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FOCUS: KOREA

A new experience awaits the audience of the Flora Theatre Festival. For the first time ever, we will have a look outside the European continent and discover a new theatre culture. The festival introduces a dramaturgy section entitled Focus: Korea, within which we will present six performances and two workshops dedicated to contemporary dance of the southern part of the Korean peninsula.

The productions will introduce current trends of contemporary Korean dance and range from more conventional approaches to experimental ones. The audiences will see the results of collective work as well as pieces by a single choreographer with the clear vision of the young and middle artistic generation. We will be witnesses to a pronounced attitude towards tradition and a drawing of inspiration from various international experiences based on their touring abroad as well as international co-productions.

The Korean dance style will be represented by the top-class performances of Korean dancers with remarkable movement techniques at the 2019 Flora Theatre Festival. It is a specific feature of the Korean dance scene to have a tendency to cloud one's own feelings and attitudes. This stereotyping claim is disrupted, however, by the Goblin Party, who in their provocative performance called A Silver Knife, come to the stage with an unmistakable character and literally flares of energy. The creative duo Choi-Kang experiments with external choreography tools such as cameras and video screens. They strive for a different perception of the stage image and are clearly successful in their exploration. The choreographer Kim Sung-hoon presents pieces in which we dive into the dark sides of human beings on stage. He uses a wide range of stage designing approaches and strongly appeals to human emotions. The choreographer Bora Kim then develops an intellectual choreographic approach and places language at the centre of her theatre exploration. Her deconstructivist piece playfully works with sarcasm and a minimalist artistic gesture.

The work of the individual artists is often significantly based on the need to define oneself against tradition. Moreover, it reflects on social issues and is not afraid to dive into the depths of the human psyche. We can wait and see to what extent we feel emotionally close or distant to the concepts and ideas of the individual performances.

Jan Žůrek, dramaturge of the Focus: Korea section