Han!
Directed by: Thomas Richards
Assistant Directors: Cécile Richards and Jessica Losilla-Hébrail
With and by: Hyun Ju Baek
In Korean with subtitles
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Hyun Ju Baek is an absolute tour de force.... Bare foot, no incidental music, a simple set design of three hanging scrim upstage, for 65 minutes Hyun guided us through a transcendence that touched our common ancestral past of humanity.
- John Karabetos (Author and poet)
The eyes and ears of the audience were inexorably drawn to Baek and the chronicle she expressed!
- Edward Kliszus (Front Row Center)
Watching Hyun Ju Baek’s gracious movements, listening to the waves of powerful emotions in her voice and gestures, we forget about the strangeness of the language. In the struggle with her culture and her displacement, we recognize our own sense of loss and disorientation, and the longing for peace.
- Grażyna Drabik (Polish Theatre Institute)
Mr. Richards background in Grotowski’s approach to creating the physicality of a performance from deep within the body in combination with Ms. Hyun Ju Baek’s native Korean aesthetic and superbly trained instrument make for a spell-binding performance. Don’t miss it!
- Beate Hein Bennett (The New York Theatre Wire)
An ancient dance is performed under a neon light. A virgin ghost stares out of the TV. A baby left alone in an apartment meditates on the nature of solitude. A woman explores memories of her life in relation to the Korean concept of Han.
Our heroine moves back and forth between the ancient myths of “Gojoseon,” the era of her dead grandmother, her mother’s past and her own life. Three generations of Korean women bound together in the “resilient silence” of Han. How will she navigate the sea of expectations that life, family, and nation have thrown herway? Through her struggle to understand the complexity of her own Han, which ignites a fire in her mind, we are carried into a dynamic meditation that explores the no man’s land that exists between myth and modernity, as we weigh the relation between suffering, sacrifice and destiny.
Han! Trailer
A fragment of Han!