“It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye,” the Little Prince famously said. There is hardly anyone who would deny those words. However, how are we to see something invisible when we can’t even accurately describe what is visible? It would be irresponsible to simply emphasize the importance of seeing with the heart. I am not saying that what is invisible is unimportant; rather, I am merely stating that what is visible can be just as important as what is invisible. The play ＜SEE＞, as its title implies, contains a humanistic examination of the act of seeing. Sidestepping the conventional dramatic arc of exposition, rising action, climax, falling action, and dénouement, it instead provides a serious report that follows and explores the visual activities of the human being. The one who put together this examination is Choi ZinA, director of Theatre Nolddang, an artist who always finds new narrative methods to convey her material from a fresh perspective.

Neither Feminism, Nor Humanism

Q(Kim Il-song) : In one of the performance arts portal sites, you were introduced as “the playwright and director who became notorious for her fastidious and perfectionist tendencies in the Daehangno theater scene.” Do you agree with that description?

A(Choi ZinA) : It was an expression that the organizer came up with and wrote in the pamphlet without consulting me when we were performing ＜Geumnyeo and Jeonghee＞. I suppose the organizer wanted to emphasize the “notoriety” part.

Q : Seeming quite contrary to your “notoriety,” the name of your theatre company is Nolddang, which is associated with nolja (playing).

A : I know. One of the new members of our troupe recently asked, “Why do we practice non-stop when our company name is Nolddang (playground)?”

Q : You are the leading director of Nolddang, but I heard that you didn’t get into theater to be a director.

A : That’s right. I tell my actors that I started directing because no one cast me as an actor. When I first joined the Theater Company Yeonwoo(Yeonwoo Mudae), I listed both acting and directing as my desired field in my application, but I never actually got a chance to perform on stage. Unlike now, when I first started out doing plays, it was the teachers that directed the work, and there weren’t even that many works for which we could audition or be cast, so there was always a lot of down time. But I wanted to stay in the theater scene, so I went on to graduate school and majored in directing. After graduation, I made my directorial debut with This isn’t a Love Story. That piece opened up a lot of doors for me.

Q : Your next work, ＜This Love＞, Please was also received quite well. It was chosen as one of This Year’s Best Play 7 by The Korean Theatre Review that year.

A : I just got lucky.

Q : Well, I have some quotes from the critics about those two works. Kim So-yeon said, “Choi ZinA creates ample space for her female characters, through the dramatic space that goes beyond mere representation, in which they can be soft but daring, and are not defeated, even when they are badly hurt and bleeding.” Kim Myeong-hwa wrote that, “Choi ZinA has calmly and consistently presented a body of work that could be affiliated with feminism from the outset, without faltering or being overpowered by excessive self-consciousness.”

A : Neither works were intended to be feminist pieces. The main characters happened to be female, simply because I wrote what I felt. The works that followed also happened to be a romance called ＜Goddess Blesses＞ Romances and a story of a mother and a daughter called ＜Geumnyeo and Jeonghee＞. The latter was put on stage in 2009.

Q : By 2010, you presented a work that seemed to go against the grain of your previous body of work. Kim Yun-cheol, the artistic director of the National Theater Company of Korea, said, “What is even more striking about ＜House Number 1-28, Cha-sook’s＞ is that the artist has broadened her interest and horizons to the humanism from the feminist perspective she had maintained thus far.” But judging from what you just said, is it safe to say that it was not your intention to broaden your horizons to humanism?

A : Since it was never my initial intention to do a feminist writing, it never crossed my mind to write a piece based on some other theory or ideology that could replace feminism. I did not consciously switch my thematic basis from feminism to humanism. I did not construct my story around any kind of theory or ideology. I drew up ＜House Number 1-28, Cha-sook’s＞ when I saw a housing construction site.

Q : The format you adopted for ＜House Number 1-28, Cha-sook’s＞, which was to build a house on stage during the performance, was quite unique and unheard of.

A : When I have gone to see plays in the past, there were times that I felt like the way people changed scene during the intermission was more interesting than the actual performance itself. They usually do it in the dark while the lights are out, but I thought, “Why not show the audience such an interesting scene just as it is?” That’s why I adopted that format in my production of the play.

Q : ＜House Number 1-28, Cha-sook’s＞ was quite successful. It was even selected as 2011 PAMS Choice.

