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Performance Info

Kim Kyung-hee is a performance director, and also the artistic director of the creative theater group Noni. Noni was founded in 2005 by artists working in the field of stage design and yeonhee, the Korean traditional performing arts. During the initial stage of their work, they focused on contemporary yeonhee, referring to Noni’s productions with the modernized traditional performing arts, but with their recent site-specific productions, they have been exploring the nature of motility among objects, and bodies, and spaces. Their productions include G.Round, Things That Remember, Chaotic Twins, Param-nori: Playing Wind, and Kkok-du.

Q. Can you tell us about how you founded the creative theater group Noni, and the theater productions Noni produced in the beginning?

A. In 2005, artists who were working in the field of stage design and yeonhee, our traditional performing arts, got together for a workshop, and we ended up forming a theater group because we wanted to continue working together. Our works have been collective, with the aim of undertaking different projects, but when you look at the nature of our productions and process, you will see that our previous works and what we are doing now are connected; they have been built up while being transformed at the same time.

From the very beginning, we staged productions that were inspired by our traditional performing arts. Our first production was called Kkok-du (2006) and was inspired by the only traditional puppet performance that has been handed down, Kkokdugaksi Nori. The themes of Kkok-du are death and gut, the Korean shamanistic ritual, and you can say that this production is like a conversation between the living and the dead. In Gokdo-gut (2014), our traditional theater practitioners played the characters of shaman, the ones who represented the time of humankind, and instead of following a format of storytelling, they communicated with the audience through music and dance. In ㅡㅣㅇ, which was produced in 2017, the idea for the production was for three artists working in different fields of art to face the audience and move and perform dictated only by their senses. In the previously mentioned productions, the concept of the bowl was important. If we were to compare a shaman to a bowl as an embodiment of different spirits, in Kkok-du, that would be the puppets, in Gokdo-gut, that would be the performers, and in ㅡㅣㅇ, that would be the theater. Kkok-du dealt with a story about life and death through funeral rituals, and you can see this theme of life and death and its variations in our theater group’s productions. A funeral is a ritual where the living and the dead are brought together, and sometimes, the ritual is conducted with puppets or the body, or by reversing the role between the audience and the stage. Noni has been telling and experimenting with stories about life and death.

Q. Since 2014, Noni’s productions seem to be moving in the direction of experimental theater, away from the traditional performing arts. Can you tell us if there was a special reason behind this?

A. There wasn’t one reason per se for the change in the direction for our work. There were several reasons that happened around the same time, and this slowly changed the direction of our work. First, there was a personal reason that ended up being a great influence on the nature of our work. In the winter of 2011, I was diagnosed with epilepsy, and I couldn’t work at the speed that I had been working.

I had to slow down, and when I did, I was able to ask myself questions which I couldn’t before. It was rare, but I did suffer from the illness, and this made me very interested in memory and linguistic abilities, and I began to ask questions. How does the nature of sensation change depending on neural transmission? Is one’s entity decided by society or by oneself? What does it mean to be alive? Is surviving different from existing? As an artist, I began to fear that I might not have much time left to work, and with that, I began to contemplate more seriously the nature of work I wanted to do. It was around this time that I started to take on more aggressive challenges in my work. And it was fortunate because around the time when I was able to sort things out, I met parkour performers who became another reason behind the changes in Noni’s works. When I met them, I felt as if all the training I had had before was being rendered useless, and this was a refreshing experience. They became inspirations for my work, and we worked together for several years during which they also learned from me the language of theater. In our work, they were provided with an ample space like a playground to perform in. A majority of parkour performers are young, and they are more used to performing for short video clips and editing, and it was difficult for them to learn the basic theater training to perform a full-length production and also to maintain their energy level throughout a performance. But by working together, we learned something new from each other, and this process of discovering a brandnew possibility became one of the important inspirations behind Noni’s recent productions. And last but not least, I can say it was the Sewol Ferry Disaster in 2014. Ever since I started working as an artist, I have been thinking about the relationship between an artist and society, and how an artist should communicate and react in the society she is living in, but when the Sewol Ferry Disaster occurred, I realized for the first time that an artist should react promptly and precisely in whatever the circumstance is. And it also led to the idea that everything I do should be left as documents in preparation for anything that might happen later, and this became almost a compulsive habit. Since the ferry disaster, I have been documenting everything Noni has been doing, including documenting the production process. Everyone who worked in the project checks, studies, and documents what we do, and this recording or archiving our work has become a project itself. Since 2014, we have three members who have joined us in our on-going effort to document our work, and one of them who is our dramaturg is a resident of Ansan. And I have to say, they are Noni’s most important members.

