Session House opened in 1991 on a back street in Kagurazaka, a few minutes from Kagurazaka Station. It has been in the same building ever since. What follows is the short version of thirty-five years; the full year-by-year record, running to several hundred programmes, is kept on our Japanese chronology page.

 

1991 - A room that opened with music

The dance classes came first. They began in April 1991 on an open system - no membership, no audition - with five teachers, among them Yasuyo Omoto and Naoko Ito, who had left the Watanabe Modern Dance Company four years earlier to work on her own.

 

The theater opened two months later, in June, with an opening party and an inaugural concert. It is worth saying plainly that the room did not start as a dance venue. The first performance was a percussion session by Midori Takada (高田みどり), followed by a solo and duo evening with the pianist Masahiko Satoh (佐藤允彦). In August came the first artist invited from abroad, the Ghanaian drummer Aja Addy, and in September a Japan-Korea session with Satoh, Midori Takada and the saxophonist Kang Tae Hwan (姜泰煥).

 

Dance arrived in the room in December, when about twenty students from Naoko Ito's class put on a performance of their own called "Hat Hat Cafe." That order of events - musicians first, then the people who had been taking class - set the pattern for everything after it. Session House has never been only a place where finished work is shown.

 

1993-1999 - A company, a gallery, a platform

In 1993 two things started that are still running. Dancers began producing their own evenings here, under the name that grew into Theater 21 Fes; and Naoko Ito founded Mademoiselle Cinema, which became the company in residence.

 

In November 1995 the second floor opened as Gallery "Garden," with an exhibition of prints. From then on the building held two things at once: performing arts below ground, visual art upstairs, each drifting into the other.

 

1997 was a dense year. Condors gave their first solo performance here. The croquis sessions began - life drawing with dancers as models, still held today. The first dance company from abroad was invited. Theater 21 Fes became a regular series, which it has remained: by autumn 2026 it reaches volume 141.

 

In 1999 Mademoiselle Cinema performed abroad for the first time. The company named its touring work "Traveling Dance," and has since performed in France, Germany, Bulgaria, Austria, Romania, Poland, Portugal, Korea, Mexico, Ethiopia and the United States. The same year, the company Mizu to Abura (水と油) appeared in one of our selected programmes.

 

2001-2011 - Building the ladder

The tenth anniversary year, 2001, is when the programmes that define Session House today took shape. University Dance Cross (UDC) began, bringing student dancers from universities across Japan together on one stage. Ringo Planning grew into an exchange project for young dancers, with Ryohei Kondo taking over as its artistic director in 2004. The Ichie Watanabe talk series started. A residence artist scheme brought choreographers into the building for longer than a single run.

 

What emerged was a ladder rather than a single stage. A dancer might take a class, enter a ten-minute piece in Theater 21 Fes, be selected for the fifteen-minute Dance Flower programme, and eventually produce a full evening. That structure is still how the place works.

 

Recognition followed. In 2005 Session House received the 13th CATA Regional Culture Award. In 2008 Naoko Ito won the Newcomer's Prize in the dance section of the 63rd National Arts Festival of the Agency for Cultural Affairs, for "A Strange Place." In 2011, the twentieth anniversary year, Mademoiselle Cinema took the Audience Prize at the Gryfino international festival in Poland.

 

2020 - The year the room closed

From March 2020 performances were cancelled one after another under the state of emergency. The response, in May, was to open the Session Online Theater: a run of streamed solo performances, beginning with Mariko Kakizaki (柿崎麻莉子) and continuing with Ruri Mito (三東瑠璃) and others. The gallery upstairs lost exhibitions to the same cancellations, and recovered its programme the following year.

 

Streaming did not replace the room, but it stayed. Several programmes are still offered with an online viewing ticket alongside the live performance.

 

2026 - Thirty-five years

In September 2026 we mark the anniversary with a nine-day festival, Memory and Future: masterworks danced both by the choreographers who made them and by young dancers who have taken them on, an archive show of thirty-five years of work, a free stage experience for children, and a closing celebration built on Dvorak's New World Symphony.

 

Milestones

 

The programmes, in short

 

Sources for this page: the Session House 20th Anniversary Book (2011), and the annual reports and Voice of Session House editions published each year since. Details of individual programmes are given in Japanese on the chronology page.