Eight Noteworthy Perspectives at PAMS 2022
2022 PAMS
The 2022 Performing Arts Market in Seoul (PAMS) is right around the corner. Due to the impact of the pandemic, economic and social changes, and technological development, ‘sustainability’ has become a major topic again in the arts sector. PAMS is examining three major aspects of economic, social and environmental sustainability in the arts. Based on the theme of ’arts sustainability’, with the focus on these three aspects, PAMS will explore what a healthy arts ecosystem is, and discuss what changes the contemporary arts sector needs.
∙ In light of the changes in creation, audiences, consumption and the international circulation of the
performing arts brought on by the pandemic, what is the ‘economic sustainability’ of the arts?
∙ What is the ‘environmental sustainability’ of eco-friendly creation, production and circulation and
their response to the climate crisis?
∙ What is the ’social sustainability’ of the arts, based on diversity, inclusiveness and equality according
to changing social values?
Among PAMS programs, ’PAMS Choice’ focuses on inviting artists who have been selected through a competition and looks into their artworks. As it has, above all, been three years since the last face to face event, ‘PAMS Choice’ has put emphasis on contemporaneity, and will introduce eight works that best represent the noteworthy trends of this year’s PAMS.
CHOI X KANG PROJECT,〈A COMPLEMENTARY SET_DISAPPEARING WITH AN IMPACT〉
#Dance #ChoixKangProject #2D&3D #Camera #Series_Complement
 |
 |
| ⓒKNCDC, Mok Jinwoo | |
| Date/Time: 16:00~17:00, 27th (Tue) September | Choreography: Choi Min-sun & Kang Jin-an (Choi X Kang) |
| Venue: SFAC Theater QUAD | Showcase Runtime: 30 minutes |
| Genre: Dance | Tour Size: 5 people (3 performers & 2 staff members) |
‘A Complementary Set_Disappearing with an Impact’ is an extension to ‘Complement’. Starting with the question, “Are we able to control those outside of our gaze?”, it utilizes a gap between two media that form different space-time structures, i.e video and performance, to talk about the unpredictability created between two dimensions and three dimensions as well as what is on the other side of those.
While the premiere of Complement focused on the relationship between video and performers, A Complementary Set_Disappearing with an Impact uses the gap in the space that is free from our gaze and elements in the set, and does this in experimental ways that can be realized in a black box theater space.
Through direction that uses the variability of theater to create a space, it distorts our preconceived notions about the theater and expands itself to become an exploration of space.
With the video images of the past forcing their way through the gap of the camera’s gaze, and sound turning into a noise while losing its power to exist as music, the original movements get transformed. While looking at this process, the audience is exposed to a fascinating brain game where interactions between what’s seen and what’s not seen and between what’s disappeared and what exists. Theater’s limitation is tested in the space as it gradually changes into the space for thinking, and the performance is asking how the artists should look at this process with the audience.
“A Complementary Set_Disappearing with an Impact deals with the nature of temporality, spatiality, and media while talking about the unseen possibility of what’s behind these. When most of our international performances were canceled or suspended during the pandemic, we experienced losing the opportunities that had been prepared for years. As we are carefully treading on the international exchange once again, we are participating in PAMS hoping that its marketability will invigorate art circulation and exchange. We also feel positive about the fact that international exchanges or performances are taking place not only face to face but in various other formats. Artists must also reduce their carbon footprint or find clues as to how to make the performing arts sustainable by discovering performance formats that are in line with the contactless era. Nevertheless, there still is absolute value in the senses that we must experience on site. I think it’s time to rethink what we’ve never thought about in the process and actions of our performances.”
GREENPIG,〈TREE WON’T SEEK FOR SHOE STORE〉
#Environmental_NuclearPowerPlant #Fable_that_didn’t_exist_in_the_World #Dystopia #Greenpig #YoonYoungsun
 |
 |
| ⓒGreenpig | |
| Date/Time: 17:30~19:00 27th (Tue) September | Director: Hansol Yoon |
| Venue: Hall 2, SeoKyeong Performing Arts Center | Showcase Runtime: 40 minutes |
| Genre: Theater | Tour Size: 15 people (11 performers & 4 staff members) |
Tree Won’t Seek for Shoestore is a theater piece originated from a seven page-long draft written by the playwright Yoon Youngsun. Tree Won’t Seek for Shoestore is a collective creation by members of greenpig with additional text by Jeon Seong-hyun. Tree Won’t Seek for Shoestore is a serious of pictorial episodes portraying paradoxical aspect of capital-driven human civilization, human paradox seen in the development of civilization and the destruction by contrasting it with ’shoes (civilization)’ and ’trees (nature)’. By intersecting short episodes such as Monkey’s Flower Shoes, Feet, Fetus in Yoon Youngsun’s poetic and melancholic language, the performance tells the audience a fable that did not exist in the world.
