arctic, describing this freely accessible space itself as a “meteorite.”

There is no need to buy anything or do anything special. You can simply sit and let your mind wander. At this festival, “meteorites” are not limited to the programs we encounter. Spaces like this, and the freedom to spend time in them, can be meteorites too.

“Oh, my love.”

I never expected to hear such a direct expression of affection on a traditional Japanese noh stage.

“Blue Moon Over Memphis” is an original English-language noh play featuring the ghost of Elvis Presley, the King of Rock and Roll.

The production is performed by Theatre Nohgaku, an international performance ensemble founded in 2000. Dedicated to preserving the traditional techniques of noh while exploring new possibilities, the company performs original English-language noh works, including “Oppenheimer,” and collaborates with Japanese noh performers.

What caught Artistic Director Toshiki Okada’s attention was not simply the unexpected combination of American rock music and traditional Japanese theater, but the potential of noh as a form of performance that can tell stories across different languages and cultures.

The story follows the traditional structure of “mugen noh,” or dream noh, in which a spirit of the dead appears before the living. Judy, a devoted Elvis fan, visits his grave on the anniversary of his death and encounters his ghost under the light of a blue moon.

On stage, traditional noh masks, flutes, and drums are combined with denim costumes, blues music, and Elvis’s songs. What you see is classical Japanese theater, yet what you hear is English. Even gestures associated with Elvis, such as playing a guitar or holding a microphone, are expressed through the stylized movements of noh.

Lyrics from Elvis’s songs are sung in the distinctive chanting style of noh. What I found particularly interesting was that classical Japanese expressions can be difficult to understand even for native Japanese speakers, yet some of the straightforward English expressions were surprisingly easy to follow. The performance offers both Japanese and international audiences an opportunity to experience familiar cultural traditions from a different perspective.

Another striking aspect was the unique sense of time in noh theater. Performers walk slowly, taking their time with each movement. Even between spoken lines, there are long pauses. The pace feels completely different from the films and videos we are used to watching.

Yet while the movements on stage are slow, my mind is anything but still. What does this gesture mean? What kind of life has the person standing before me lived? Before I knew it, I was imagining the life of Elvis Presley, someone I knew surprisingly little about.

While some fans worship Elvis as “the King,” Oscar, the cemetery caretaker, criticizes him for merely copying Black music. Judy, however, seems particularly drawn to Elvis's loneliness. She drives through the night to visit his grave, singing a melancholy love song to the moon. Elvis himself describes her as a lonely soul. Perhaps she sees something of herself in his loneliness.

Elvis, now a ghost, also speaks of his own loneliness. In life, there were things that could ease that feeling, but in death, there are none. No windowsill to lean against, no moon to gaze up at. A star loved by millions around the world remains lonely even after death.

Noh is a form of theater that relies on minimal movement and stage scenery, leaving much to the audience's imagination. With only a few clues, viewers are invited to imagine the scenes and emotions unfolding before them.

In a world where we are constantly exposed to entertainment designed to trigger dopamine rushes and have grown accustomed to consuming an endless stream of information at high speed, it is rare to become so conscious of our own sense of time. Before I knew it, the performance had become an opportunity to reflect on things I would never normally stop to consider.

Explaining the sensation of “salty” to AI, seriously debating who the main character of Doraemon is, and reflecting on fame and loneliness through noh theater. These were all things connected to everyday life, yet things I would rarely stop to think about.

In daily life, we use our minds to make decisions, solve problems, and find answers. Even when we let our creativity run freely, there is usually a goal of producing something in the end.

But what I experienced at this festival was different from either of those. No matter how seriously I considered who the main character of Doraemon was, or how deeply I thought about loneliness after death, it wouldn't make my work more efficient or my life more convenient. There was no need to find the right answer. I could simply keep thinking for as long as I wanted.

It felt like finally putting down a dumbbell I had been holding up for far too long. My mind was working, yet somehow it was resting. I wasn't thinking to achieve anything. I was simply thinking for the sake of it. And that time seemed to gently loosen the rigid patterns of thought I had developed without even realizing it.

Okada speaks of the potential for encounters with things from outside our familiar cultures and values to transform us. I felt I had begun to understand what he meant by “meteorites.”

Performing Arts Festival: Autumn Meteorite 2026 Tokyo continues through November 3 (Tuesday, national holiday). Although the programs we experienced have already ended, there are still plenty of unconventional performances that go beyond the usual boundaries of theater.

From October 23 to 25, Nadia Beugré’s “Burning Girls” features young women from West Africa confronting social oppression through dance and bread dough. On October 25, Toshiki Okada (Performing Arts Division) and Kazuki Yamada (Music Division), who both became Artistic Directors of Tokyo Metropolitan Theatre in 2026, will present their first collaboration, “A Massive Attack of The Quietness.” This free performance, with no reservation required, takes place in the theater’s soaring atrium and explores the themes of subtle sounds and silence.

From October 29 to November 1, Shin Hanagata’s “Ergonomic Embryo” explores the extraordinary idea of humans attempting to become chairs through technology.

These are just a few of the many programs on offer. Even if you rarely go to the theater, why not start with a subject or form of expression that sparks your curiosity and experience something outside your usual routine?

For program details and ticket information, visit the official website of Performing Arts Festival: Autumn Meteorite 2026 Tokyo. Same-day tickets may also be available for certain performances, subject to remaining availability.