Until October 22nd, we held a critique contest for the 2018 Arco Partner of the Year Best & First works.

Out of a total of 9 entries, we selected the grand prize winner and honorable mention winner through screening.

The grand prize went to 'When the Arabian Nights Open', which deals with the play [Arabian Nights].

The honorable mention is 'Giving Opportunity, Not a Set Direction', which deals with the play [Christians].

We are pleased to present the grand prize winner, Kim Mi-young's 'When the Arabian Night Opens'.

Thank you to everyone who participated

Please refer to the attached file for detailed evaluation comments.

From left, Park Du-hyeon, head of the Performing Arts Department of the Korea Arts and Culture Committee, and Kim Mi-young, winner of the Best First Criticism Award

[Arabian Nights]
Original by Roland Schimmelfenig
Directed by Jeon In-cheol

When the Arabian Nights Open

Kim Mi-young

The Square: A small square for everyone, just for you
There is a small square (about 2 meters by 2 meters, a low cube) in the center of the stage. A light board of the same size attached to the ceiling illuminates only this small square. Inside the square, there are rectangular tables, chairs, and wooden cubes. If the actors lie down, sit, or stand on them, three people can sit, and the remaining space is enough for two actors to stand side by side. As the play progresses, this square becomes the inside of an elevator, the living room of Francisca and Fatima, an apartment hallway, and inside a bottle of alcohol. Above all, it becomes a platform for the narrator, where the actor talks about what he can see and hear (both in reality and in the story) along with his thoughts. Today’s five actors stand on stage as their respective characters, but sometimes they become narrators, reporting on each element of the play, and because they have visible physicality and occupy the time and space where the play is performed (and share it with the audience) (this can be said to be due to the ‘presence’ that was persistently asked in <Performance Theory-The Real>), they become real selves (actors Lee Ji-hye and Kim Jung-min) who have been injured one after another during the rehearsal process for this play, or who have the opportunity to escape from the crowded small square by kicking props (wooden cubes) out of the small square and creating stepping stones toward the wide side of the empty stage. This is what director Jeon In-cheol revealed in his conversation with the audience along with the circumstances of the two actresses’ injuries. “In this play, the actors are performing three roles at once: characters, narrators, and real actors themselves.” (Jeon In-cheol)
The actors' commentary is directed at the audience, but they are primarily and constantly talking to themselves. It's like someone who has suddenly fallen into the Arabian desert or the bottom of a well (or a narrow-mouthed bottle) that smells of alcohol, and who cannot even understand his own situation, endlessly sees, listens, thinks, and endlessly spouts out words as if there is someone who will hear, understand, and save him. These monologues have already been widely evaluated as being in line with the intention of Roland Schimmelfenig, who is known to have uniquely created storytelling theater (on the other hand, Narrative Theater) as a metaphor for the isolation of people living in big cities.