A : That’s right. Thanks to that selection, it was invited to the Tokyo Performing Arts Market, which also earned it the chance to be performed in Turkey in 2012.

A Play That Does Not Resemble a Novel, But a Thesis

Q : Now, let’s get into a more serious conversation. My next questions are based on an interview you did in 2010; I am curious as to whether your thoughts have changed or solidified since then. At the time, you said, “There are times I try to read the actors thoughts or reactions. Sometimes I feel like they expect me to not show up anymore. When the practice sessions are over and the play is put on stage, it seems like the actors want me to leave it in their hands. In the Korean theater scene, that kind of director is probably considered more tolerant and understanding.” Well, have you become a more tolerant and understanding director by that standard?

A : It is quite a sensitive issue. When I was sharing my notes with the actors yesterday, I did find myself asking, “Am I being helpful to the actors?” It has been an ongoing question for me to figure out what kind of virtues a director must acquire. Directors and actors basically share the common resolution to create a good play together, but that doesn’t mean that both parties can always be harmonious. Different demands constantly spring up; working through them and helping the actors pull off a good performance is the task of a director. I’m not saying that a director should not refrain from watching the performance every day and share their notes with the actors. However, when the actors make a request for the director to leave, it is probably necessary for the director to take a step back. Essentially, actors are the ones who feel the audience’s response and embody the text through their body. However, I still firmly believe that it is the director’s role to navigate the actors’ thoughts and ideas; if the play addresses something conceptual or abstract, the actors will sometimes miss something, restricted by the corporeality and concreteness of their body.

Q : During the 2010 interview you also said, “I cannot help but wrestle with the questions such as, ‘Is it possible to create a story that looks deeply into humanity?’ or ‘What is it that the audience is interested in now?’ What kind of play should I create? I keep thinking that addressing complex and profound issues are not good enough anymore.” In your answer to my previous question, you mentioned the conceptual and the abstract. Does a play become easier or more difficult by the way it actualizes the conceptual and the abstract?

A : While it is the actors’ task is to express the conceptual and the abstract embedded in the work through their concrete body, it is the director’s task to incorporate the conceptual and the abstract into the work. I believe that the conceptual and the abstract exist in ellipsis, rather than in sentences, and staging that ellipsis is an interesting work for me. That is why an unrealistic story can appear in a realistic performance; I actually enjoy the mixture of unreal elements on a very realistic stage. During a conversation, the thoughts of the listener may suddenly be heard as a monologue, or a thought in a character’s imagination that stemmed from a conversation may be staged. A character may abruptly stand up and dance, or even fly into the air in the middle of a conversation. What lies in the ellipsis and is not expressed in reality is our real thoughts and life, and I feel that it is my job as a director to express that ellipsis on stage.

Q : It seems like that answer may also apply to your current play, ＜SEE＞. You mentioned that you cannot help but struggle with the method of expression. You added, “It is not that I want to use a different form, but that I want to tell a different story. Even when I discover good material for a play, I am concerned with the method with which to incorporate that material into the play.” I can imagine that the method of expression was something you had to tackle when you were creating ＜SEE＞.

A : Around the time I was conceptualizing ＜SEE＞, I wondered if a different type of play could exist that did not demonstrate the emotional ups and downs through drama. I questioned if it was really necessary to repeat the emotional drama in the theater when we already experience it in our daily life. That is when I received an offer to direct a play from the National Theater Company of Korea and came up with the idea of staging the act of “seeing,” which was something I was interested in at the time. I decided to create a play that treated human act of seeing as its subject matter. How exciting would it be to extend the momentary pleasure onto the play and then convey that pleasure to the audience? However, I wouldn’t say that it is the formal characteristic that penetrates through all my works. I always try to find the form that best fits each theme. When drama seems like the best fit, then I would choose drama; when another method seems like a better fit, I try to find a different form. Take ＜House Number 1-28, Cha-sook’s＞, for example. As I tried to grasp and convey on stage the emotional impact that one experiences in the process of building a house, and what came out of it was a play that had the features of documentary. Yet, if you had asked me if I liked the documentary form, I would have said no. What I try to pursue is creating a play that does something other than give catharsis or be emotionally moving. I want to express the sense of enlightenment that one feels when a new horizon of perception opens up after reading some great dissertation or essay rather than a novel. I deliberately tried to develop a more objective and conceptual approach by excluding emotional tear-jerking scenes from the play.

