Gulliverse (2022)
Seongsu Art Hall (Seoul, Korea)
Dec 09, 2022
~
Dec 18, 2022
Adaption, Direction, Choreography, Staging, Props, Costumes, and Decor, and Song Curation by
Kim Hyuntak
Original Play by
Jonathan Swift
Kim Mi Ok |
An Soobin |
Park Yumi |
Kim Namhyun |
Park Bohyun |
Choi Minhyeok |
Kwag Young Hyun |
Hyun Seungil |
Jeon Hyein |
Kang Jinee |
Jung Seohyun |
Lee Da Hye |
Cast
Staff
Dramaturg : Hwang Dong Woo
Executive Manager : Ji Daehyeon
Technical Director : Suh Jiwon
Lighting Design : Shin Dong Sun
Lighting Operator : Kim Na Ra
Sound Operator : Kim Ha Sun
Video Operator : An Bo Ri
Marketing : DPS Company
Assistant Director : Choi Mi Hyun
Description
"Tragic portrait of today’s society made again through dismantlement and distortion of a classic"
The classic Gulliver’s Travels and director Kim Hyuntak meet in this performance. Dismantling the original text audaciously and provocatively, the director makes a tragic portrait of our society.
[Introduction]
Director Kim Hyuntak has firmly built his own artistic world with his experimental spirit provocatively and audaciously. He produced <Gulliverse> based on Jonathan Swift’s tale-like social satire Gulliver’s Travels with his extreme imagination, focusing on the novel’s first part: A voyage to Lilliput. In this performance, several young Gullivers face and collide with this world, as the vulnerable in society. Here, the director deals with different issues of today’s society by depicting the Gullivers who have fallen into the world inside their smartphone. The play won the 59th Dong-A Theater Awards in 2022 (category: best play).
[Synopsis]
The Gullivers fall asleep to ASMR and wake up to an annoying alarm. They watch a morning news interview and ballet video. They can’t live without their smartphone. They hurriedly go to work, play online games and invest in stocks. To survive in this world, these young people keep running and rowing their boat. Nevertheless, they are treated like useless parts of a machine in today’s society. But those of the older generation stay in their past glories and turn a blind eye to younger people who struggle to move forward.
Review
“For Seongbukdong Beedoolkee Theatre, the classics are the bare minimum material through which to speak about the here and now in which we live. If Gulliver, the protagonist of Gulliver’s Travels, drifts across the sea to reach fantastical lands, the Gulliver of Gulliverse drifts through the fantastical space of the multiverse. The figures he encounters there are the young people of contemporary Korean society.
The perfectly synchronized ballet ensemble, with performers divided between black and white tutus; the scene in which the actors stand in a line, their right and left hands—each with five fingers—striking piano keys, while they repeatedly sit and rise without rest, gasping in time with the intensity and rhythm of the sound; and the moment when, despite warnings that a wolf has appeared, the performers recite the immediate anxieties of reality—youth loans, public housing, and the like—all evoke, in a breathless yet comic way, the painful lives of a futureless generation of young people struggling to endure.
In the final street-dance sequence, the performers first take the form of chickens trapped in a cramped cage, then, the moment life jackets are handed to them, move in precise unison. This scene rises to a powerful climax, transforming into a sorrowful elegy for the young lives lost in the Sewol Ferry disaster and the Itaewon tragedy.”
— Jury Statement, Dong-A Theatre Awards, 59th Edition