Arabian Nights Extra: A Sleeping Princess, Her Roommate, and Three Men in an Apartment
The original play of this play is set in an apartment, inside and outside, and the story of five characters' one night is set vertically (five vertical pillars) and horizontally, symmetrically, underground, stairs, inside a bottle of alcohol, in the ocean, in the desert, and 1 centimeter above the ground (high enough to say "I'm dying" right before hitting the floor and dying), and it plants the characters' revealed and hidden pasts, stories that freely transcend time and space. In addition, it brings fantasies that transcend the real and possible worlds that cannot be refuted by any logic as events on the stage. These fantasies have the properties that could be added as a side story to 'Arabian Nights'. The themes of desire, cruelty, peeping, disappearance, betrayal, murder, curse, dream, kiss, nudity, sex, death, and fall, which are used as incident elements to define human beings in this story, are constantly included as if they are an application of the 'Arabian Nights' or an exposure (of elements that can be defined as 'entertaining' narratives that all old stories used as a device to take away the reader's sense of reality and lose their mind). One of the reasons why the king lost his mind and pardoned Scheherazade is that the narrators appear one after another in the stories. (Let's say that in the story of Scheherazade, a poor young man is captured by a giant. In the story that the young man tells to the giant to beg for his life, a mysterious old man begins to talk about why he carries a black dog, and the black dog tells the story of how he was a human... and the story goes on and on, from mountain to mountain, from frame to frame. The secret to being able to fill 1001 days with interesting stories was the overwhelming number of narrators. Of course, it is noticeable that the stories were created from the desperation to survive, and this seems to be a fundamental condition hidden inside and outside of all stories.) The title of this play is 'Arabian Night', and the number of narrators on this night is five.
The setting of this play is a German city where there is an apartment building on the 8th floor above where the water suddenly stopped somewhere on the 7th floor due to a water shortage, and the skyline between the buildings at sunset is beautiful, but the things to do tonight are laundry, watching TV, drinking, and shopping. As soon as we enter the characters and events, we are faced with a view of Istanbul that appears not only as a desert and a bottle of alcohol, but also as a horizon that looks from the past to the future, and we gradually learn whether the prince who has the magical power of a kiss that must wake up the sleeping princess (Franziska, who lives on the 7th floor, has a drink after work, takes a shower, lies down on the sofa, and never wakes up until the morning) from the curse is Romaier, the apartment manager who hears the hallucinations of his ex-wife, Karpati who spies on the princess showering from the apartment across the street, or Khalil, the boyfriend of the princess's roommate (Fatima). Franciska was supposed to become the concubine of Al Harad Barhadba, but due to the jealousy of her first wife, she was cursed to never see the moon unless she received a kiss from true love. She works in the hospital laboratory during the day, but when the moon rises, she falls into a deep sleep and spends the night wandering through the memories of her harem. Those who happen to kiss Francisca but are not destined to break the curse also receive the curse (or blessing, depending on your perspective). When Karpati, who lives across the apartment, sneaks into Francisca’s living room after spying on Francisca while she’s showering, kisses her, and gets locked in a bottle of alcohol, when Romaier, the apartment manager, comes into Francisca’s living room to diagnose the water shortage, kisses her, and ends up in the desert, meeting his first wife who cursed him in a Bedouin tent, and learning the cause of the water shortage, when Khalil, Fatima’s lover, gets trapped in a broken elevator and barely escapes, enters Francisca’s living room, locks lips with her, and is forced to submit to the sexual demands of the entire apartment. These are all the results of kisses. The reason why there are so many keys on the camel-shaped keychain of Fatima, Francesca's roommate, is because she was Francesca's servant and palace manager. For the characters in this play, 'Arabian Nights' could be a past life or a reference list containing their dreams and curses.
Meanwhile, we learn that Romaier, who has worked in overalls and has worked as an air conditioner and building maintenance worker, has left his ex-wife Helga with no prospects for the future (except for their first meeting when her house was flooded and Romaier was his savior), that he is very lonely and has not been in a relationship for years. When Karpati imagines a happy date with Francisca, we learn that the beautiful space and time he imagines are memories of a past relationship that he must now forget. Fatima, who has left her key and cannot enter the building, asks the apartment residents’ nameplates to open the door, calling out all sorts of names (first and last names of various ethnic groups living in Germany). Romaier travels through a desert of regret where his life with his ex-wife recurringly comes to him, and he arrives in Istanbul, where he receives a business card from a middle-aged man who works for an insurance company and whose young daughter he lost in the crowded market. Romaier, who raised his head while holding a business card, is newly fascinated by the apartment resident, Francisca, and realizes without realizing it that the young daughter is Francisca, as if by revelation. The person who has the magic of kissing is Romaier in his overalls. Francisca really likes Romaier. She wants to keep looking at him. Somehow, Francisca wants to see Romaier without his overalls. Actor Jo Young-gyu, who took off his overalls as Francisca requested, was wearing a surprising t-shirt. The t-shirt contained the character Romaier’s desire that surpassed all the explanations, lines, and thoughts that Romaier had expressed verbally throughout.

Face the event, the world indicated by language is directed towards the human heart
The original author, Roland Schimmelfenig, worked as a freelance journalist before becoming an actor, dramaturg, and director, and then gained fame as a playwright. He is currently also active as a novelist. His more than thirty plays have been performed around the world, and <The Golden Dragon> was performed in Korea in 2013 to rave reviews. He won the Mülheim Dramatist Award in 2009 for this work. The play is set in a fusion oriental restaurant called 'The Golden Dragon' in Germany. The plot is about a Chinese newbie working at the restaurant who has no money or ID, gets a rotten tooth pulled in the kitchen, dies from excessive bleeding, and is thrown into the river. The scenes of the exploitation of the young and poor are interspersed with the names of various cooking ingredients, conversations between stewardesses living in the building, and old, young, and drunk couples (the pause can be heard in the characters' lines, 'After a short break'). From the words of a stewardess who saw a refugee boat from a plane over Senegal and Mauritania, looking at a locust barely surviving as a target of sexual exploitation, and guessing about the current situation of the younger sister of a Chinese new employee who went to work and disappeared, we see how the world we live in uses our differences as a springboard to drive each other out. The same actor simultaneously portrays the exploiter and the exploited, and the 60-year-old actor plays a young role and the young actor plays an old role (the writer has set the roles in the script in this way), urging us that our way of dealing with the situation should not be simply to choose a target of sympathy and root for someone or to hide behind them. <The Golden Dragon> is earlier than <Arabian Nights> and has a vividness that exemplifies the directing in a political and formal way, but it becomes a forward base for understanding <Arabian Nights>.
One of Schimmelphenig's recent works is Comrade, which tells the story of an intellectual couple spending Christmas Eve with a kind and cultured guest who accidentally invites them to their home. In this work, he questions the present status of the past that was thought to have been liquidated through a guest who disarms the other person with his culture and charm. In Comrade, he depicts that fascism is not something that is clearly marked as barbarism and is initially avoided, but rather that it invades the spiritual and material foundations of my life in a deceptive and deceptive manner (perhaps that it is invited as a guest). In this work, too, the thoughts and situations of the characters are continuously intertwined with dialogue. Language is a powerful tool in his dramas. It is as if he is giving us an instruction that we should first understand the situation and the world instead of following the emotions of the characters and immersing ourselves in the story (we can detect this characteristic of Schimmelphenig's plays in <Arabian Nights> directed by Jeon In-cheol). If emotions play a role in defending a character as an individual object and making it possible to pardon a character who has done anything, Schimmelphenig's descriptive narration language is like constantly drawing out the place and time where each character is standing, the context and events that exist, and demanding that we look at the situation before the emotions properly. The purpose of his instructions is to confront the events. Instructions are conveyed through language. He recently published a lecture collection, Yes and No. In that book, he confesses (paradoxically) that "what is important in drama is not language, but people." Why not? When director Kang Ryang-won (of all people) emphasized that "story is not everything in a play, but story is the most important element in a play" (he, the creator of the stage who proves that story is expressed through physical action acting and not existing alone), he was able to realize once again that the relationship between story and form is the limitation, possibility, and turning point of a play.

