한국 국기 South Korea 

Theater Practice III. Playwright practice-To Die as a Fish

Theater Practice Project

연극연습3. 극작 연습-물고기로 죽기  
  • Executive producer Koh Jooyoung
  • Playwright Kim Bi
  • Director siren eun young jung
  • Date 10.20.FRI 8pm
    10.21.SAT 5pm
    10.22.SUN 2pm, 6pm
  • Tickets 30,000won
  • Accessibility (All) Sign Language, Korean and English subtitle
    10.22.Sun 2pm/6pm Audio Description
  • Genre Theater ●●●●
    Dance ●●
    Music ●
    Video ●
  • Venue National Jeongdong Theater of Korea, Cecil
  • Premiere 2021, Arko Arts Theater - Small Hall
  • Rating 13 and over
  • Duration 70min

 

Global Interpark

You are not an age. You are not a gender. You, are a fish, a fish that must swim.

Performance descriptions

To Die as a Fish is a theatre practice conceived of by transgender writer Kim Bi, who has shared her ways of living and thinking performatively in her works about the processes of her transition, her life in the present moment, as well as her thoughts on bodies and gender. The performance, a collaborative outcome by an interdisciplinary group of artists, becomes a play about the narratives of queer life from the cradle to the grave. It is a celebration of queer beings, living, breathing, aging, here and now.

Plot

The protagonist “I,” born into a male body, begins to feel the incongruity of her body and her gender as she comes of age in an unjust and discriminatory society. Transitioning to a female body finally liberates “I” from the assigned gender, the experiences with which inspire “I” to become a writer and spend the rest of her life writing her own story. Like a fish out of water living in the human world, “I” delivers one last word before she leaves this world behind.

Executive producer
김풍년

Jooyoung Koh

Jooyoung Koh



Koh Jooyoung is an independent performing arts producer and curator. Her interdisciplinary works include “Camino de Ansan” (2015-19), “Theatre Practice Project” (2018-), and “PlanQ Project” (2019-) among others. Between 2016 and 2020, she was a program director for TPAM (Performing Arts Meeting in Yokohama) Direction, an international platform for performance practitioners. Koh defines her role and work as liminally situated between the interiority and exteriority of the arts.

Playwright
김풍년

KIM Bi

KIM Bi



Kim Bi is an award-winning author whose 2007 debut novel Plastic Woman won the Women’s Donga fiction award. She has published novels The Girl Called a Bitch, The Terminal, and Red Exit Signs, Locked Doors, No Way Out, as well as collected essays Kim Bi: The Story of an Ugly Transgender, Wear a Flower in Your Hair, Beauty Out of the Mundane, and My Mother Bokhee on Jeju Island among others. She contributed a monthly column titled “Onward Sweet Fifties!” to The Hankyoreh between 2020 and 2023.

Director
김풍년

siren eun young jung

siren eun young jung



siren eun young jung is a visual artist whose oeuvre takes a form of political praxis in fine arts incorporating feminist-queer methodologies and combined uses of moving image and performance. Some of her notable projects include “Dongducheon Project” (2007-2009) and “Yeoseong Gukgeuk Project” (2008-), part of which was presented in the Korean Pavilion at the 2019 Venice Biennale. She received the prestigious Korea Artist Award in 2018.

Credits

Playwright 
Kim Bi
Director 
siren eun young jung
Movement Director  
Lee Yun Jung
Music 
KIRARA
Cast 
Hwang Soon Mi, Yang Dae Eun
Video  
Director : Lee Hee In
System Supervisor : Kim Sung Ha
Operation : Lee Hyun Seok 
Lighting  
Design : Kang Jihye
Operation : Kim Boyoung
Sound 
Design : Hong Chosun
Operation : Ryu Hye Young
Assistant Director·Stage Manager 
  Park Jina
Korean Sign Language Korean Deaf LGBT
  Translation : Baek Sujin 
Consultation: Kim Bo Seok
Audio Description 
Script : Gu Jisue, Kim Naewon
Narration : Cho Yeonhui
Consultation: Kim Hye Young
Poster 
Drawing : Park-Cho Kun Hyung
Calligraphy : Kim Bi
Graphic Design : ZeroLab
English Subtitle Translation  
Yoon Soo Ryon
Accounting 
Yi Dowon
Executive Producer 
Koh Jooyoung

About Theatre Practice

Theatre Practice started in 2018 when curator-producer Koh Jooyoung proposed a project that would push the boundaries of theatre and facilitate an emergence of a new theatrical genre based on introducing variables to the usual elements of drama including acting, directing, and playwriting, envisioning the project in an algebraic function-like structure. Theatre Practice has since produced 1. Directing Practice: Three Bears (2018, directed by Jeong Seyoung), 2. Acting Practice: A Performing Person (2019, performed by Kim Sung-sil and Lee Mi-gyeong, directed by Sin Jae, videography by Ma Min-ji, co-produced by 0set Project), 4. Audience Practice: What People Do (2021, conceived and directed by Lee Jin-hee, co-produced and performed by Dancing Waist, the theatre company of Women with Disabilities EMPATHY), and 5. Adaptation Practice: Romeo and Juliet and more (2023, play by Lee Oh-jin, choreographed and directed by More Zmin & Bae Hyosub, co-produced by the LG Arts Center) among others.

  • Photo 1/2  
  • Photo 2/2  
  • “Every single moment of the 70-minute performance was an honest reflection of writer Kim Bi’s selfhood. Without the heavy-handedness that usually comes from theatre’s anxiety over dealing with the politics of visibility and representation, the performance made an ambivalent story of a fish to seep into every line of its dialogues. This allows for the performers to be able to embody their own emotional reactions instead of reenacting what is given, thus making every evening’s performance an accumulation of their affect changing over time. What results from this is a kind of meta-performance: a performance about a performance, but ultimately, a performance that is a form of self-reflexivity beyond the given structure of theatre.”
    – Son Okju (performance critic), TheatreIn, 2021
  • “The takeaway here is that we need to keep remembering: these are words spoken by a real body out there, that there is an actual material being at the core of the soundwaves produced from this speech, to which we all react. […] Bodies make other bodies respond. Despite the physical, psychological, temporal, and social distances, the fact that we co-exist puts our bodies in contact.”
    – Anpak (performance critic), 2021
  • “The performer’s body embodying multiplicity of corporeality is neither a representation nor a body double of Kim Bi. The narrative arc of the performance may have been conceived of by Kim Bi herself, but its force eventually exceeds the identitarian label of transgender or queer.”
    – Yang Geun-ae (theatre critic), Le Monde Diplomatique, 2021
  • “By engaging with Kim Bi’s life story, the award winner encourages to consider the will to live for those of who, just like Kim Bi, are confronted by the prospect of what is yet to come. It reminds us of why freedom and happiness still matter so much to those of who share the present moment as well as the future with us.”
    - The 16th Rainbow Human Rights Award Committee, 2022