Another World Against Necessity, Latent Possibilities
Yewon Seo
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Those who rarely arrive at the theater on time inevitably enter through its doors after the performance has already begun. Their experience may differ slightly from that of those who entered punctually. Ordinarily, arriving late to a performance means delayed entry, and missing the opening moments leaves behind a sense of impatience, as though one has lost access to a meaningful part of the narrative. Juho Song’s performances, however, occupy a somewhat different position from the usual problems associated with delayed entry. What they provoke is a sensitivity to the “events,” “experiences,” and “fleeting moments” encountered both inside and outside the stage. More precisely, what is experienced by the audience is not something simply given to them, but something unsettled and formed through the bodily sensations each individual directly confronts.
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In Skaters on Frozen Canal (2019), the theater lobby itself became both the setting and the primary stage of the performance. The space was arranged to resemble a familiar lobby environment, complete with a ticket box, waiting chairs, tables, and potted plants, while performers occupied it in the guise of audience members awaiting the start of the show. Within the original structure of Platform-L Live Hall, where the work was presented, the side door of the stage, ordinarily used as an entrance to the waiting room, became the theater entrance within the performance, while the actual entrance to the theater was transformed into an entrance to the lobby. Whether one was a “real” audience member or an actor within the performance, entering Skaters on Frozen Canal meant stepping into the lobby of the stage–theater itself. People dispersed throughout the space, some into the real auditorium seats, others toward the benches and tables of the staged lobby. Moreover, when someone arrived after the official start time, an ambiguous situation could arise in which it became difficult to tell whether the person was an intentional performer or simply a late audience member from reality. The spatial structure and boundaries that distinguish the theater became a strange threshold between reality and performance.
In Juho Song’s work, the structural characteristics of performance as a medium become, in themselves, site-specific theatrical devices. Audience members who enter the theater through the “theater house” in order to watch a performance are confronted once again with a fictional house. Facing a space that reproduces a theater lobby and a set of fictional spectators, viewers simultaneously observe both the stage and one another, moving uncertainly between private memories of theaters they themselves have experienced, phantasmatic images, temporal disjunctions of presence, and the seductive dimensions of scenography. The “performance within the performance,” which everyone conventionally expects, is ultimately staged beyond the waiting-room door. Yet in the end, we realize that we are never actually allowed to see “the performance.” Instead, we are left relying solely on the sounds emerging between theater and stage, space and the space beyond, experiencing a sense of irony and uncertainty. As a result, what initially resembles an experience of viewing the world, or the conventional expectation of doing so, is transformed into an unfamiliar mode of experience and affective response. By activating the double diorama embedded within the theater’s structure and its architectural–spatial boundaries, the work evokes a heightened sense of presence. At the same time, it invisibly displaces the conventional properties of theatrical genre, introducing fractures into the forms ordinarily demanded of both the medium’s surface and the performance site itself.
The “directorial events” imposed upon forms and structures long accepted as conventional emerge suddenly as incomplete and dissonant elements marked by a powerful sense of estrangement. In Skaters on Frozen Canal, for instance, there is the presence (or non-presence) of “the performance,” the one that somehow seems as though it ought to appear but never fully does, alongside sound transmitted only as acoustic phenomena through microphones rather than through the performers’ spoken dialogue. In Useful Sufferings (2015, KNCDC Archive Platform), the work combines the performative potential derived from the visible condition of Schrödinger’s cat with slapstick choreography. In Forbidden Plan (2018, Seoul Art Space Mullae), objects and shadow forms cast upon chroma key fabric are perceived differently depending on whether gravity is assumed or suspended. And in Nuit Beau Roman (2019, Seongmisan Village Theater), the entire theater drifts into a faint, half-somnolent state. The psychological desire for the smooth unfolding of expected developments, or for conditions that sustain stable recognition, instead gives way to invisibility and insufficiency. Meanwhile, unfamiliar experiences that intrude at the level of direction confront the viewer abruptly, unsettling even the longstanding discourses that underlie the medium itself. These works exist in states of superposition between the theatrical and the real, movement and stillness, aliveness and death, visibility and concealment, relations that can never be fully defined by a single truth or fixed condition.
What these incomplete and dissonant sensations seek is not the pursuit of originality through yet another expression of novelty suited to the contemporary moment, nor are they experiments aimed simply at combining actions or sensations that remain undefined or beyond language. Neither are they intended merely to provoke emotions such as pleasure or discomfort, or to deliver unfamiliar sensory intensities for their own sake. The sensation evoked by the flickering light suspended at the entrance of Nuit Beau Roman, or by the fleeting moment when fog released from the stage machine forms a faint mass above the stage, resembles something that briefly reveals itself at the point of physical contact with “that state,” the state we fail to fully register at the very moment it occurs. Such moments may easily be mistaken for directorial devices intended to generate atmosphere, or else be described using terms such as “overlap” in an attempt to explain a condition that resists precise definition, only to collapse into linguistic interpretations like “indeterminacy,” “presence and absence,” or “a state of not knowing.” What “occurs” between disappearance and emergence, what exists between artificiality and naturalness, what approaches the threshold before it arrives as narration, can ultimately be felt only as a bodily response that quakes within the immediacy of the site itself.
Ultimately, everything occurs along a path that obliquely approaches the problem of representation through non-representational means, and, at its furthest point, moves toward the question of existence itself. And whether on stage or in an exhibition space, in a lobby or an auditorium, inside a building or outdoors, the work reveals itself only through actively reflecting the spatiotemporal condition of the “here and now.” In the questions that arise while looking at the artificial grass only partially laid across the stage of Nuit Beau Roman, and in the uncertainty produced by encountering a performer who appears half-asleep from the moment one enters, though one suspects they may genuinely have been exhausted, we are compelled to reconsider the things we take for granted with narrowed eyes and a fading sense of certainty.
