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Performance Info

BAE Yo Sup (Senior director of Performance Group TUIDA)

: A truthseeker’s theatre that transcends borders and differences

It has been 17 years since the founding of the theatre company. Your work is based in Seoul and Hwacheon, please tell us about the projects you have been working on.

I continue to work as senior director for the Performance Group TUIDA, that I had founded back in 2001. Up until 2009, I mostly directed performances in Seoul such as The Tale of Haruk (2002), Hamlet Cantabile (2005) and Alice Project (2009), performances that were sound, music and movement based, using objects rather than text. From 2010 onwards, I created a creative residency space called ‘Tutbat Arts Farm ’ in Hwacheon, Gangwon Province. For the past five years, I have been interested in the art of devising theatre, which is an improvised form in which the actors and dancers explore fundamental energies and am working on some projects within this genre.

Tale of Haruk, which premiered the year the company was founded, is still running. This piece seems to have all the elements of TUIDA, such as the way it deals with mythical tales, the use of masks and puppetry, condensed within it.

Tale of Haruk is a story of Haruk who is only allowed to eat dew and because of that taboo, suffers from uncontrollable hunger and eventually breaks the taboo and eats everything in the world, including his parents. The actors tell this ancient Korean tale using props. The movements were based on Korean traditional mask dance rhythms and the designs of the masks from traditional Korean masks. Thus, the actor in this piece is not just the character he/she plays but the clown, the story teller and the musician.

This has been performed for 17 years, and translated into 7 languages and performed in around 20 countries including Japan, China, Thailand, Malaysia, Vietnam, India and Taiwan.

Quartet on Pain and Beyond Binary were both made by collaborating with Indian artists, apparently.

Quartet on Pain (2012) is a story of ‘Gorae, ‘ who is subjected to excruciating pain each time he speaks and ‘Nuksoni,’ who must survive on the sound of people’s pain. This piece is performed in a confined space of 2 square meters horizontal and vertical, and we combined the structure of ‘Kuthiyattam,’ which is a traditional play originated from the southern Indian state Kerala, and traditional Korean music. This piece was made through a joint residency workshop that took place from 2011 to 2014 with the Indian company, Adishakti Theatre, and was selected for the showcase of 2015 PAMS. In 2014, having been inspired by the Indian third gender class, Hijra and the God Bahuchara Mata that they worship, I made Beyond Binary and performed it in Korea and India. In 2017, after doing a residency that involves teaching training methods and master classes in Tamil Nadu and Adi Shakti in the South of India, I am scheduled to premiere a play that incorporates Indian and Korean mythical motifs called Tree, Fish and Moon at the Ranga Shakara Theatre.

There seem to be more international collaborations with numerous foreign theatre companies. Please tell us about these past collaborations and future collaborations.

In 2015-2016, I collaborated with BIRD Theatre Company TOTTORI in Japan. It was a project that addressed questions of the meaning of war while we are at a crossroads in terms of Korean-Japanese modern history. Classroom of Poem (2016) is a piece that was performed in October 2016 in Japan (Dottori and Nigata) was the result of two years of research and a workshop.

And a collaboration with National Theatre Wales is planned for 2017-2019. Driven by the two companies’ past experience in residencies and artist networks, this project will experiment the possibility of ‘site-specific, immersive, socially engaged performance’ which is directly linked with society.

What are the characteristics of your directing process?

In my process, there is no such thing as a ‘play,’ so to speak. The beginning point is always a simple idea or theme. I prefer building a show with the performers from an idea while growing the seed with scenes. Sometimes the base of the scenes are built first but that is just one of the ingredients. The important thing is how those ingredients are treated and guiding the performers to treat those ingredients properly is the role of the director.

What is the most important part of working with actors?

I don’t differentiate actors with dancers. Whatever it is, even if it is an expression of emotion or psychological turning points, everything can be seen as a physical movement. I also believe that an esthetic value of the moment must be obtained before imposing a meaning on ‘physical movements.’ That is why I require depth of the present of the performer himself.

This type of esthetic value comes not from physical technique but a detailed acknowledgement and understanding of the material and the spirit and mind is intrinsically related to the physique. For this reason, in TUIDA we’ve continued our ‘movement meditation,’ which constantly observes how these spontaneous movements come and go and where those instincts derive from.

To become an actor is to go on the path of searching for the reason of one’s existence. To share that process is the very essence of the performance art that I try to produce and I believe that through this process we can learn more about the way of life. The approach that I take for my theatre work is pure and intense, within my reach and power.

Production Details

Director
BAE Yo Sup

Reference

E-mailjodokjodok@gmail.com

Program

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