“Would You MindProject” is the “talkative visual theatre” that aims at the theatre out ofthe theatre. Two actors expand images in harmony with space through texts,sounds and movements. Focusing on the actual issues arising between the social structure and an individual, they create documentary plays based onself-narratives and present site-specific performances.

Interview

Q. Before doing street arts in “Would You Mind Project,” each of you performed as actors.You are still working on theater works. What made you form the group together?

SHIN Moon-young: We met at theater school asstudents. After performing individually, we got married. And one day, we lost our job. We had talked about performing together before but we hadn’t had anyopportunity to do so. And then we tried our first performance together at the 2015 Seoul Fringe Festival.

KIM Seung-eon: The rental fee for theaters was a big problem for us. Even if we do have money, a play requires not only two actors but also the staff at the theater. So the size becomes bigger. We wanted to let go of what we had worked on before and find something we could make together. We also wanted to find our own way to perform. When I first understood the concept of a street, it felt refreshing. On the street, I could see things that aren’t found in theaters. AsI didn’t know what they were exactly, I was shocked as well.

SHIN Moon-young: We didn’t turn to streets intentionally in the process of looking for alternative spaces. We just met streets naturally while doing what we could do. We had produced performances in the theatrical style and we made attempts to locate ourselves on streets or alternative spaces.“Would You Mind Project” seems to be the result of such attempts. In addition, the platforms dealing with street arts at that time worked for us as well.

SHIN Moon-young: We still think that part of what we did was acoincidence. The same was true for the issues we dealt with in "Job on Loan". We are not professional dramaturges so the structure and text of works are inevitably rough. Despite this, our attitude of sincerely expressing ourselves would have appeal to the audience. That is why we used the expression“gift.” We mainly perform with words. In fact, sounds of those participating in rallies and religious people on the street are similar to the voices of us who keep talking. Nevertheless, ordinary but slightly cold stories in our voices would have been refreshing for the audience. Many people empathized with the content of our performance. We felt that they were cheering for us during the performance. As for the trilogy, we planned it from the beginning. It has along text and tells today’s stories in the form of collage. In the process of presenting the works, we sometimes failed to lead people to empathize. It seems that we have found an appropriate tone through trials and errors.

KIM Seung-eon: In fact, we performed at the Seoul Fringe Festival even though we hadn’t completed the work. At that time, all we wanted to do was to share the message that “it is hard to survive.” Looking back, the performance was completed at about 50% but the audience reacted to it positively. That seems to be the strength of the “fringe” platform. In other words, it is where we could feel out if something will work. Based on that experience, we were able to perform again at the Seoul Street Arts Festival in 2017. The festival platform gave me feedback in diverse ways and thanks to that, we came to make a more sophisticated work. I believe that the Korean street arts scene has greatly developed in terms of genres, compared to the period when we first performed at a festival. We are stimulated positively and “Would You Mind Project” keeps thinking about how to develop its form.

SHIN Moon-young: Being successful at festivals, we were afraid of our next projects. We also became more concerned about our dramaturgical attitude and the content of our works. As we deal with sensitive issues in society, we also wondered if it would be right to share our personal views of these issues. We sometimes find ourselves explaining something to the audience. But such a direct explanation in our performance also made the audience grow apart. When it comes to more recent works "Speed, Jobs" and "Adam’s Miss", we learned a lot from the audience’s reaction during a street arts season program.

KIM Seung-eon: Such experiences gave us an internal turning point while working on the trilogy. At the beginning of 2018, the Me Too movement started and events that were much more powerful than performances were happening in reality. We also felt nervous, thinking that it wouldn’t be right to talk about these events carelessly. And we changed the order of completion to this: "Job on Loan", "Adam’s Miss" and "Speed, Jobs". Such a flow of work seems to be in line with social issues of that time. It naturally happened because creators keep thinking about issues that feel close to them.

SHIN Moon-young: It is already so hard to struggle with these issues in the city. So we are also wondering if we would have to deal with these issues in our performances. On one hand, we want to set these issues aside and live comfortably. On the other hand, we want to talk about them in our works. These two ideas keep colliding ironically. Since the 2015 Seoul Fringe Festival, we decided to participate in the festival every year.