Q. Things That Remember is one of Noni’s well-known productions, and like your other works, it deals with the relationship among things, the body, and space. Can you tell us what you wanted to say by placing things in motion in the same space with bodies that are immobile?

A. Our body is a thing; it’s physical material. We introduced Things That Remember in 2014, and its aim was to discover a line of equilibrium between things, bodies, and space, but I was also interested in the audience’s reaction to seeing the objective of the production expressed as it was. To everyone, the experience of being objectified comes at the last moment of our life. It is an inevitable ending for everyone, but we might not want to accept it. I also think that being still is a type of movement. A body that is not in motion still breathes as long as it is alive, and by breathing, it stays in motion. By presenting a subverted or inverted image of things in motion and immobile bodies, I wanted the audience to experience something different and also to see things differently in Things That Remember. The most important aspect of Things That Remember was the space and things. When it was presented at Seoul Station, the focus was on the historicity and generality of the place; at the county pumping station, we experimented with transferring the physicality of water into social memories; at the Long Biên Stationin Vietnam, we experimented with the possibility of performers becoming objectified using the contemporary nature of the site; at the naval military academy in Argentina, we questioned the present-ness of memories through the re-understanding of a historical event.

Instead of communicating with language, Things That Remember foregrounded linguistic limitations; therefore, nonverbal means of communication such as movements, sounds, pictures, or visuals were at the center of the production. When we can’t communicate with words, we concentrate more on using other communication clues such as gestures and gazes. It was the same with our work. We focused on communicating and interacting through the means of sensory experiences. Things That Remember will be presented again at the Gyeonggi Sangsang Makers Lab this year, and this time we plan to have Vietnamese and Korean artists work together under the theme of “The Woman I Know” by conducting interviews and research prior to the show and collecting different stories as well as things related to the topic. It will be followed by a workshop where the collection of things under the topic of “The Woman I Know” will be explored and experimented with in order to show the possibility of communication that is intricately dependent on the topic and place.

Q. One of the creative ways for Noni to work has been large-scale productions by conducting workshops with residents in the community. Can you tell us about your community productions?

A. One of the most difficult works for an artist to do is working with the community. There are a lot of things, small or big, that you have to pay attention to, and you have to be in the position of the listener and also of the planner by laying down a production structure with room for improvisation and consideration for others. Despite these challenges and difficulties, we have been working with people because by having more opportunities to work with the community, we can realize that we, too, are citizens of this country and we can make others also aware of that fact. In my opinion, what we do can be described as a social activity rather than a theater or art work because it connects society to the arts: it is a way to make known the presence of artists and their art in society and to recognize ourselves as members of the society. The work or labor of artists is not perceived as worthy as other labor in society, and therefore, I believe we have to continue with these productions to provide a direction for future community productions. An important production Noni has done with the community is An安寧Nyeong meaning “well-being.”This was the opening production for Ansan Street Arts Festival in 2017, and participants from all different backgrounds came and became a part of this work. The production began with the

members of Hello Orchestra – an orchestra with young adults from multicultural marriages – playing with balls, and people from different age groups came forward to visually express the rhythm of ball playing; the people were the most important element in the work. The production included the theater actors, traditional performing arts practitioners, circus performers, parkour performers who moved up and down with a forklift, and performers who transformed an everyday space into the space of a festival through gilnori – a traditional performance carried out in the form of a street procession. There were also vertical dancers who were wired to a crane, operators of forklifts and cranes, professional street artists, circus coaches, and artists working in different fields; they were all divided according to their expertise. Besides the festival operational team and volunteers, there were more than 700 participants in the production including the very first participants, people who joined the work during the second round of recruitment, and people who were recruited on the very day of the performance.

