Major Research Areas

Exploration of Creativity and Training

How can movement, rhythm, and singing training that are conducted separately be integrated into the improvisation of the actor and expressed in the creative process?

Can creativity be separated from training?

What is personal skill in acting, and how can it be developed?

II. Text

Can the movement of an actor become text? Can various movements be understood as physical, vocal, and mental aspects of training, and can they contribute to the actors' construction of the scene?

Rather than uttering the text according to its meaning, the work proceeded by first finding the texture and rhythm of movement and vibration sound, and then adding the text, and creating meaning from there. In order to find a new 'signification', the work sought to find living words (signifiers) and capture the words coming alive in living movements.

Will working on text in this way lead to a deeper understanding of the essence of movement and the hidden intention behind it? Will this process help to stimulate improvisation and spontaneity, thereby opening up the creative impulses of actors?

III. Form

How can we evoke and develop structures that go beyond the mechanical reproduction of art forms to living acts?

What is precision in acting, and what is the role of improvisation in creating new understandings of the places where performances are received?

What is the essence of the process of transforming etudes into structured performances?

Creative Methodology

Exploration and Improvisation

Initial workshops: Etudes often begin with an exploratory phase, inviting actors to improvise. This allows them to express themselves freely and experiment with movement, rhythm, and emotion without the constraints of a set structure.

Theatre in the Art of Acting: During the process writings and books by Jerzy Grotowski, Zygmunt Molik, Zbigniew Cynkutis, and Ludwig Flaszen were introduced and specific passages were cited to explain new or different perspectives on what actor training and theatre are which we called - Playful-ness: The actors explored various themes, emotions, and relationships inspired by personal experiences or specific concepts.

Singing-ness: In order to explore sound as a means of expression, we trained by expanding the texture, direction, volume, speed, and pitch of the voice, and explored the meaning of the voice flying through space and traveling while dancing.

Dancing-ness: First, we recognized our own body and explored the expression of our inherent impulses and emotions as creativity through the process of release and cohesion. We studied the sense of speaking with our bodies.

2. Identifying Core Elements

Finding Patterns: As the work progressed, we selected repetitive motifs, themes, and beats of emotions that resonated with our movements. These core elements helped shape the direction of the work.

Selecting Materials: The actors recalled and further developed specific parts or ideas that were particularly strong or meaningful in their improvisations.

3. Structuring the Etude

Framing/Creating a Narrative: Once the etude works were assembled and the essential elements were selected, the next step was to create a structure. This includes the act of conveying a narrative or thematic pattern, composing a scene or a beginning and end scene. We had them read all of Jeong Bo-ra's short story <Seed>.

Tempo and Timing: We worked on finding how long to spend in each scene and how to effectively transition between different etudes.

4. Integration of Text and Movement

Self-choreography: Although it is not dance, we developed movements that are like dance, starting from the body, to strengthen emotional and thematic elements, as if I were the choreographer of my own body.

Dialogue Integration: We explored various sounds (breathing sounds-mouth sounds-body sounds-chanting sounds-vibration sounds-text), and sometimes the text was superimposed on body actions, and sometimes the movement followed the text, and we created a dialogue between movement and language in a way that the body and sound complemented each other.

At this stage, the script creation was completed.

5. Rehearsal and Repetition

Training and Rehearsal: Rehearsal is no longer training. When we enter the rehearsal to refine the work we have done so far in line with the set date when the audience is invited, the training is actually pushed back. At this stage, the aesthetics of repetition are achieved and the questions change, leading to an exploration of how to revive the improvisation and vividness found in the etude (self-reproduction).

Feedback: The work evolves by reconfirming the script and recognizing personal and group rhythms based on feedback from all.

6. Conclusion

The essence of all these processes is revealed. All previous work, which moves towards consistency and clarity: The exploration of whether the beginning and end scenes and the scenes flowing between them are consistent and clear never stops. Each element, such as movement, text, and emotion, is constantly explored to get closer to the special work conveyed in the first etude.

Refinement: The clarity of each etude, transition scenes, memorization of text, utterance of various sounds, movement and contact, and relationships is increased, and the group is in harmony while resonating with the images, associations, and stories that each individual pursues and follows.

Performance: Structured etudes are repeated as run is being done today, and will be done tomorrow, is therefore a work that flows like a river, and the audience only comes for a moment on one day to witness the way their work flows.

Monthly Progress (January-October 2024)

The workshop sessions held from January to May were a process of exploring “actor’s skills” and focused on the following:

1) Negative Method: An acting training method that reaches essential and fundamental expression through the process of eliminating unnecessary movements, habits, and obstacles of the actor.

2) Combination of Conflicting Elements: Emphasizes that conflicting emotions, forces, or concepts are in harmony and find balance in the creative process, working together in a complementary manner to lead to deeper understanding and change.

3) Holistic Acting: Integrating all elements of the actor's body, mind, emotions, and voice, recognizing the actor's existence itself as a small universe, approaching it as a holistic whole, and pursuing genuine expression. These are the elements that Jerzy Grotowski believed and studied as the core of theater. The workshop at this stage was planned to help deepen the understanding of "poor theater" developed at Grotowski's "Theater Laboratory" located in Wrocław, Poland in the 1960s.

The first private intensive work <Project Seed> was held in June towards focused creative exploration of the participants, and the boundary between training and creation began to blur. This can be seen as pursuing an expressive etude that finds text and embodies movement in dynamic improvisational work accompanied by rhythm, sense, and emotion. The etudes developed by the actors were intended to reveal a series of associations/imaginations, and we would like to define them as “another form of writing” or “records carved inside and outside the body.” These records leave traces that can continue a living conversation, and the records of these traces were organized into a “script.”

