Performances

World Premiere, New Commission

Eternal Labor

Profile

• Formed 2009 in Kanagawa, Japan. Based in Tokyo, Japan.

OLTA is a multidisciplinary collective founded in 2009. Their work, ranging from agriculture to installations, explores the nature of collective identity in today’s world while reinterpreting the meaning of community, ceremony, folklore, historical events, and the specificity of land and space. Their fieldwork looks at marginalized communities within society as well as labour, history, and customs that are liable to be overlooked. Bringing together art and theatre, their performance work interweaves elements including text, art, people, space, light, sound, and video. The five members of OLTA –Inoue Toru, Saito Takafumi, Hasegawa Yoshiro, Meguninja, and Jang-Chi– have in recent years, held many interdisciplinary performances at art festivals, theatres, and museums both in Japan and internationally. Through audience involvement, they create experiences that blur the lines between the quotidian and the historic, real and fiction, genders, and countries, all with rebellious play.
For Aichi Triennale 2025, they are presenting a new work foregrounding themes of “women” and “labour.” Building on their fieldwork in the northern coast of Kyushu, the Tsushima Strait, and the Korean Peninsula, this new work will both dynamically and playfully make full use of the theatrical space.

Selected performances and group exhibitions

2023

“The Japanese Ideology,” Yokohama International Performing Arts Meeting 2023, BankART Station (Kanagawa, Japan)/ROHM Theatre Kyoto (Japan)

2020

“Hyper Popular Art Stand Play,” ROHM Theatre Kyoto (Japan)

2016

Busan Biennale 2016: Hybridizing Earth, Discussing Multitude (Korea)

2014

16th Seoul Marginal Theater Festival (Korea)

2013

Visceral Sensation — Voices So Far, So Near, 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa (Ishikawa, Japan)