Because they all had a different reason for participating, as well as a different length of time for participating, figuring out how to work with all of them together became the biggest challenge for us. For example, the participants who had been working with us since the very first workshop complained about the people who joined us on the very day of the performance. Starting with these complaints, which we were happy to deal with, there were many unexpected problems on the site. The circumstances were such that we couldn’t possibly have a perfect rehearsal, but because we had to use heavy machinery in a public place, safety was the priority. With each part sectioned off, we conducted a rehearsal as well as possible scenarios for each part, thereby limiting any dangers or risks and ensuring safety. The aim of the 2017 production was to wish for peace and well-being for the people of Ansan, as well as the salvage of the ferry and recovery of the remains of the missing people from the ferry disaster. It was very meaningful for the participants who did their best until the end of the production. An安寧Nyeong was not just a community production, one that is fun to see and participate in; it provided a time and space to remember, which was the aim of the festival.

Q. G . Round was staged at the Oil Tank Culture Park, but now there are two different versions of G.Round – one with a performance and one without. And in the version without any performance, a ball launcher replaces the performance element. Can you explain the significance of machines in Noni’s productions?

A We introduced G.Round in 2017, and in the following year, we added more technically experimental elements to it and restaged it. In 2017, the production combined play and art by focusing on the physicality of a ball, and without any linguistic restrictions, the audience became intrigued by seeing the balls, which naturally led to their participation in the work. Using the characteristics of the performance place, which had previously been used as an oil tank, the production proved that there was an interactive relationship among objet, the body, lights, and sounds. In the 2018 version, which could be described as an installation performance, we used four ball launchers which were programmed to operate at different times. When a launcher operated, the audience reacted, and it was the moment that decided a certain relationship between them, but sometimes nothing happened between an audience and the launcher. Sometimes an audience simply left after a certain movement, and the machine would re-enact that movement. Therefore, in order for the audience to enjoy this production fully, two things were required of them: an attitude to do something of one’s own volition and an observation of the movements of the machine. Because the people who came to see our work did not exhibit unilateral behavior, we didn’t call them the audience; we called visitors.

In the first version of the production, we also used technology; for example, we hid machines in different places, and they were programmed to move by themselves. What we used wasn’t the latest or very high-tech technology, and since the first production, we had had discussions about it, and we agreed to employ more technological elements when we had an opportunity to restage the production. In the 2017 version of G.Round, the sound reacted to the movements of the actors, but I don’t think the audiences really registered these experiments that we tried. This led us to think about how to maximize the effect of our technical experiments on the audience. And I wanted to try staging a production without any performers, and this also became a reason to employ technology in the work. In short, I wondered about ways to have the audience feel that they were watching a performance, not a display, even without any performers. So we came up with a production with machines, and by having the audience interact with the machines and become performers themselves, we decided to call it an installation performance. In a performance, there are actions and reactions. In the 2018 version of G.Round, the audience decided when to enter and exit, whether to act or not to act, and how they wanted to act and react in the space. The choices they made created the start of their relationship with the machines in the performance. With the focus on relationship and actions in the production, I can say for sure that it is not a display; it’s a performance. And each visitor to the site could create his or her own scene of the performance. What I plan to do is continue this methodology where a performance becomes the research, instead of having performance and research separate and independent from each other, and therefore I can continue to experiment and try variations of it.

Photograph Copyright :

1. (Main Image) : Things that Remember, 2014

2. Things that Remember, 2014

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