The process of continuing the short writing “written with the body” continued from July, into August, September, and October. During this period, we worked on specific etudes by arousing our inner impulses, assembled those etudes to form a structure, discovered points of contact between the actors, and completed them into detailed and precise scenes through text work. All of these processes were the work of embodying actions in space.

Source of text and creation

<Seed> by Jeong Bo-ra,: A short story dealing with a dystopian story set in a future world. It depicts the relationship between nature and humans, environmental destruction, and human desire and its consequences, and depicts the process in which nature gradually revives from the ruins left by humans. Nature seeks a new way of life on the devastated Earth, and through the symbolic act of planting seeds, it summons the possibility of regeneration and recovery.

We go one step further and begin the first scene with the myth of Dangun Wanggeom, the founder of patriarchy, to highlight the essence of the crisis of the devastated Earth, which lies in our patriarchal masculinity, our single-minded pursuit of development while shouting bigger, faster, and higher.

The last scene is composed of the image of the earth holding seeds and the earth holding hope. Yun Seon-do: Yun Seon-do (1587–1671), a poet and scholar of the Joseon Dynasty, is well known for his outstanding skills in sijo, a form of traditional Korean poetry, and his works reflect themes of nature,

Confucianism, and the harmony of humans and the natural world. Yun Seon-do’s poetry is characterized by elegant simplicity and deep philosophical depth, providing important inspiration for exploring the relationship between humans and nature, a life of reflection, and balance.

Pansori: Pansori is a traditional Korean musical narrative art form that originated in the late 17th century. It expresses a wide range of emotions from joy to sorrow, and deals with life themes such as love, loyalty, and tragedy. We wanted to introduce this aesthetic of pansori to the actors.

All eight participants received a lesson in the ‘Sae Taryeong’ section of Jeokbyeokga from Min Hye-seong, a master singer of National Intangible Cultural Property No. 5, to learn pansori vocalization techniques, emotional vocal expression, and the use of various vocal techniques. We believe that incorporating pansori into an actor’s creative work can help create primal and powerful images, impulses, and narratives, and is an essential element in Korean actor training, as it is connected to rich human emotions, deep emotional expression, and dynamic vocal techniques and rhythms.

Through <Project Seed>, we summon the voice of nature again, starting from Dangun Wanggeom, and invite you to our soft cry for a new relationship with all living things.

We invite you into our theater to witness the ecological empathy that nature and humans are all connected through a new theatrical format. This is a story of rising and falling,

Before sharing our work

<Project Seed> can be seen as an invitation to re-plant a new aspiration for all life on Earth. Inspired by the novel <Seed> by Jeong Bo-ra, this work is a fable that goes beyond the dystopian boundary of our destruction of the Earth, and depicts nature crawling back to life.

Through <Project Seed>, we want to summon the voice of nature again, starting from Dangun Wanggeom, and invite you to our gentle cry for a new relationship with all living things. In a new theatrical format, we invite you into our theater to witness the ecological empathy that nature and humans are all connected. This may be a desperate cry for re-naturalization through the process of rise and fall, extinction and creation, retreat and advancement, or perhaps a new beginning in the relationship between humans and nature.

We want to go beyond dichotomies, awaken change, and invite you to a place of contemplation and mystery.<Project Seed> wants you to hear the forest as a historical record of the Earth, and to accept nature not as something unrelated to human culture, but as a force that records subtle changes in the environment. <Project Seed> proposes a new way of looking at our existence.

<Project Seed> invites you and approaches you. Intertwining with each other. Intertwining with the grand expansion of imagination. A world where nature and humans become one, where nature is being devastated by human ignorance and desire, but still not giving up hope and conceiving seeds, water, stones, bamboo, and pine trees, intertwining with the vast universe contained in that small body.

“When I think about how many friends I have,

Water, stones, bamboo, and pine trees. The moon rises over the mountain, and they are also my welcome friends.

What good is having more friends than these five?”

— Yun Seon-do (1587-1671)

Is there a story/narrative in a non-dramatic play?

The research direction of <Project Seed> is to pay more attention to the training of actors without completely abandoning the narrative.

<Project Seed> is the actor's actions, the traces of the actor drawn in space. It is composed of a series of events with several decisive points where the story is revealed.

When we see actors moving in space, we should think of them as natural beings, elements of nature. As beings like moss, grass, roots, trees, and water, the soil and water, mountains and trees that remember the history of this land that existed before Gojoseon, and it is a moment that shows that a specific relationship between humans and nature began from there.

In this relationship, humans have increasingly hurt nature, and now nature seems destined to be destroyed. The destruction of nature ultimately leads to the destruction of humans, even though it is a living community. Nevertheless, the world of living matter, the world of nature, is always moving toward a sensuous body that is trying to bloom.

The forest gathers against the genocide of its own kind by humans. The forest throws off the cloak and mask of patriarchy to find a way to survive, reaching out to each other and erecting trees that implore all living beings. Mocking human folly, intertwining, supporting and leaning on each other, they plant the seeds of survival through acts of healing.

We want to replace the concept of humans managing the Earth with the concept of poise, meaning balance or posture. Any living practice can only be a poetic practice. Poise raises the need to understand the world we live in as not divided into objects and ideas, resources and consumers, culture and nature, but as connected, symbiotic, and greater than the sum of its parts. Everything begins with the creation of relationships and emerges from the fertile and abundant changes that occur continuously.