A strategy for re-questioning the director who unfolds the concept on stage: Example) Let's look at the state of isolation from the opposite condition
Director Jeon In-cheol is a director who continuously intervenes in the world and characters to ask questions. He vividly depicts the world of division, ideology, and theater politics that explain each other while dividing the past and present of Si-dong-ra-sa, as well as the past and present of Mulan-unnie and Guk-bu, and realizes the hierarchical structure of the political landscape on stage. He is evaluated as a director who “sees through the charm of a work more than the writer who wrote it” (quoted from the preview article of <I am a Murderer>). His intervention in the world and characters is to re-set the problem, and changing the content of the problem to ask the question again leads to changing the format. In <Blood and Seed>, he made the problem of ethical choice based on blood relations into a scene where each individual's decision collides. In the process, he broadcasts the present happening in his daughter Autumn's room in real time on a video screen, suggesting that in addition to what we can see (we think we can judge because we saw it ourselves), there are elements behind each individual's decision that exist beyond the stage, in the inner self and past of each character (there is also the question that it may be a delusion that all decisions are social or have a common foundation). The audience thinks that they can become the most stern judge by watching all the events that occur on stage, but in reality, the complete reconstruction of the entire event takes place in the audience's head. Everything cannot be shown and seen all the time, and the process and result of reconstruction are not the same. The audience's relay of support and criticism of the video scenes of <Blood and Seed> once again reveals the fundamental formation of this theatrical act. And the work in which director Jeon In-cheol simultaneously draws actors and audiences to the cutting edge of this theatrical act is <Arabian Nights>.
If the focus was on the emotions of modern society evoked by the isolation of the big city, the disconnection and voyeurism of apartment complexes, broken elevators and short water pipes, this play would be nothing more than five characters standing separately on isolated pillars, each silently telling their own stories (it is said that you can find overseas works on YouTube that portray this in actual isolation, not in concept). That would also be an option. However, director Jeon In-cheol made the five actors enter a small square at once. They rhythmically ride into the timing of their counterparts’ lines to secure a space for their own stories. They are conscious of, considerate of, and are considered by their counterparts who are trying to secure their own acting space (they exist as actors as well as their roles). When their paths overlap, they sometimes overlap. In this play, the actors stand alone, without any intersecting gazes with other actors, without any synergy of acting, and although they share a part of the area and breathing of their bodies in a small square, they are completely aware that they are alone, and they constantly report the world on the stage, making the situation of their characters visible and audible. The characters, who think that they live in isolation and are the most important universes in their own heads, act in a small square. They all ride on a carpet like the palm of Buddha's hand and report loneliness and alienation even in a high population density. (Sometimes, by coincidence, the acting created by each actor may overlap with the acting of another actor. When actress Lee Ji-hye acts as if she is being held in someone’s arms to act out how Francisca feels when she is held by Romaier, actor Jo Young-gyu, who plays Romaier, acts as if he is holding someone, and coincidentally, the two are sitting next to each other, so their acting lines overlap. Each of them acts alone, but the audience may (by chance) see the two of them embracing each other. From this perspective, that is.) Against the backdrop of the isolation and isolation of this early-century metropolis, the daydream through the Arabian Nights becomes a lively and active one-night carpet trip. On this stage, an extremely lively rhythm flows that cannot be shown or predicted, and no matter how low the external appearances of the five men and women reach, the vitality that can be found at the point where they externalize and cannot distinguish between their words (actions) and their inner selves is displayed. We can tell the story by putting any of the five characters at the center of the story. Since all five can be the central narrators in the play, we can construct the world in five different ways. However, even if someone becomes the center, the whole world in the play is not explained from that person's perspective. This is because their dreams and real-life overlap. He is continuing the dream I had, so I have to wake him up and ask him to find out the ending.

