In addition to the intimate performances of dance, music and theatre in its small venues, the Esplanade—Theatres on the Bay’s inaugural “Super Japan: Japanese Festival of Arts” last month also featured a couple of productions on a much grander scale.

In the Esplanade Concert Hall, the Suntory Hall’s 30th-anniversary production “Himiko: Memories of the Sun Goddess” stunned the audience with an ingenious interpretation of an ancient myth on the themes of birth and revival, blending classical and contemporary music composed by Yoshihiro Kanno, who also held the baton. This unique performance was the brainchild of Kanno, kabuki actor Fukusuke Nakamura, violinist Yasuko Ohtani and shamisen performer Mojibei Tokiwazu and saw such western instruments as cello and organ sharing the stage with their Japanese counterparts, the shamisen and koto. Dancers also moved on the same stage and interacted with musicians in such a way that there was no boundary between dance and music. And because the Suntory Hall, where the performance premiered two years ago, has its stage in the middle, the restage deftly had members of the monks’ chorus entering and exiting through the foyer stalls, walking along the aisles past the audience, thus further involving us in their sublime pageant.

Over the same weekend, across the Concourse at the Esplanade Theatre, the globetrotting butoh group Sankai Juku’s “Meguri: Teeming Sea, Tranquil Land”, which premiered last year in Fukuoka, took the audience on another immaculate journey of what director, choreographer and designer Ushio Amagatsu described as “phenomena like circulating water and all things that rotate.” While this concept risked repetition and predictability, his choreography made sure that this was not the case.

Having watched six Sankai Juku productions on four continents over the past 22 years, I’ve become a loyal fan and am inevitably delighted by the surprises I encounter in this contemporary art. Here, the grounded and highly articulated dance movements in some scenes were swifter than what we generally expect from butoh and Sankai Juku.

The textured backdrop, on which Amagatsu had recreated the image of fossils of the Paleozonic marine creatures, was a sharp contrast to the floor dispersed with sand and the performers powdered| in white, yet when swathed in different hues of lights took on a life of its own, as if another group of dancers were moving vertically.

In the end, we came to realise that in this contemporary world where everything moves so swiftly, we all need to pause, to relax and to contemplate and let our imagination freely take us to places we cannot reach, not even on the Internet.

These two performances explained why our curiosity about and fascination with Japanese culture has never faded and will likely continue. We love their traditional as much as contemporary and there’s plenty more for us to discover and cherish.

“Himiko” and “Meguri” are also prime examples of – and this is quite different from what our own Culture Ministry believes – the fact that an Asian performing arts culture needs not project only its traditional roots and pretend it has never encountered modernisation and westernisation.

We’re all using mobile phones, aren’t we?

Another blockbuster

– Esplanade’s annual da:ns festival is in October but the da:ns series continues with “The Sleeping Beauty” from August 4 to 7. Tickets cost S$40 to $125 at http://www.Sistic.com.sg. For more, http://www.Esplanade.com.