Creative Group Noni was founded in 2006 with artists specializing in stage design and the traditional theater who gathered to rediscover the aesthetics of the Korean theater. In this group, artists and co-workers of different genres work with different collaborators according to the characteristics of each project, thus carrying out projects without any border. Recently, they work on a sustainable archiving project focused on street arts and the circus and on the basis of this project, they experiment with a new form of artistic activities. There representative works include "Collectors", "An-Nyeong", "Life Jacket 304", "Things That Remember" and "Dear Friend: A Letter through Motions".

Interview

Q. What I find interesting is the combination of the roles played by all of you who constitute Creative Group NONI. Two of you joined the group after its founding. How did you meet the director Ms. Kim Kyunghee? I would also like to know how three of you are sharing the group’s creative process.

KIM Minkyoung: I was studying film and video in France and Creative Group NONI came to conduct research in France as part of the France-Korea project "역:STATION:驛". I served as an interpreter for the project and met Kyunghee. After the decision was made to produce "역:STATION:驛", I collaborated with her as a coordinator. I also participated in other projects little by little and since 2014, I have been the group’s production manager. Before joining the group, I just watched performances and didn’t know much about them. But joining NONI and working for the group, I found that its creative style is very refreshing. When it comes to the group’s research, approaches and concrete results, everything was interesting to me because I felt that the group was working without any border, contrary to my previous knowledge.

LEE Mikyung: I met Kyunghee in 2014 on the street. Just after the sinking of MV Sewol1, NONI performed "Dear Friend: A Letter through Motions" in Ansan City which is home to high schoolers who became the victims of the disaster. At the preliminary stage, the group asked the citizens of Ansan to share their opinions about the performance. It was in this process that Kyunghee came to me. Listening to her, I also wanted to contribute to the performance so I decided to participate, not as a member of the performance but as a citizen of Ansan.That experience was a really powerfully one that enabled me to meet street arts for the first time. The work wasn’t easy. As for things that may be done easily, the director requested us to work on them differently. Carrying out such requests and communicating, I felt that I kept overcoming my own limitations. For me, what was challenging was also attractive. I used to be a visual arts critic. NONI’s work is based on the performing arts but it has elements that appeal to me visually. In fact, I couldn’t see any border between genres.

KIM Kyunghe:Our creative style changes every time, depending on the nature of a certain project. If collaborators also change with projects, such a change is more dramatic. Basically, we talk a lot. We make the process itself through discussions. And during the creative process, we work a lot. What is essential for us is to establish a system through actual labor and experience. People have their roles they have received from some sources and they also have their limitations. But the group’s basic attitude is to destroy such limitations. Consequently, what we do isn’t  efficient in many ways. I feel great about not being able to characterize the group. As I formed the group, I decided to call it a “creative group,” not a “theater company.” And I came up with the group’s system based on projects. All this is because of the group’s main direction. We start working by sensitively reacting to our co-workers and to events and environments around us. That is an important sensibility for street arts.

LEE Mikyung:The way we choose the title of a work is also in line with our destruction of roles and borders in our creative process. For example, we dismantle a word or put together words in different languages as in the case of "G.Round", "역:STATION:驛" and "TEMPest_Do you HEAR. me?". In this way, we encourage people to look at things differently. In other words, we unveil our creative attitude and intention through titles. That is the inefficiency we have chosen. In fact, these titles aren’t found easily on search engines.

KIM Kyunghee: Working on "The TEMpest", we met performers of parkour. They weren’t thinking about the possibility of becoming artists at all. France has circus schools and I actually saw practitioners of parkour going to circus school. We thought that helping them meet circus artists could let them know their possibilities and stimulate them. It is in this context that we started planning the project "역:STATION:驛". So in 2014, we went to Ansan City every week to prepare for the Ansan Street Arts Festival. But after the sinking of MV Sewol, the festival was canceled and everything stopped. The city was silent and everyone seemed to be underwater. I had already experienced cancellation of festivals before but I couldn’t help questioning repeated cancellations done by force. I wondered if we needed to accept that and I asked the young collaborators who were preparing the performance with us. Most of them said, “We don’t feel comfortable to stop like that but we are afraid of moving forward.” But a decisive moment came when the youngest collaborator said, “We must do something. Ansan City needs that now.” He was living in Ansan so what he said was all the more persuasive to the older collaborators. So all artists participating in the project decided to present aguerrilla performance in Ansan and Seoul, on the date when the festival was supposed to be held. It was a difficult decision to make so I was thankful. In those days, the participating artists were carrying a huge mat from the theater to the plaza every week to rehearse. And the guerrilla performance was a simpleone made out of these movements. The performance’s title "Dear Friend: A Letter through Motions" is also in line with the improvised performance. One of the participating artists found it challenging to performmore than anyone else. But after the performance, he said, “I don’t  know what it is exactly but I now have an exclamation mark in my heart.” What he said really comforted me. Memories of that time still constitute a big asset to me. This experience and the power I gained through it enabled me to produce other works which led me to "An-Nyeong". It felt like mourning for three years. For "Life Jacket 304" as well, I just did what I could do in the same vein. In the plaza, we spread out the life jackets we had invited the audience to put on for "역:STATION:驛". The project involved everyone including the street artists of Korea Street Arts Association and citizens, without any boundary.

