English Program

The space is prepared with sound. A woman appears. This is the place where she died. Returning, can she escape death, even knowing it? But, as if by fate, she falls again. In this scene, the image of her mother, who survived Japanese colonialism flashes before her, and the breath of her ancestors overlaps. Will there be those who remember her death? If so, what meaning will it hold? The first step, where even breathing is difficult and with her broken wings she attempts to fly. To fly for those who cannot reach the sea. Collecting strength she stretches to open her wings releasing the words to fly again.

Introduction: What Remains Unspoken - Raymon Montalbetti

Hidden Echoes is a work built on a timeless muse and a prophetic breath yet to be unleashed. Rather than interpreting the text of "Dictée" linearly, we sought to embody the traces of a shattered soul through gesture, sound, music, and silence, as an instinctive response.

"Dictée" is not a closed book with a fixed meaning. We view it as an open field, leaving traces across time and space, like echoes that resonate. The actor's actions on stage are traces that cross the boundaries between subjectivity and objectivity, sense and thought.

Our challenge is threefold: An active work of discovering the unknown within the body, or the body itself. Entrusting the moment of creation to the liberated body. Discovering hidden seeds of hope within echoes of relationships between artists and audiences.

Hidden Echoes respects the concept of traditional theater while simultaneously questioning it. Instead of offering a friendly explanation, the audience is invited into a story of uncertainty and incompleteness.

Planning Intent: Layers of Stacked Layers by Jeong Ae-ran

Hidden Echoes begins with “Dictée”, the only posthumous work by Korean-American performance artist Teresa Cha Hak-kyung. During my master's degree program at New York University, I re-enacted her performance A Ble Wail based on a few surviving photographs, which became my graduation performance. The text used at that time was also "Dictée."

This is the final work in a trilogy of one-person plays prepared after returning to Korea, and may be considered a reincarnation of the stage from 20 years ago. While I performed in English as an international student, I now present a Korean adaptation, under the title Hidden Echoes, as a Korean female artist.

Hidden Echoes is not simply a tribute to Cha Hak-kyung. it is also an ode to female artists who perished without even a chance to spread their wings, and to those who were left without a name amidst marginalization and double discrimination. This performance is closer to poetry than narrative. I hope that traces of fragmentation, disconnection, loss, and resistance will flow from my body. At the same time, it summons the memories of my youth, the intense times I lived in a foreign country.

Although I was frustrated by the limits of imagination, the limits of the body, and the limits of language, I seek to revive those traces through artistic gestures. Hidden Echoes is not simply a representation. No.

Broken but re-spread wings, a chorus of erased voices, may the breath of our artists continue with a little less pain, and may Korean society move toward a little kinder, a little slower...

Director's Note - Raymon Montalbetti

I did not direct. I couldn't. I tried only to listen. To listen is to quiet the mind, open the channels of the senses, and feel the subtle tremors of gestures, the weight of silence, the vibrations of echoes. This attitude allows an amplification of the impulses within the body and its unknowable world, ultimately discovering the body itself as the unknown.

Rooted in Teresa Cha Hak-kyung's Dictée, we wish to honour her traces and artistic explorations through her presence on stage. On this stage, the actor does not convey a specific message. The actor, herself, is the message.

You are invited to awaken the seed of Cha Hak-kyung, who lives and breathes in all these traces, in women seeking their own colours and voices, in independent and resistant women — a living, resistant echo.

Hidden Echoes resists narrative form, unfolding as a memory in motion, a reverberation of energy reaching the audience. Hidden Echoes is a trace of what history has erased, a reminder of what has been erased.

Actor's Note - Jeong Ae-ran

First encountering Cha Hak-kyung's "Dictée" over 20 years ago, it felt utterly incomprehensible, yet simultaneously comprehensible. It was confusing, inexplicable, and impossible to categorize into any one genre or theme.

The nine-chapter book, titled after the Nine Muses of Greek mythology, unravels the stories of women, including Korea's Yu Gwan-sun, France's Joan of Arc and Saint Thérèse, Cha Hak-kyung's mother Heo Hyeong-sun, and herself. It was an experimental attempt, framed within a postmodern framework, to explore history, femininity, and existence through the lens of a Korean diaspora woman in the United States.

When the first edition of "Dictée" was published in 1982, Cha Hak-kyung sent it to her older brother along with a letter. However, on the day the book arrived her brother was preparing her funeral. With trembling hands, he opened the first page revealing the engraved phrase, "I miss my mother. I'm hungry. I want to go home,”. He closed the book as if burned by fire. Just three days after its publication, the book had become her posthumous work.

I dedicate this stage to her, who passed away before she could fully blossom, and to the countless artists who have passed away namelessly. Slowness is not fear, but our only weapon. May the wings of art, imbued with freedom and dignity, never be broken, may they finally soar, breaking free from reality!

Note towards creation:

Sea of Veils … a navigation of tradition and innovation, the past and the future simultaneously.

Veils sometimes are a means of escape, a way to go out for adventure, or to elude problems or they are forced on you and in many senses veils are a trap. You use various ways to pursue, work out, collect, construct and gather till eventually you transcend time.

You might perceive this search through repetition and accumulation of the volatile relationship between art and identity - fragments that invoke motifs of death, night, presence and silence in burns, blossom, song and speak. We invite you to explore with us a confounding intimate moment of overcoming and unveiling mysteries with dancingness, singingness and the playfulness of reality.

