The History of Korean Western Theater | Perfect tense

After Cuckoopresented at the Festival TransAmériques (FTA) in 2019, Jaha Koo is back in Quebec these days to present another interesting solo on the quest for identity, both individual and collective.

Luc Boulanger
The Press

The South Korean multidisciplinary artist, based in Belgium, is a real jack-of-all-trades. He plays and signs the staging, the text, the music, the video and the sound design of this show which is part of a trilogy that is both autobiographical and historical.

As soon as the public enters the room, Koo is already on the stage, seated on the ground, doing origami. The decor is minimalist. One of the rare accessories that accompanies him is a “smart” rice cooker, an object that serves as a replica of him at the start of this 60-minute show.

In his proposal, Koo stands as the heir of a culture that has amputated its art, its traditions, to better embrace the modern values ​​of the West. It’s not documentary theater — although the creation immerses us in Korean history with good research and archival footage. It is a formal and impressionistic odyssey in the footsteps of the artist’s childhood, including his founding relationship with his grandmother.

The play also exposes the blind spots in the history of his country, wedged between two giants: China and Japan. She unearths the ruins of the past to question the present. Today, in the era of globalization, “everything has become universal”, he laments. However, universalism plays the game of the dominant, Western, Anglo-Saxon culture; the parallel with Quebec culture comes to mind.

Western Theater Centenary

The premise of The History… is the celebrations of the centenary of the theater in South Korea in 2008. But, of course, the theater has existed for millennia, there as elsewhere; what the leaders and the Korean cultural elite were stressing then was rather the 100 years of forced reform, even the colonization of their theatrical practice. A reform orchestrated during the war with Japan, a period when Korea experienced a rapid westernization of its culture, its economy, its way of life. In the middle of the 20^e century, the theaters of Seoul mainly produced plays by Shakespeare, Molière and Tennessee Williams, even going so far as to whitewash its actors to give a European touch to the distributions!

The success of this show is due to the aesthetics and sensitivity of Jaha Koo. The latter manages to intertwine his intimate and personal quest with that of his nation. Among other things, he illustrates the threat of the “evil spirits” of progress, with the image of a monster, half-dragon, half-bird, who wants to erase memories and memory (his grandmother has Alzheimer’s) .

With an amazing talent for reinventing forms during performance, Jaha Koo bridges the richness of Eastern cultural traditions and the use of technology and contemporary art to ground us in the present. To better make us think about our collective future.