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Narrative is one of the central elements in Juho Song’s work, particularly in the performances and theatrical forms realized through scenography. Yet only the bare minimum of narrative—something closer to a synopsis than a fully developed story—is ever established. Gradually, and almost belatedly, one realizes that the completion of narrative was never the work’s objective to begin with. Most of the works contain no spoken dialogue from the performers. What initially seems like whispering often turns out to be nothing more than yawning, interrupted only by the occasional roar of monstrous entities or sonic vibrations produced through mechanical devices. For this reason, although language is technically present, it cannot really be said that a narrative unfolds. Themes such as disaster and viral contagion frequently appear, as do genres like the Grand Guignol and the space opera. Yet these works seem far removed from subordinating themselves to the symbolic meaning of social events or from treating genre merely as artistic material. This is because the narrative operates independently of the representation of specific situations or the constraints of genre categorization.
The method is presented in the form of “stage–landscape,” most often through the intrusion of an “event.” For instance, the introduction of disaster viruses or sleeping sicknesses—such as Allegorgy or Theaterypanosoma—into the coherent, conventional layers of the theatrical medium serves as the very engine that drives the performance’s narrative. Infiltrating the work as “double” clues that seemingly bear traces of their antecedents, these devices evoke the concept of allegory—functioning as both an artistic attitude and a formal strategy within contemporary art. The allegorical mode, in which one text becomes overlaid by another, possesses what Craig Owens describes as a “tendency to originate in previous commentary and interpretation while continuing to reveal the direction of commentary itself.” When a text is explained, its original meaning is not restored; rather, meaning is continually added through “relations” and from the “outside.” These narratives generate uncertainty not by encouraging interpretation but by continually gesturing toward hidden structures of meaning that never fully disclose themselves. In Skaters on Frozen Canal, the very “door” through which actor–spectators entered in order to watch the performance is suddenly breached by a disaster response team, while the theater lighting, seemingly transformed into emergency equipment, is dragged in across the threshold. Meanwhile, on the floor of Before It Turns Whiteout (2018, Namsan Arts Center Searchwright), a stage that also functions as another interior–exterior space, stage objects from earlier work Forbidden Plan abruptly emerge. Unable to stand on their own, these texts collide with one another, producing moments of both recovery and erasure.
In this regard, Before It Turns Whiteout may be understood as the foundational work for the methodology through which narrative becomes structured in relation to spatial organization and imposed conditions. The work visualizes a “crevasse,” a deep fissure formed on the surface of a glacier, as a stage device, while establishing the event of a “whiteout” as its narrative condition. The performance begins with a whiteout effect created through the use of a fog machine. Within the performance, the device of “whiteout” establishes the condition that the performers must search for a missing fellow performer somewhere amid a snowstorm in Antarctica. Functioning almost like a score, the work assigns the performers a double task: navigating the fissures of the crevasse while improvisationally determining how the event will unfold. This whiteout also responds performatively to the institutional conditions and creative framework of the work itself, namely its attempt to test whether an unfinished performance, still lingering at the level of research or idea, can be realized through stage language. Furthermore, the white screen—serving as a point of departure that signifies a void in representation—implies the potential for media leaps and transitions. Here, interrupted and displaced images migrate into the invisible space beneath the crevasse-like stage structure, where they encounter earlier works and texts, setting off a series of unpredictable reactions. What ultimately determines the visibility (or invisibility) of image and narrative lies in the direct enactment of interiority and exteriority at the spatial threshold of the crevasse itself.
At the same time, the characteristics of lacking inherent meaning and instead referring outward also call forth outdated genres such as the space opera and the Grand Guignol. Having once been excluded from dominant artistic discourse and dismissed for their aesthetic potential, these genres now return to form new relationships with the present. In this respect, they operate much like allegory. In Forbidden Plan, Juho Song adopts the genre of the space opera to explore forms of human theatricality grounded in fantasy. Elsewhere, through the Grand Guignol horror workshop Coffin Club (2019, Incheon Art Platform), the artist revives audiences who scream, faint, burst into laughter, or hurl jeers from their seats. The revival of obsolete genres preserves these texts from simple historical displacement while reopening them to critical interpretation. Through this method, Juho Song layers texts fragmentarily to generate hybrid forms of content, offering a lens through which contemporary institutions and issues may be reexamined upon the foundations of past forms.
Can efforts to restore texts while simultaneously displacing them into opposition draw forth new possibilities for the future? Can narrative, functioning as a critical lens directed toward institutional structures, become a way of responding to the contemporary world? Amid the endless circulation of flattened stimuli and proliferating images, such works risk becoming just another form of time-based art—consumed and forgotten as soon as they appear. Moreover, for the radicality of the theatre of cruelty, which expels repression like a contagion, to operate today, the antibodies embedded within contemporary bodies—bodies already saturated by media spectacle—have become grotesquely resilient. For Antonin Artaud, however, the cruelty of the theater did not signify the mere sensation of bloodshed or violence; rather, it referred to a rigorous discipline of performance—a manifestation of merciless will and absolute control. Rather, it depended upon a discipline capable of liberating narrative and form precisely through the rigorous control of attention. Seen in this light, these anachronistic strategies, armed with misrecognition and designed to restrain attention, paradoxically disclose that the present moment itself may still be “the incubation period of a virus.”
Juho Song’s “Diorama Vivant Theatre” will continue to offer glimpses of visible meaning, only to postpone their fulfillment once again. It does not matter if the audience’s time is delayed. They will not have missed the narrative. For even when something appears to have already passed, the work draws back those elements that have been discarded, overlooked, or left behind, allowing them to remain latent. It is from this state of latency that new “mutations” and new “moments of trembling” emerge.