LEE Mikyung: Our previous works stretching from "Dear Friend: A Letter through Motions" to "An-Nyeong" make me think about artists’ role. Depending on the reactions and thoughts of those who are in a given space or depending on the story of the space, a performance feels very different. That is the attractiveness of street arts which give us a vigorous and powerful experience that a stage performance or exhibition can’t provide. I strongly feel that art isn’t something a person could do alone. Such an experience has helped me expand an artist’s roles at different points. While working on "An-Nyeong", I didn’t keep any objective distance from it. I just did it voluntarily as an act of alleviating my sorriness and guilt. During the performance, I should have been helpful as its staff member but at a certain moment, I also cried while watching the performance. I experience how a festival should express death, sorrow and mourning. That experience gave me power to continue to work up until now.

KIM Kyunghee: The young collaborators of "DearFriend: A Letter through Motions" served as a great source of power andinspiration for me. I also experienced and perceived “street arts outside a festival,” a concept I only had in my head. Of course, an artist needs to be a “speaker” to expresswhat they want but in addition to that, a street artist must be a “listener” who listens to stories of space, time and the public. I came to understand this point clearly. Street arts are the arts in the front line. It also requires strong mental and physical power as well as prompt decision-making an dimplementation. I felt somewhat reassured, thinking that we made it at that moment of 0.001% at least. The young artists didn’t calculate something in their head but they actively discussed and made a decision to take action. I’m grateful that I was with them at that moment. I hope that they don’t forget the exclamation mark they felt on that occasion.

KIM Minkyoung: A festival, which has been established in an institutional framework, certainly has positive functions. A festival helps artists meet many people and approach them easily. But as creators, we keep thinking about how to be independent from festivals and how to overcome our limitations. To prepare for a festival, wecan’t avoid doing something within a certain scope. In that sense, I have contrasting attitudes toward a festival.

KIM Kyunghee: I once studied a lot by observing festivals. I currently don’t have any complaint about festivals but in my view, we must not think that a festival is everything. What is problematic isn’t a festival but the environment of street arts dominated by festivals. So it is necessary to widen the scope of our activities to go beyond festivals. That could make the cyclic structure of the artistic ecosystem more natural. Street artists should also make efforts to find means other than festivals.

KIM Minkyoung: "Things That  Remember" is a site-specific performance that premiered in the Cultural Station 284 (formerly Seoul Station) in Korea. For this performance, we worked on evoking memoires coming from a place’s story. In Hanoi, Vietnam, we presented the performance in a small train station which still operates, in collaboration with Vietnamese artists. We connected memories of the place and the artists’ own memories. While we were discussing the theme of the performance from different angles, the keyword “woman” hit home. After coming back to Korea, we performed at Gyeonggi Sangsang Campus in Suwon. On that occasion, we invited some of the Vietnamese artists we had collaborated with and focused on personal memories with the subtitle “Women.”

KIM Kyunghee:"Things That Remember" is basically about how spaces, objects and personal memories are connected. Which of these to focus on differs according to the place of the performance and conditions of its production. In the case of the performance In Argentina, the local space had universal memories but not personal ones. So we focused on memories of objects. We would like to present this performance in Gwangju City, Korea, if we have a chance.

LEE Mikyung: For "G.Round", the audience play a very important role. In theperformance, the audience become performers. It doesn’t matter if they perceive that role or not. This work keeps blurring the clear lines and boundaries ofthe elements constituting the performance. And its scene changes at the audience’s will. We study and record that moment of transition. The audience actively gave us feedback on accepting such an unfamiliar way of watching a performance.

