Not long ago, I watched a television documentary about the addictive pull of the digital age. On screen, I saw us reflected with unsettling clarity — tamed by the glow of our smartphones and the rhythm of dopamine. Look around any subway car or bus, and everyone is bent over a screen, alone with a world that exists only in their hands. The warm voices and glances we once exchanged with family, friends, and colleagues are slipping further into the past.

Alongside the rise of AI, we are living through an age ruled by speed and efficiency. Amid an endless stream of information and stimulation, we are more connected than ever — and yet the moments in which we truly sense and feel for one another grow fewer.

So what role can art play in a digital age?

Perhaps art is the force that calls us back out from behind the screen, out of our isolated corners. A shared space where people face one another, breathe together, and exchange sensation and emotion. A place where different lives and experiences meet, where unfamiliar perspectives and imaginations cross paths, where new relationships and conversations begin. That, perhaps, is the most valuable public space art can create today.

Believing in this value of art, the 2026 Seoul Performing Arts Festival unfolds as a “Multiverse of Art.” Comprising 19 performance works alongside creation labs and workshops, this year’s festival is a journey in which artists and audiences imagine together, connect their senses, and build a new universe of dialogue and coexistence.

The “Locality and Trans-locality” section brings together diverse theatre works from Korea, Asia, and South America, along with the Asian Playwrights Project, to look at the spaces, times, and memories of the past we inhabit through multiple layers. Through this, audiences will encounter not a single narrative but a universe of differing perspectives and interpretations.

“Experiments at the Edge of Creative Aesthetics” explores the boundaries of artistic form through matter, technology, installation, music, and sound. These experiments are pluralistic trials in the rules and irregularities of art, revealing how art generates new territories of sensation. Here, the artist’s work is not a finished product but a universe of relations that continually expands as the audience’s senses and imagination intervene.

“The Expansion of Contemporary Dance Language” traces how dance, beginning from the aesthetics of the body, has developed through physical technique, expression, and the refinement of movement. Extending into conceptual dance, fusion with visual art, and discourse on AI and the body, this section reframes the body not merely as a tool of expression but as a universe of thought unfolding through movement.

“Festival d’Avignon @ SPAF 2026” is a project born of close artistic exchange between festivals, continuing its connection to the Korean-language invitation program of the Festival d’Avignon, which marks its 80th edition this year. Beyond works of theatre, dance, and multidisciplinary art, it includes a staged reading by Korean and French actors based on Han Kang’s novel We Do Not Part, creating a universe of ongoing connection and sharing.

The 2026 Seoul International Performing Arts Festival’s “Multiverse of Art” is a world where differing perspectives, media, aesthetic rules, and modes of sensation coexist. Rather than converging audiences toward a single notion of beauty, it will guide them into an infinite universe of creation — one where different viewpoints collide, intersect, and generate new meaning.

Kyu Choi, Artistic Director