Let’s Start from Accurately Seeing the Visible

Q : I am sure it was an incredibly demanding task to expand momentary action or perception into the theatrical temporality.

A : The act of seeing takes place in less than a second, so it was tricky to expand that at first. Of course, I could make the audience see something for over an hour, but then I thought the audience would not take away anything when they stepped out of the theater. So I constructed diverse episodes that could be associated with the act of “seeing.” I first premiered it in 2012, but I had a change in perception when I reran it in 2014. Before, I thought we could perceive the object through the act of seeing. But now I have come to think that perception is not a momentary action, but rather something that functions through a learned process that has been accumulated from the past. Until 2012, I thought that the act of seeing was a pure act that transcended the perceptions from the past, but now I have come to realize that we cannot see things completely detached from our past experience. It was a huge change in perception. If I were to produce ＜SEE＞ again in two years, I think it would be yet another work that is different from the current one. I have intentionally tried to exclude emotional charge thus far, but now I think that I may even create an emotional moment through the act of seeing. If ＜SEE＞ 3 were to come out, who knows? Maybe I could share this change in perception with the audience.

Q : Then was there an actual change in directing between SEE 2012 and the SEE 2014?

A : In Act 2, I modified a couple of lines from the medical explanations, but I found that the audience did not detect the change. I probably should have created a scene out of it, instead of modifying a few lines.

Q : What is it that you wanted to show through SEE?

A : If we want to see something accurately, we must actively engage and approach the object. And if we put “the world” in the place of “the object,” the meaning could expand even more.

Q : Seeing properly may not necessarily mean seeing the hidden side of things, but to understand the entire spectrum of what is visible. For instance, if a person only knows red, yellow and blue, that person would only perceive the rainbow in these three colors; someone with a more refined perception of colors, however, could definitely see more colors from it. I think this could apply to the way the audience interprets the work.

A : Among Native American stories, there is a story of a Native American who can spot an eagle from ten kilometers away. This could perhaps be attributed to a connection between the Native American and the eagle; if one truly wants to see something, one may overcome the physical constraints. As a director, I have a desire to make the audience see more than seven colors, figuratively speaking. If the audience’s spectrum includes only three colors, I would like to provide them with the stimulus to expand the spectrum one by one. I would like my play to diversify the audiences’ perspectives. I want them to see the world through the raw, diverse perspective that was not learned or injected into them through textbooks. For that to happen, I must first start grasping the things that I did not detect before, and transform them into a play. That is the kind of play I aspire to create; I would be thrilled if the audiences could see a perspective or point that they missed out on up until then.

Q : In 2012, you went to Turkey with your previous work, ＜House Number 1-28, Cha-sook’s＞. If things work out, it seems that ＜SEE＞ will get you another chance to show your work overseas.

A : The majority of discourses have argued that “It is only with the heart that one can see rightly,” but ＜SEE＞ is saying that “one must see with the body.” In other words, we must not try to see the invisible, but see the visible as it is. Someone who got a Ph.D. in philosophy from France told me that ＜SEE＞ combines Western and Eastern philosophy. According to that person, there is some point in Western philosophy that crosses into Eastern philosophy, which is demonstrated in ＜SEE＞, and that is why it would probably be received even more favorably overseas.

Q : I agree. By the same token, Korean audiences may find its unfamiliarity disconcerting.

A : Isn’t it fun to see something a little unfamiliar or disconcerting? I think an intriguing play can be born when it is unfamiliar and disconcerted, yet still interesting and not boring.

Q : On the other hand, international audiences may enjoy it more without feeling uneasy.

A : I think unfamiliarity brings freshness and fun to a work. On the contrary, if a play is thought of as dull and monotonous, that is a failure by my standards.

Q : Any last words for the readers and fans?

A : If I were to choose between depth and fun, I would like to choose depth. However, it is not until one finds something fun that one feels its depth. If one wants to create a play that the audiences can feel the depth of, it should be executed well, no matter what. I think it would be fun and interesting to find something fresh and unfamiliar in this world where it feels like everything under the sun has already been done.

ⒸThearter Company Nolddang