Lucerne Festival Ark Nova 2017 in Tokyo Midtown

Tokyo Midtown celebrated 10 years of operation this spring, while this July the total number of visitors exceeded 300 million. To commemorate this first decade, Midtown will host the Lucerne Festival Ark Nova 2017. It is a massive mobile concert hall measuring 18 meters high, 30 meters across and 36 meters deep and has a capacity of 494 people and appears in Tokyo for the first time.

The Lucerne Festival Ark Nova was planned by the long-standing Swiss music festival, the Lucerne Festival, in order to help support recovery from the East Japan Earthquake. Produced by world-renowned architect Arata Isozaki and English sculptor Anish Kapoor. It has been erected a total of three times in the past, between 2013 and 2015, in Matsushima, Sendai and Fukushima, holding concerts and workshops and attracting a total of 19,000 visitors. Tokyo Midtown fully supports this undertaking, and this fall, six and a half years since the disaster, will host the Lucerne Festival Ark Nova for a period of 16 days. During this time it will be open to the public have concerts and movie screenings.

About the Creation of the Lucerne Festival Ark Nova

Following the catastrophe of March 11, 2011 in Japan’s Tohoku Region, the Japanese star architect Arata Isozaki, the British artist Anish Kapoor, together with Michael Haefliger, Executive and Artistic Director of Lucerne Festival and the Japanese concert agent Masahide Kajimoto developed the idea of using music to provide encouragement and assurance to people while the region is being rebuilt. For this purpose, Anish Kapoor and Arata Isozaki designed the world’s first mobile and inflatable concert hall, the Lucerne Festival Ark Nova. It was constructed for its inaugural season of performances in 2013 in Matsushima, Japan. Thereafter, the Ark Nova operated during the fall of 2014 in Sendai and, in 2015, in Fukushima. The Ark Nova was given the Classical:NEXT Innovation Award in Rotterdam in 2015.

• Venue: Tokyo Midtown, Roppongi
• Date: September 19, 2017 - October 4, 2017
• Time: 11:00 am JST - 06:00 pm JST

• Link: http://www.tokyo-midtown.com/en/