Monkey’s Flower Shoes is based on a fairy tale written by Jung Hwi-chang. Fetus Chitchat deals with upright walking and the origin of pain. Contract, is the story about a fetus who doesn’t want to be born negotiating with the mother. And Tree Won’t Seek for Shoe Store talks about the death of the mother and human dignity.
On the stage of this performance is a waste mountain made from scrap fabric from a sewing factory. On top of it, the actors wear costumes in indistinguishable colors and move as if only their faces are floating around. The stage, with a grotesque atmosphere, depicts human desire running without brakes represented by nuclear energy and nuclear power plants, the capital that fuels them, and the collapse of civilization and humanity as a result.
In addition, it borrows the perspective of a ’fetus who does not want to be born’ to imagine an extremely realistic dystopia. Tree Won’t Seek for Shoe Store first part1 of greenpig’s ’e(environment)-trilogy’. Most of costumes and props used in the show are recycled and upcycled items that are no longer used or had been thrown-away, thus adding more meaning to the work.
“We have come a long way since then, and now even discuss animal rights, but back in 2021 when the performance premiered, environmental discussions were very much about humans vs nature. I wondered whether the extreme human-centeredness should be questioned, and I decided to work on this performance again this year because I wanted to say that the question this work is asking is justified.
Ultimately the word sustainability came out for the sake of sustaining humans as a species. Without answering the question of why it must be sustainable, other vested rights will be claimed, some will be marginalized, and things will continue as business as usual.
In this society, an art work and the artist have no choice but to constantly prove their worth and that they deserve to exist. It is about whether the questions Hansol Yoon and GreenPig want to ask society through their works are valid and valuable, and whether the performances resulting from those questions are worth seeing from the audience’s perspective. I need to make performances which the audience finds worth visiting a theater for, while proving to my colleagues that my work is worth doing at the same time.”
LK9,〈IDENTITY〉
#LK9 #OneManBand #ElectronicMusic #EthnicHouse #LiveLooping
 |
|
| ⓒLK9 | |
| Date/Time: 9.28.(WED) 16:00~17:00 | Director: LK9(Lee Kyung-gu) |
| Venue: SFAC Theater QUAD | Showcase Runtime: 20 minutes |
| Genre: MUSIC | Tour Size: 4 people (1 performer & 3 staff members) |
In 2021, a world music player LK9(Lee Kyung-gu) released Identity, a performance in which he combined Korean musical elements from his own music with world music instruments to create sounds that transcend borders. This concert consists of creative music expressing the artist’s experience about his own body. For his work, sensuous computer beats are used to express our inner emotions as well as make anyone enjoy music. In addition, various instruments uniquely combined by LK9 are added to make the performance even more impressive and give the audience the pleasure of seeing and hearing. Through this the performance shows how it can be expanded to a convergence performance that is based on traditional music.
“Overall, the music I’ve been creating is based on the stories I find within myself. The way I create my music is that I create layers by using acoustic instruments, do a dubbing right there on the spot to edit the music or sources, and sometimes distort them.
While going through the COVID-19 pandemic, I thought having colleagues to collaborate with or forming solidarity with them has been very important. To me as an artist, they provide huge support and energy.
With the transition to the endemic, the creative method has changed a lot. Artists send and receive the work they have created in a studio via email. And there are a lot more performances taking place in a contact free online space and with some of them available to watch on a smartphone. As a creator, I think my challenge is to stay current with these developments when I create works. As an artist, I try to stay healthy mentally and emotionally. I would like to share my ideas on sustainable happiness with many participants of PAMS this year.”
GOMOOL X GOBLIN PARTY,〈KKOKDUGAKSI〉
#KoreanTraditionalMusicxContemporaryDance #SubjectnObject #MovementnSound #Staged_Documentary #Fantasy
 |
 |
| ⓒ2021 ArkoSelection_Sang Hoon Ok | |
| Date/Time: 16:00~17:00 27th (Tue) September | Music and Directing: Lee TaeWon Choreographer: Lim Jinho |
| Venue: SFAC Theater QUAD | Showcase Runtime: 20 minutes |
| Genre: Music x Dance | Tour Size: 11~14 people (8 performers, 3~6 staff members) |
Kkokdugaksi means kind of a dance, a song, and a game. Kkokdugaksi is also a symbol of a funeral, a woman, and a doll. Therefore, Kkokdugaksi is also a marionette, the personification of passivity. We wanted to create a work that embodies this ambiguity. On stage, everyone, be they a dancer or a musician dances, sings and plays. While playing, the subject and object, and the place of domination and oppression are switching positions while reconstructing the space in which the subject, who is only a bundle of objects, is othering the subject itself by othering the object.