KIM Kyunghee: After "G.Round", we also made the performance "No Title" which has scenes without any performer. Like "G.Round", machines play the role of performers to create scenes in "No Title". Here, the audience participate as performers with a different role. We keep experimenting with this environment without performers. Doing this, we are trying to see if people could regard such an environment as a performance. "G.Round" has are petitive system and variables which are made by the audience. Once they have control over the variables, they become active performers.

KIM Kyunghee: Preparing "역:STATION:驛", we talked with French collaborators about all kinds of things. And we found circus categories with the word “Korean”: trapeze and plank. They asked us how Koreans were practicing these categories today. We didn’t know why the categories have the word “Korean” even though they are very different from what Koreans do. At that time, we continued to talk and moved on, still feeling curious. Later on, my curiosity didn’t disappear. The categories would have the word “Korean” because a Korean technique or a Korean practicing the technique was famous. So I thought that it wouldn’t make sense if I don’t know it. That question triggered our research and we collected data from Asia. But the continent has different languages so it wasn’t difficult to work on it. We traced today’s circus back to the time when there was no word “circus.” We explored how the past form had been connected to the present one and how circus people had moved and communicated. And it turned out that finding the origin of the categories wasn’t something to be done in a couple of years.

KIM Minkyoung: We vaguely started the project at the end of 2018 and we started doing lots of things in earnest in 2019. And we have worked on it for three years. We supposed that the Korean trapeze and plank in today’s circus would imply a certain trend that had existed before the modern circus. In that era, the word “circus” didn’t exist but a different term may have been used. Such a word would have continued to be used in a certain trend to form a prototype. That was the hypothesis for our project. But we still don’t know why the categories have the word “Korean” or who contributed to the circus terms. It would take time to find the answer.

KIM Kyunghee: This must not be approached on the basis of what we have today such as the circus and traditional theater. In the past, terms like “circus”, “theater” and“street arts” didn’t exist. So if we don’t accept that era’s terms and types as well its languages used by specific countries or regions, everything becomes complicated. Once we think that we could dismantle the categories of all information and put them into a certain zone, we have to spread out the elements in the zone and organize them again. Creative companies often carry out research to make performances but our research’s purpose is not necessarily creation. Of course, we find really interesting stories everywhere so we want to turn them into a performance right away but we are trying not to do that. We need to let go of that desire in order to work on archiving. For some time, we will keep on studying different documents. We need to work while thinking about the possibility that other artists could be inspired by these documents and about the joy of enriching the artistic ecosystem. That way, we could make progress in the project even a little bit. We will organize what we have collected so far to share it both online and offline, in collaboration with Seoul Street Arts Creation Center. But it seems that we are not organizing what we have done. It feels like the beginning of the project right now.

LEE Mikyung: We adopted numerous methods used by researchers but these documents have been chosen and collected from artists’ perspective. And the archiving project naturally unveils this. That is the attractiveness of our project. We allow those who are interested in the data to make categories themselves.

KIM Kyunghee: That is actually how we work. Just as it isn’t important to define NONI as specific terms like “street arts,” “multidisciplinary arts,” “traditiona ltheater,” “plays” and “circus,” it is not important to define our documents. Instead, what is important is to connect different contexts. For those who consult the archives, it would be more interesting to make these connections themselves. If we work only in the framework of what is organized, it is difficult to come up with new things. We started the archiving project with the circus but in cooperation with Seoul Street Arts Creation Center, we also added street arts to the archives this year. The platform for consulting the data is online but we have condensed the documentsand put them into a container for a mobile exhibition.

KIM Kyunghee: First of all, our goal is to successfully reach a certain level of embodying our ideas in the archives. Another goal is to ask questions about capital.Street artists don’t have any structure for making profits other than festivals and busking. In particular, they don’t have any solution during a pandemic like that of this year. So we are reflecting on if we could be free from capital and we are trying to find alternatives and solutions.

#the_arts_in_the_front_line #making_me_stop_my_daily_activities_to_remind_me_of_something #the_closest_arts

#storeroom_of_memories #place_making_me_think_and_let_go_of_thoughts #connection

1. With the sinking of MV Sewol onApril 16, 2014, 304 passengers either died or went missing. After the accident, Korean citizens held candlelight vigils in 2016 and 2017 in order to protest against the government’s incapability of responding to the disaster and to call for the salvage of the ferry. "Life Jacket 304" by Creative Group NONI, which took place in Gwanghwamun Plaza (site of the candlelight vigils), commemorates the 304 victims of MV Sewol.

*Photo Credit: ©Creative Group NONI