ABOUT SPAF
Seoul Performing Arts Festival 2022-2026
History
Started in 2001, the Seoul Performing Arts Festival (SPAF) is the largest, most prominent and longest-running international performing arts festival in Korea. SPAF is held for one month in Autumn in Daehangno and nearby areas in Seoul. SPAF provides a platform for dialogue between artists and audiences through contemporary performances, workshops, and creative labs. SPAF is hosted by the Korea Arts Management Service with support from the Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism and the Arts Council Korea.
Artistic Vision
Seoul Performing Arts Festival is an international festival that introduces new approaches and directions in contemporary performing arts in order to present the perspectives and values of the times through art. We focus on artists' imagination and creativity and support excellent works from Korea and abroad. SPAF provides various opportunities for enjoyment and participation to contemporary art audiences and local communities. SPAF emphasizes interrelationship with the wider world based on the local and regional contexts and characteristics of Seoul, Korea, and Asia.
Curatorial Direction 2022-26
New Narratives :SPAF questions contemporary perspectives on art based on the changing values of the times and creates a space for new artistic discourse. We emphasize previously unheard or less heard voices and diverse narratives about women, gender, disability, and aging. The future of art, science, and technology and posthumanism :At SPAF, we focus on new experiments and expansion at the meeting point between art and techno/scientific innovation. Through the lens of posthumanism, we explore new relationships with the environment and the natural world. Locality and Translocality : Based on the local and regional contexts and characteristics of Seoul, Korea, and Asia, we re-examine our sense of place and pursue the interrelationship between the uniqueness of our locality/region and the 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.