“When I made this performance I thought that it would be great if I could avoid the way in which one side provides itself to the other, where music is not meaningful without choreography, and where they cannot exist independently without one another, and to show that I want to make this performance to be like ’laced fingers.’ Kkokdugaksi is a performance that looks into the interdependent relationship between a puppet and its puppetier as the two who switch the roles of being a master and slave back and forth, and how it is easy for them to fall into that master-slave relationship in their reality.
The theme of PAMS this year is ’sustainability.’ As we are going through the COVID-19 pandemic, we need to think about what it is that we want to make sustainable, it is worth sustaining it and what is collapsing. PAMS this year wants to shed light on: what is the subject of ’sustainability’?; how do we define it?; what is each artist going to do with their own artistic resources?; and for which audiences we are having this discussion?”
Kim Wonyoung x Project YYIN,〈Becoming-dancer〉
#Dance #Disabilityart #TrioA #DemocracysBody
> |
 |
| ⓒProject YYIN | |
| Date/Time: 16:00~17:00 26th (Mon) September | Choreography: Sinae Rha, Kisub Choi |
| Venue: SFAC Theater QUAD | Showcase Runtime: 25 minutes |
| Genre: Dance | Tour Size: 4 people (2 performers & 2 staff members) |
If the imperfection and limit of the body could be shown not as a deficiency or inability but as a difference itself, if it could be shown as the capacity to unwork the logic of dichotomy that degrades difference into negation of the identical, the movement of such bodies could open up a question about the “impossible” world where each and every body can live as a dancing being beyond what is given to them as possible.
“Becoming-dancer, which will be presented at PAMS, was premiered in ‘Value of Togetherness’, an inclusive disability arts and culture project organized by the Seoul Foundation for Arts and Culture in 2020. It was performed again at the Korea International Accessible Dance Festival (KIADA) and Under Stand Avenue Art Stand in 2021. Becoming-dancer is based on the questions about disability, existence, choreography and dance that we are personally experiencing and see embodied in Korean society. We are curious as to how this will be seen in the eyes of audiences outside the Korean context. In my opinion, the interest in the value of sustaining ‘ability’ is greater among creators than it is by those in other fields. Perhaps it’s because creating a performance stage or an exhibition is a ’useless’ work that will disappear soon after. In fact, I think the group that has the largest number of people in it who have doubts about whether what they are doing is useless, is the creators. I still don’t know how I can continue my work and threaten the world’s sustainability even slightly less amid the geopolitical conflicts and climate crisis. However, interest in sustainability is not only very meaningful in that it triggers a reflection or actions on the world’s crises, but also in that it makes us question the ‘usefulness’ of our creations and the values of our creative practices.”
TIGER POWER THEATER,〈CALL TIME〉
#FemaleNarrative #Theater #Blackcomedy #Feminism #Growl!
 |
 |
| ⓒArko, kyoung-oh, Ryu | |
| Date/Time: 17:00~18:00 29th (Thu) September/td> | Director: Lee O-Jin |
| Venue: SFAC Theater QUAD | Showcase Runtime: 35 minutes |
| Genre: Theater | Tour Size: 10 people (3 performers & 7 staff members) |
Beom-soon: Changing this world of 2022? Not easy as I’ve thought.”
Eun-ho: Old plays, which were written by old-male- writers!”
Above two quotes are the lines in play by Tiger Power Theater, which means the energy of Tiger. Drama of two Korean women who live their lives in and out of the stage in 2022 The play becomes the stage and the stage becomes the play
〈Call Time〉is a comedy which deals the conflict between modern history of Korean theater and current theatre of feminism. It depicts the real time thundering responses between two Korean women: a 12-years-of-experienced professional actress and a very brisky 21- year-old feminist assistant director.
With big and small laughs out of satiric sarcasm the audience can have a moment to feel their own queerness which do not fit on their own “self- designed- normality”s and thus will be rediscovered consecutively.
“Tiger Power is a one-person theater company founded by Yi Oh-Jin, but it also works with the same staff members for several years at the same time like a team. The sustainability of theatrical work is to create a production that yields work above a certain scheduled quality, whilst not excluding any team or audience members in that process. Working in theater is a career choice I’d already made a while back. And If I am going to be in it, I might as well work as diligently as an ant. Doing that, and working a second part-time job or writing articles in other genres to sustain that career might count as economic sustainability in my opinion.
