High on a mountain top covered with tea bushes in Shizuoka Prefecture, Kim Itoh is dancing his solo piece "Nerve Maze Garden 2" in one of the most aesthetically pleasing venues in Japan. Designed by architect Arata Isozaki as part of the Shizuoka Performing Arts Park, Daendo Hall is a small oval theater with a high-arching ceiling reminiscent of sail rigging in the way the beams of cypress support the entire structure. The floor, polished black and sibilant as befits a theater that can be used for traditional Japanese performing arts such as noh, mirrors the vaulted ceiling and shoji-spaced walls.

But this performance is as far from the traditional arts as it is possible to get. Itoh, dancing and communicating in monosyllabic grunts with a chair, is one of the solo dancers participating in the season of solo dance by Japanese performers April 23-May 4. It was held as part of the ongoing Theatre Olympics, a festival of performance bringing together stage artists from all over the world that started April 16.

Japan is the second country to host the festival after the first held, appropriately enough, in Greece in 1995. The next festival will be held in Moscow in 2001. As befits the largest festival of performing arts ever to be held in this country, the event demands expert planning, applicable venues and facilities that can handle visitors in waves.