ABOUT SPAF
History
Launched in 2001, the Seoul Performing Arts Festival (SPAF) is Korea’s largest and oldest performing arts festival representing Korea. SPAF takes place annually on October, around the Daehakro area in Seoul. SPAF serves as a venue of communication for artists and audiences, offering a wide variety of programs including contemporary performances, the Creative Lab, workshops and forums.
Artistic Vision
SPAF is an international festival that introduces new trends of the contemporary performing arts while sharing the views and values of our times through the arts. In this regard, SPAF seeks mutual connection with a wider world, building on the locality of Seoul, Korea and Asia. By focusing on artists’ imagination and creativity, SPAF supports high-quality performances produced in and out of Korea that share new challenges and questions. In parallel, the Festival provides contemporary audiences with opportunities to experience and participate in different forms of the performing arts. SPAF also pursues and applies an “eco-friendly festival” by responding to the climate crisis with the diversity, inclusiveness and accessibility of the arts.
Curatorial Directions 2022-2026
In order to achieve its vision and mission to become an international performing arts festival sharing contemporary views and values of our times, SPAF 2022-2026 suggests three curatorial directions. Based on these directions, SPAF is willing to renew itself as a festival coexisting in harmony with the ecosystem of the performing arts.
1) New Narratives: We ask questions about the contemporary views of the arts based on changing values of our times. We are also ready to provide a venue for new discourses. We pursue diversity of the arts by paying attention to voices and narratives which may have gone unnoticed: women, gender, disability and aging.
2) Future of Art, Science and Technology and Posthumanism: We focus on how art meets with the innovation of technology and science. In this regard, we pursue new experiments and expansions. From the perspective of posthumanism, we turn to the environment and a new relationship between humans and nature.
3) Locality and Cross-locality: Building on the locality and context of Seoul, Korea and Asia, we explore again the locality of our times. In this way, we pursue the uniqueness of the local area and mutual connection with a wider world.
Four Goals of SPAF’s Action Plan
1. Art in response to the climate crisis: The Festival pursues not only art practices considering the environment but it also tries to find and apply different art practices and their roles in response to the climate change.
2. Different forms of accessibility in the arts: Based on accessibility, the Festival encourages more audiences with disabilities and carries out different, step-by-step programs offering accessibility.
3. Next Mobility for the arts: The Festival reflects on what changes have been made in the methods and forms of international mobility for artists and their works after the pandemic. We ask new questions about the internationalism and globalism of our times and ensure international mobility considering the environment.
4. Making a healthy performing arts ecosystem based on cooperation: We restructure the roles of a performing arts festival in the changed performing arts ecosystem. We engage in cooperation that could help us grow with the public and private sectors, local area and international partners.
Kyu Choi
Artistic director of the Seoul Performing Arts Festival 2022-2026
Kyu Choi first met with the performing arts in the 1990s as he participated in different festivals, with an interest in the theatrical body (physicality), movements and materiality. Starting with the Chuncheon International Mime Festival in 1994, he served as the artistic director of different performing arts festivals such as the Ansan Street Arts Festival and the 2017-2018 Korea-UK Year of Cultural Exchanges. In this process, he focused on the spatial aspect of the arts, working on festivals based on site-specific performances and a city’s spatial and local aspects.
He was the planner of the following projects: urban arts project “Connected City” (as part of the Korea-UK Year of Cultural Exchanges), 2019 Korea DMZ Research Lab (theme: “Boundaries and Coexistence of Our Times through the Lens of DMA”),
He closely observes how the arts, a city and people are connected. More recently, he has been interested in sound and music, exploring how the arts could expand through sound. And in this era of universalized technology, he reflects on the expansion of the arts in the context of technological and scientific development and on the role of the arts from the perspective of posthumanism.
Through AsiaNow which was founded in 2005, he has actively worked as a producer and dramaturge by developing the international exchange of the Korean theater, different international co-creation projects and international residency projects for the past ten years. Since 2014, he has served as a member of the steering committee for Asian Producers’ Platform (Asian producers’ cooperation network pursuing the independence and solidarity of the private sector) and its APP Camp.
