Sapporo Art Stage

The Sapporo Art Stage is held every November with the concept “A Gateway to Art,” in which people can informally come into contact with a variety of art forms such as music, theater, and fine arts.

It is a place where young artists are supported and nurtured, and children are provided with opportunities to take part in artistic activities and present their work. The program of events started in 2005 and was held for the 19^th time in 2023.

Please find a more detailed list of the events down below.

Music

SAPPORO MUSIC SHOWCASE was held at the Sapporo Ekimae-dori Underground Walkway over the course of two days. Ten artists and bands principally active in Sapporo, whose work was selected as "Sapporo: Music You Should Know", performed to visitors and people walking by.
The Sapporo School Music Festival took place at the Sapporo Concert Hall Kitara, where elementary, junior high, and high school students enjoyed choral, instrumental, and brass band performances. Videos from the performing schools have been published and are available to view on the Art Stage website.

Theatre

The Theatre Go Round: Sapporo Theatre Festival is an initiative that involves concentrated performances of theater, puppetry, and more. The aim is to kindle interest in theatrical culture among those who may not usually experience theater. This year featured 33 groups over the course of a month at seven theatres in the city. A Grand Prize, Excellence Award, and Rookie Award were given to teams selected from among the entries.
The Hokkaido Junior High Theater Performance Competition was held over the course of two days at the Sapporo Education and Culture Hall’s Small Hall. This is theater competition held for all of Hokkaido.

Art

ART STREET was held at the Sapporo Ekimae-dori Underground Walkway and Sapporo Community Plaza. Various art works were exhibited, including large-scale paintings by high school students and live painting demonstrations.
The Borderless Art Exhibition is an exhibition of art created by children and those with disabilities through the collaboration with BASH (Borderless Art Support Hokkaido).
VR・AR Art Exhibition is held as a collaborative project where VR and AR artworks are exhibited at the Sapporo Ekimae-dori Underground Walkway. Visitors can experience AR art using their smartphones or tablet devices, and on weekends, they can try on VR goggles to enter the space of the artwork as well as create their own VR pieces.
SCHOOL ART LIVE exhibited large-scale paintings by high school art clubs and the like, and visitors even enjoyed live drawing sessions on the underground walkway.
At the University Student ART Competition, artworks from universities of the arts in Hokkaido were presented and a grand prize winner was chosen, delighting viewers with a variety of artworks.
Another media arts-related initiative developed in recent years is the KIDS ART FES Festival, a series of workshops for children led by artists in which they collaborate to create artwork together.
- 2023: Exhibited were collaborative works created by three artists during workshops with children.
  - A video workshop where children overlayed videos onto familiar locations, such as their neighborhood or favorite places to visit, creating something new and mysterious.
  - Preparing for the coming winter, children created “winter enclosures” out of fabric and ribbon to placed within the town’s gardens and streets, protecting them from the cold and snow.
  - Much like the flipbooks we have created in the margins of our textbooks, children learned the essence of animation by drawing still images onto a disk, making it come to life as it rotates.
- 2022: four artists’ collaborative pieces produced from workshops with children were exhibited. The contents of the artwork are as follows:
  - 3D sculptures of children's faces that had actually been read with a 3D scanner
    - This workshop was particularly popular, reaching capacity on the first day of registration given that children's faces turn into adults' so quickly - these sculptures allow the preservation of their current childlike visages.
  - A stop-motion animation feature created using pieces of shaped plastic to form the image of flames flickering upwards and sideways
  - A digital artwork for which children learnt a node programming language, connecting blocks to make colourful "snow" fall onto various scenic images of Sapporo
  - A moving feature in which programming transforms children's drawings of wind based on imagery conjured from the sounds of a wind gauge
- 2021: during the Media Arts School Workshop, a UNESCO Creative Cities Media Arts special project, the workshop leader taught children remotely about programming and showed them techniques to move on-screen birds etc. To find out more about the workshop and the finished product, please find the video below.