Works that will allow me to survive as a contemporary artist, making new works, and continue working with amazing team members are the two very important things.Tiger Power writes stories about women to present them on stage. It creates stories about the people who have been frustrated by being stuck in a dilemma but move one step forward at last with affection. We want to present stories about people who love the world rather than resenting it and who are struggling in it.
Taking the opportunity of presenting Call Time at PAMS, we hope to see Tiger Power speaking and exchanging with theater experts not only from Korea but from around the world.”
YOONHWAN JEON(AND THEATRE),〈NATURAL BREAD〉
#New_Documentary #Immersive #Island_residency #Capitalism #Climate_Crisis
 |
 |
| ⓒAND Theater | |
| Date/Time: 17:30~18:30 28th (Wed) September | Director: Yoonhwan Jeon |
| Venue: Hall 2, SeoKyeong Performing Arts Center | Showcase Runtime: 40 minutes |
| Genre: Theater | Tour Size: 5 people (1 performer & 4 staff memebers) |
Yoonhwan Jeon rigorously seeks inspiration for theater making from his daily life. He has moved to Ganghwa Island and tends the vegetable garden day to day. He expects that this change in his way of living will open up new horizons in his documentary theater making. This is the context which his work, Natural Bread is in. In the performance, he talks about the irony that he finds himself in where he moved to Ganghwa-do to live a life that allows him to keep an adequate distance from the city and capital, but gets swept away by the bitcoin frenzy. This performance takes a style in which Yoonhwan Jeon appears as himself and talks about his own stories. On the stage, he stands in front of a screen on which a Bitcoin investment graph is projected. He bakes bread and drinks makgeolli while listening to music. This reenactment of his modest lifestyle is a good reminder of how contemporary society is engulfed by capital.
“PAMS is exploring ’sustainability’ by examining topics such as the climate crisis, the economic crisis, the pandemic, and arts and technology. In particular Natural Bread is a work that asks profound questions about crises, and sustainable life. The younger generations in Korean society are living at a time of inequality where it is impossible to go up the social hierarchy even if they work hard. The work is presenting the situation in which they have no choice but to bet their lives on the abstract capital of ’Bitcoin’ to find a breakthrough. In it, a young artist living in the neoliberal era who has mixed feelings about his situation talks about his life. While growing a vegetable garden in the countryside and pursuing a life of self-sufficiency, the artist is invested in the virtual currency that is at the forefront of the neoliberal era. His life will resonate with young people not only in Korea but around the world.”
CIFIKA,〈CIFIKA X HYDROVOX 3.0〉
#MediaArt #ImmersiveArt #Audiovisual #ArtandTechnology #TouchDesigner
 |
 |
| ⓒAdamKissick | |
| ate/Time: 16:00~17:00 28th (Wed) September | Director: Loksu(Alex Griff), CIFIKA |
| Venue: SFAC Theater QUAD | Showcase Runtime: 20 minutes |
| Genre: Music | Tour Size: 4 people (2 performers & 2 staff members) |
HydroVox is an audiovisual series. In each version, elements of visual, audio, visual, and fashion are transformed and developed into their own direction by nature. With the change of space for each performance, the installation, projection and lights are positioned in an optimal way to result in new arrangments of visual and lighting. HydroVox is the story of a planet that uses music as its primary energy. There is the theory that this planet is Earth in a parallel universe, or that it could be Europa of Jupiter. A being, called ‘Cifika’, uses sound to travel through multiple dimensions and interact with new life forms, and use another dimension which they can access to move between complex and entangled interplanetary space while emitting and absorbing energy.
HydroVox’s Journey – Along with the composition of the music, it uses two types of light, projection and LED, to express the energy and details of the story. The two types of visuals are linked in real time to the music and Cifika’s vocals, and explores how the sounds are transformed into the light energy that can be presented to the audience.
◾ Period: September. 26(MON) ~ 29(THU), 2022
PAMS Dance Season AMS Dance Season
- Seoul 9. 25.(SUN) ~ 28.(WED) - Busan 9. 29.(THU) ~ 30.(FRI)
◾ Venue: JCC Art Center, JCC Creative Center, SFAC QUAD, Seokyeong Performing Art Center
◾ Hosted & Organized by: Korea Arts Management Service(KAMS)
◾ Supported by: Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism, Arts Council Korea, Seoul Foundation for Arts and Culture, WELCOME DAEHAKRO FESTIVAL, The Japan Foundation, Seoul, JEI Corporation
PREV
.JPG)
.jpg)
.jpg)
.jpg)
.jpg)
.jpg','');)