KIM Seung-eon: I studied economics and I came to think about famous economists known for dealing with how to make a living. I also reflected on their influences. I just borrowed their theories in a shallow way, just at  the level of economic notions we all know generally. Rather than exploring profound academic meanings of their theories, we created works by focusing on what status their theorieshave in reality and how they work. We thought that we couldn’t be free from the influence of major discourses.

SHIN Moon-young: The titles of the works came from Seung-eon’s ideas. We first chose a title and wrote down the content of the work. We don’t like what is difficult. We just wondered how such a huge number of masters’ theories would help us make our society a better place to live in. Our performances actually started from our conviction that we would need to know what kind of economic cause and effect are influencing our lives.

KIM Seung-eon: In 2018, "Adam’s Miss" was selected for the PAMS Choice and we came to try the performance in English. The running time of its Korean version was 40 minutes. We translated it into English and shortened it to 30 minutes, which was the time limit of the showcase. So we couldn’t show the last part of the performance. We tried that without thinking seriously. Ms. Na Hee-kyung, a producer who collaborated with us at that time, said that people would find it tiring to read subtitles on the street. The translator did a good job but couldn’t really highlight our wordplay. The audience’s reaction was not bad but the showcase didn’t lead us to be invited to foreign countries.

SHIN Moon-young: In 2017, we presented in Germany. We roughly translated some scenes to perform. In the scene where we introduce Adam Smith and Karl Marx, we couldn’t do the wordplay in Korean so we tried it in English but there was certainly a limit. As for "Adam’s Miss", international audiences empathized with the performance’s style and issues rather than its wordplay. A Swedish lady really empathized with the story, even if she is from a society where feminism and gender equality would be better than those of Korea. So it was surprising.

KIM Seung-eon: While performing, I was worried that the issues we deal with may be regarded as something that characterizes Korean society. But as we kept performing, we realized that "Adam’s Miss" has a theme appealing to women around the world.

KIM Seung-eon: These days, I have no idea about the scope or concept of “ordinary citizens.” I wonder why the poor would side with the super-rich and the unreasonable social structure supporting them. I wonder if noisiness is what democracy is about. In this world, people isolate and attack those thinking differently. So I wonder what the right answer would be.

SHIN Moon-young: We came to prepare "H.E.S.I.T.A.T.E" amid the global pandemic. The coronavirus has forced us to change the style of street performances. Under these circumstances, the Seoul Street Arts Festival came up with its open call program “The Street That is Very Close to Us.” And we create this work to participate in this program. As usual, we experimented with it in the “fringe” setting. For this new performance, we couldn’t be close to the audience with our drop lets spreading as we did for the previous trilogy. This is a story of those who find it hard to keep a distance. In the context of the pandemic, people suggest online performances as an alternative but I believe that they will never be able to replace offline performances. Through this new performance as well, we wanted to express that no medium can replace our sensuous experience on the spot. When we gave a virtual flower to the audience while respecting the institutional distance, they would have empathized with the story expressing the deplorable distance.

KIM Seung-eon: On the other hand, the social distancing enforced amid the pandemic also made me think that we may have needed a certain distance between each other before. If there is a certain distance between people, they may be able to share what is in their hearts more safely. In such a safety zone secured that way, they could be able to express themselves, with everyone’s realm respected. We wanted to elaborate on such contrasting aspects of distancing.

KIM Seung-eon: Right know, we are talking about distancing but we always want to meet our audience and communicate with them. At the end of "H.E.S.I.T.A.T.E", we wanted to dance with the audience while maintaining ourdistance. So we are thinking about how to make them move. In "Future, City" as well, we wanted to involve the audience so they could draw a picture freely but it wasn’t easy. In the future, we want to make more performances involving the audience. We want to find ways to involve those we naturally meet on the spot, rather than having them reserve their seats. And this may sound in appropriate in the context of the pandemic but we also want to perform discussion plays. Trying not to be too serious, we want to discuss with the audience everyday themes which may look trivial but which are important for each of us. We also want to strengthen the “visual” part ofthe “talkative visual theatre” which is our main direction. This would be about the aesthetic side of our performances.

#playground #plaza #crossroads #border_betweeen_life_and_survival

#something_to_think_about #site_of_concerns_for_those_deprived_of_their_space_of_life

*Photo Credit: ©Would You Mind Project and Galim Hwang