Toshiki Okada / Thalia Theater

Japanese theatre star Toshiki Okada invites his audience to encounter the hypermodern in real concrete spaces: at a late-night tube station in Tokyo, in a karaoke bar, in a residential house. There, he approaches them with the tools of the contemporary version of the Japanese Nōo–ō Theatre technique. For “Doughnuts” he is gathering a handful of conference guests in a hotel lobby. The world is like a doughnut: lots of edge and a hole in the middle. An empty space that grows ever bigger, with the increasing erosion of all certainties. A perfect image for a modern phenomenon: A species takes over a foreign living space and causes confusion. A bear in the supermarket, a mutating virus or social media without likes. It reaches a point where nobody knows anymore whether their own way of thinking is still valid – not least because humanity demands a redefinition of its values at high speed. Or even: because humans lose the connection to speed.