Images, tones. text are woven to touch certain musical qualities bringing together a blend of Korean lyricism, lamentation and joy. All elements harmonize with the imagination and soul of a women in journey. The musicality summons a deeper awareness of the connection between language and the innate rhythm in one’s body and mind - raymon

Original Project Statememnt:

Women, theater.

When a woman plays, she means to wander in search of herself. Instead of putting on a play, a woman bumps into something with her whole body, scratches until her fingernails wear out, and cries until her voice is hoarse.

They were treated like animals, howled like animals, and were tamed like animals and became obedient. The woman's body is torn apart and the blood is made to play and make sounds. She's alive here, as a woman, playing, still alive, she doesn't die like this.

For women to play means to invent a female form. A different way of doing theater than the method that has been inherited from time to time, the method that has tamed women through patriarchy. Poet Kim Hye-soon says that what you say is important, but how you say it is the invention of feminist vocalization.

Baridegi who was kicked out, thrown and abandoned, and renamed as the embodiment of a woman who came back to life.

Sometimes it's like a clown, about the mysterious source and desire of women, about the disease called women, about subversive desires, about leaving without staying, being pushed away when pushed, being thrown away, being thrown away when thrown away, not owning, and dying. Already present in the body, a woman burning with life, a woman producing life, that is how she plays.

- AeRan

(All photos are stills from iPhone recording of work sessions)

Abandoned: A Thousand Tongues A Requiem for the Dead @ Space T

October 29 @ 3 pm

Direction: AeRan Jeong & Raymon Montalbetti

Creative team:

Kim Ye-rin, Lee Jin-ha, Yu Haram, Kim So-yeon, Pu Saeyon, Seon Nara, Kim Tae-hun, Kim Young-jun, Kim He-hyun, Kim Euna, Pyon Eun-seo, Kim Myo-jin

Welcome.

I should say at the outset we invite you to think of the action you are to witness as a Requiem - an act of remembrance. This years end of October hovers specifically over the torrent of tears from the trauma of Itaewon.

We have approached this trauma first and foremost from the perspective of students. Many have experienced loss. The text you hear are by two esteemed Korean poets - Kim Hyesoon and Kang Eun-Gyo. Primarily the words are directly from Kim Hyesoon’s *Face of Rhythm*. Some are from her collection *Autobiography of Death* as well as *Phantom Pain Wings* which has lent us the dominant image of Angels.

We present angels giving voice in a “poetic language” intimately connected, surreally flying with the bodies of those who have been lost by the shroud of death. Yes there are shouts of pain, fierce struggle, shrieking sadness, howls of anguish and helplessness all done with ritualization and song intended to release the suffering.

Many of the lost are angry desiring to enact the wish to return to the world.

The Angels are important and active: both ethereal and earthly, confronting and sustaining an intensity at once dead and living. They also take our minds back to the migrating birds, sharing with them both wings and the habit of crossing and returning between realms lighting a path to cross borders and traverse separate worlds.

Abandoned: A Thousand Tongues is part of an ineffable feeling of longing- a journey we need to continue to take a good long, careful look, to ponder and reflect, to mitigate our fears and anxieties assisting us to accept the idea of life continuing beyond 'me'.

raymon

Procession to University Lobby: Oct. 14 @ 5:00 & 6:00 pm. "Of Us For Us"

An action dedicated to the presence of those whose tears of love wash the way for those who fell helpless. We need determination so the good survive wherever they travel especially in our memories. The ones with the brightest hearts will not succumb to agony ... to act is the process of cultivating while negotiating unbearable complexities with dignity, respect and risk.

“There is something helpless in being a witness” - Ceila’s Song by Lee Maracle

Investigating an actors training: encounters with the body/voice/imagination in space and action.

“The way to kill a man or a nation is to cut off his dreams …”

— William S. Burroughs

Participants will have the possibility of developing a form of actor’s training: a dynamic practice intended to cultivate the body core by facilitating the physical elements of agility, strength, endurance and balance connected intimately to breath, sound, vibration, voice and text.

The objective of this training is to activate the imagination and explore through play, both individually and in the group, a flow of impulses.

Through small contacts, intentions, actions and reactions the training encourages following associations challenging the individual to shape and articulate precise studies towards connection.

The practice is a research to reinvigorate the essential elements of the way of actor.

Aspects of the five-session journey:

Day 1

Actor's anatomy: contacting oneself / environment / others

Centering, grounding / rhythm and flow

Relaxation and flexibility

Concentration/focus/the senses

Plastiques & Corporals (Jerzy Grotowski and the Teatr Laboratorium)

Day 2

Actor's voice: breath / vibration / sound / text

Respiration-inspiration-expiration

Precision/organic / discipline/spontaneity

Lightness / clarity / dancingness / singingness

Body Alphabet (Zygmunt Molik)

Day 3

Actor's action: face of the body

Physiological gesture

Self-penetration / energy / play

Presence and encounter

Imagination and emotion

Gesture (Michael Chekov)

Day 4

Actor's imagination: the partner

connection

Impulse / improvisation within a structure

Sculpturing / unvoiced etude / unarticulated etude

The Score: search for a precise line and logic of impulses and physical actions.

The Presence of The Actor (Joseph Chaikin)

Day 5

Actor's Creation: the partner 

Text Work: to give life to the movement, how to let the voice fly?

Devise physical and vocal materials/ create sequences of action.

Stanislavski suggested: “access the subconscious through the conscious?”

Theatre as a Field for Experiencing Life (Zbigniew Cynkutis)

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