The actor is present and the play follows the rhythm, leaving the audience lost in thought.
<Arabian Nights> directed by Jeon In-cheol and five actors created the power and characteristics of the original structure in a unique way on this stage. The small square functioned as a kind of base in this play - and also as a wit (機智) as Inoue Hisashi mentioned. In this way, all the themes in the (old) stories unfolded, but on this day's stage, instead of the tragic, comical, and the attitude that swept away the emotions of the audience, the unique contextualization that occurred as each character spoke from a triple perspective stood out. Rather than emotionally affecting the audience (affection), the method of connecting the story and the world outside the stage and drawing out the audience's thoughts (attraction) was more important. It is not a relic of the epic era, but a modern way in which the actors speak to the audience in a way that they are aware of on stage.
The first stage given to the five actors, Jo Young-gyu, Kim Jung-min, Lee Ji-hye, Baek Seong-cheol, and Yoo Byung-hoon, is only a small plaza. Within the confines of this, the five actors perform their roles, watch, listen, and react to the actions and lines of the other four actors, and continue their scheduled turns. If the actors had existed on stage only as characters, only certain emotional attitudes, such as loss, desire, or betrayal, would have been amplified on stage and determined the impression of the entire play, and such emotions would have been mainly conveyed to the audience. However, on this day’s stage, the actors are characters, narrators, observers, and actors themselves. The actors cannot help but be more active. The small plaza is stifling to them. The story embraces the vastness of space, where one can move between Building A and Building B of an apartment and see the minarets of the Istanbul mosque, and the unstoppable exhaustion of chasing a lover who has betrayed one with a knife, and the endless depth of time is also felt as the unforgettable past keeps popping up, but the cramped small square where I am standing is not even big enough for my body to move around in. My mind lives an infinite repetition of size in time and space. My small body stands here, throbbing, but my mind crisscrosses the Arabian night.
Actors have a triple role of watching emotions arise and disappear every moment, capturing all situations that change in an instant, and expressing them through actions and words, so they do not remain as tragic characters who are caught up in a momentary emotion, amplify that emotion, and eventually believe that emotion and act according to that emotion. The audience is not in the position of pretending to accept and resolve the amplified emotion on stage, but gradually becomes an observer who gradually becomes accustomed to the strategy on stage and goes through all these points with the actors. Before the narrative of how the characters go through a certain process in the story and how they escape, run, take revenge, die, and regain love, what is there is the rhythm created by the actors’ stage acting skills and their skills as the result of practical training and research to express the given actions and situations with their bodies. The subtext of the actors on this stage that we were able to read is the presence of themselves as actual actors. What a dynamic stage this is. How lively this is. What we are hearing and seeing now, everything within the range of our senses is being spoken. The present is constantly coming to the forefront.
The stage of <Arabian Nights> on this day took the form of the original author's world-descriptive and event-indicative language blossoming from a small square. The small square is the center of the flower bud. It is where gazes depart. Five (equal opportunity) speakers take turns taking turns on a single platform, leaving the central narrative space empty in an era of periphery escape, and when someone speaks, the other speakers listen. The stories of these five speakers are scattered like constellations, and we are reminded of the stories created by each constellation. Instead of a central narrative and its subsequent climax and catharsis, the five speakers' simultaneous operation engraves constellations scattered in all directions. Sometimes, through their form, a work allows us to take a step back from the arduous era of subject supremacy, where the self comes to the forefront and everyone is given the mission to become the main character of their own life. It is an era in which narrative forms that have maintained their status for 2,500 years seem to be exerting more effort in forming the framework and hierarchy of the hypercapitalist society in which we live. We are in an age where everything converges into one ending and message, and traces of education and guidance are engraved on our bodies, or answers to questions posed at the beginning of a work are presented in some way and we respond with an outburst of emotion on our own (the work does not conclude the answer to my life). We are not alone, but can be many. Even in isolation, pessimism, repetitive fatigue, and a dazed state in front of the television, we can feel other characters within us who have crossed over to another world, different from our current selves, but who still have the same starting point. As I sense the brain’s action running with me like a mirror effect, following the actors running around the stage toward an ending that has not yet been found, I can realize that I am holding my hands like them. As I go through the night they experienced, I think about who we have as neighbors, and who the neighbors who will be invited (in my dreams) will be.

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