Seeking to stand out among the 120 triennials and biennials now offered worldwide, including nine in the Asia-Pacific region alone, Japan’s biggest art event, the Yokohama Triennale, has distinguished itself this year with an emphasis on time-based art. Titled “Time Crevasse,” the event features some 70 international artists who explore the concept in installations, performance pieces, or hybrids of the two.

The last edition of the triennial, in 2005, suffered due to director Arata Isozakis sudden resignation months before the opening, but with new director Tsutomu Mizusawa and a team of five high-profile übercurators, including Daniel Birnbaum, director of the 2009 Venice Biennale, and Hans Ulrich Obrist, now with Serpentine Gallery, this year’s looks poised not only to overcome past setbacks but to move the event forward.

“There seems to be a bit of a fatigue among biennales and triennials; they need a kick-start that injects new energy, unpredictability, spontaneity — a change in the rule of the game,” Obrist told ARTINFO. “In the last five to six years, many artists seem to be interested again in the idea of unmediated experience and in direct performance.” To create a more sustained event, performances have been scheduled throughout the triennial’s 79-day run, from September 13 to November 30, culminating in a highly anticipated performance by native daughter Yoko Ono on the event’s final day. (Ono has yet to announce what she will perform.)

As the Triennale’s host, Yokohama, Japan’s second largest city, offers proximity to Tokyo, a popular young mayor who is supportive of the arts, and several favorable venues along the city’s renovated historic waterfront. Three of the main venues are located there, including the restored Red Brick Warehouse No. 1, which is hosting a series of films produced by Japanese theater and dance groups mainly in the 1960s and ’70s that will run throughout the triennial. From the Gutai group comes Don’t Worry, The Moon Won’t Fall Down (1962), featuring a version of Atsuko Tanakas famous electric dress, while Ono makes an appearance in Hi-Red Center’s Shelter Plan (1964). Tatsumi Hijikata (1928–86), founder of the seminal Japanese dance form butoh, steals the show, however, with his famous shining phallus in Rebellion of the Body (1968).

Indeed, Hijikata’s influence — and that of the dark and grotesque butoh — can be felt throughout the triennial, particularly in the works of American performance artist Joan Jonas, dancer Saburo Teshigawara, and butoh dancer Min Tanaka. In the opening days of the festival, Jonas touched a histrionic nerve in her performance Reading Dante, and Teshigawara revealed his skill for slow-paced high drama in Fragments of Time, a dance performance held in a narrow, claustrophobic space dangerously strewn with thousands of glass shards. Tanaka, using a small wooden hut as a base, will perform his Ba Odori—Dancing Here at different locations throughout the Triennale.

Overall, visitors have responded positively thus far to the live performances, but opinions about the installations, spread among several venues and running for the duration of the triennial, have been mixed. Murmurs of “self-indulgent” and “boring” were overheard at the crowded Matthew Barney and Jonathan Bepler video installation The Guardian of the Veil, and visitors played with the U.S. Civil War cannonball in Tony Conrads multi-media installation Brunelleschi, damaging its wood and string pieces, much to his “surprise.” At the Paul McCarthy/Damon McCarthy bloody video installation Caribbean Pirates/Houseboat, there were calls for Captain Jack Sparrow to come to the rescue. On the other hand, the response has been more favorable to Miranda Julys witty and cerebral word-based installation The Hallway and to Cao Feis virtual navigation “RMB City Project,” which invites players to help build her Second Life utopian art city. Other crowd favorites include the video and sound installation Java’s Machine: PHANTASMAGORIA by Indonesia-based Kuswidananto (a.k.a. Jompet), and the sound installation A-P-P-A-R-I-T-I-O-N, a collaboration between Cerith Wyn Evans and the music group Throbbing Gristle in which disc-shaped mirrors doubling as speakers emit a seductive, high-frequency soundtrack.

At the idyllic Sankeien, a traditional Japanese garden and the Triennale’s fourth main venue, a fascinating, eerie pallor suffuses the art on view. Misty waves of man-made fog from Nakaya Fujikos Fogfalls #47670 ‘Tales of Ugetsu’ seep through the trees, setting a tone borne out in Jorge Macchi and Edgardo Rudnitzkys minimalist installation Twilight. Set in an old dark temple, this latter work features a single fading light bulb attached to a wire moving ever so slowly across the room. One Tokyo gallerist lamented, “It looks stolen from a Hijikata performance I saw in the ’70s.”