There are evenings in the cultural life of a city that carry the weight of tectonic movement — slow, monumental, imperceptible at first, but changing the landscape forever. The opening of the Georgian International Festival of Arts (GIFT) 2025 on October 25 at the Tbilisi Opera and Ballet Theater was one such evening. Under the vast dome of the iconic building, the legendary Japanese Butoh company Sankai Juku performed Meguri – Teeming Sea, Tranquil Land, a work of hypnotic stillness and cyclical transformation. With this event, Tbilisi did not simply host another international performance; it positioned itself, quietly yet decisively, as a site where the world’s most profound forms of performance art converge to speak of time, decay, and renewal.
The Return of the Sacred Slowness
To witness Meguri is to enter a space where time ceases to flow linearly. Ushio Amagatsu’s choreography unfolds, like a geological process, through accumulation and erosion. The title itself — Meguri, meaning “circulation” or “return” — gestures toward the cosmological rhythm of water, seasons, and the shifting skin of the earth.
The stage, draped in spectral white dust, resembles both an archaeological site and a post-apocalyptic plain. Dancers, heads shaved and bodies powdered, move as if awakening from millennia of sleep. They tremble, then float, then collapse, carried by the minimalist and haunting score by Yoichiro Yoshikawa — music that sounds like the slow respiration of an ancient planet.
Amagatsu, the 75-year-old master of Butoh, crafts silence as a living organism. Each gesture exists in suspension, each pause thick with invisible tension. The body becomes a landscape — an extension of stone, sea, and air — embodying what the choreographer calls “the circulation of life.”
Meguri is both a meditation and a lament. It is a requiem for the Anthropocene, yet also an act of faith in continuity. Within its abstract vocabulary lies a subtle political truth: when the world rushes forward at a devouring speed, to move slowly is an act of resistance.
Between Japan and Georgia: A Geography of Exchange
That Sankai Juku opened GIFT 2025 is no coincidence. Supported by the Agency for Cultural Affairs of Japan and the Ministry of Culture of Georgia, their return to Tbilisi (after their 2017 appearance at the same festival) signals more than artistic collaboration. It is a quiet dialogue between two cultures that share a deep reverence for ritual, silence, and the sacred in the everyday.
At the opening ceremony, Japan’s Ambassador to Georgia, H.E. Ishizuka Hideki, expressed gratitude to the festival organisers and noted the significance of this exchange — a gesture that might seem diplomatic, yet in this context, felt almost metaphysical. For Georgia, still navigating its post-Soviet identity and global cultural presence, GIFT has become a vessel of dialogue — a platform where artistic gestures transcend the language of geopolitics.
In this sense, the arrival of Sankai Juku was more than an import of high art; it was a mirror held to Tbilisi itself — a city oscillating between ancient and modern, sacred and secular, silence and chaos.
The Mask and Memory: “André & Dorine” and the theater of Forgetting
Four days later, the Spanish company Kulunka Teatro performed André & Dorine at the Marjanishvili Theater — a poetic counterpoint to Meguri. If Amagatsu’s piece traced the cosmic cycle of the earth, André & Dorine mapped the intimate geography of memory. Performed entirely without words, this masked theater work tells the story of an aging couple — André with his typewriter, Dorine with her cello — whose shared life begins to fade under the slow erasure of Alzheimer’s.
The performers — Garbine Insausti, Edu Cárcamo, and Mikel Insausti — transform latex masks into fragile, almost human faces. Every tilt of the head, every trembling hand, evokes the ache of recognition and loss. Music by Yayo Cáceres weaves through the silence, a gentle reminder of what remains when words vanish.
What makes this performance extraordinary is its paradoxical vitality. Even as memory disintegrates, theater becomes a space of preservation. The body remembers what the mind forgets.
If Meguri explored the cyclical life of the planet, André & Dorine explored the cyclical life of love — its blooming, its decay, its spectral persistence. Together, the two opening productions framed GIFT 2025 as an inquiry into temporality itself: how humans endure the slow movement of time, whether through ritual or tenderness.
GIFT 2025: The Aesthetics of Stillness
Over the past decade, the Georgian International Festival of Arts — “Gift” in both name and meaning — has evolved from a local celebration into one of the most vital international art festivals in the Caucasus. Founded with the vision of bridging Georgia with the global avant-garde, GIFT has consistently brought to Tbilisi artists whose works exist beyond entertainment — artists who investigate what it means to live, move, and remember in the 21st century.
The 2025 edition, curated with remarkable intellectual coherence, seems to consolidate GIFT’s new status: a festival where international art is not presented to Georgia, but presented through Georgia. The selection of Sankai Juku and Kulunka Teatro as opening acts reveals a curatorial sensibility that values the intersection of form and philosophy, ritual and empathy, global aesthetics and local resonance.
In a time when much of the global art market is driven by immediacy and visibility, GIFT insists on duration, process, and encounter. It asks its audience to dwell in the in-between — in silence, in fragility, in the human condition stripped of noise. What unites Meguri and André & Dorine is the courage to slow down. In both, stillness is not absence but plenitude. Amagatsu’s dancers, covered in pale dust, seem to embody geological patience; Insausti’s masked figures, frozen in the half-smile of memory, capture the beauty of forgetting.
Review by Ivan Nechaev
