Everland’s ambitious bet pairs circus spectacle with drone-and-fireworks finale

Web headline: Everland’s ambitious bet pairs circus spectacle with drone-and-fireworks finale

YONGIN, Gyeonggi Province — Everland, South Korea's largest theme park, has opened two marquee productions to celebrate its 50th anniversary since the original Yongin Farmland opened and 30 years since it was rebranded as Everland, pairing a drone-and-fireworks multimedia show with an acrobatic circus created in collaboration with a Canadian production company.

"The Guardians of Light," a roughly 20-minute pyrotechnics show staged nightly at 9:20 p.m. in the park's Four Seasons Garden, combines thousands of fireworks with 3D projection mapping, laser effects and large-scale drone flights. Theater director Yang Jung-woong, known for his Shakespeare adaptations and national events such as the 2018 PyeongChang Winter Olympics opening ceremony and the 2025 Gyeongju APEC cultural performance, has overseen the production, which held a soft opening March 27 before its official launch Wednesday.

Yang said the show draws on a steampunk aesthetic — a first for Everland — to reimagine the park's original characters, Lenny and Lara, in a nonlinear visual narrative he described as an "image play" rather than a conventional storyline.

"The audience pieces together the story from images, which makes it interactive in its own way," Yang said at a press briefing on March 26. He added that the production used artificial intelligence-assisted animation techniques, building on work his team developed for earlier projects.

Composer K-Hertz is the music director, with the Prague Metropolitan Orchestra having recorded the score on location in the Czech Republic. Singer-songwriter Kwon Jung-yeol of the duo 10cm performed the main theme, while actor Lee Sang-yoon narrated the opening sequence. British installation artist Bruce Munro contributed light-based spatial design.

Samsung C&T, which operates Everland, said the show represents a departure from past productions that relied on existing equipment with only new music and video overlaid. This time, the company has invested in new staging — converting a fountain into a performance platform — and introduced overhead drone effects designed to fly directly over spectators.

On Everland's Grand Stage, "Wings of Memory," a 40-minute circus act, is performed for 1,000 audience members twice daily. The show, produced in collaboration with Eloize, a top Canadian circus company, follows a young girl through an encounter with a mysterious swan and into a forest inhabited by fantastical characters, weaving seven disciplines — including trapeze, contortion and fire performance — into the narrative.

A cast of 24 comprises 14 circus artists recruited through Eloize's international talent pool and 10 dancers. Seven members of the creative team are Cirque du Soleil veterans. Director Benoit Landry told reporters that the team aimed to reach both children and adults by grounding spectacle in emotion.

Eloize, which normally does not use narration, added brief spoken passages in Korean to help family audiences follow character relationships, which creative director Andrew Corbett identified as specific to this project. Corbett said the show could help spark broader interest in circus arts in South Korea, where permanent venues for art circus remain scarce.

A Samsung C&T representative said they wanted to present a well-made circus show. "We recognized that South Korea has almost no permanent venues for art circus — to see a high-caliber production, audiences had to wait for a touring company like Cirque du Soleil. Everland wanted to change that, making the theme park a place where visitors could see a world-class circus year-round," said Chung Se-won, manager of Everland's entertainment group.

The park traces its origins to April 17, 1976, when Samsung opened Yongin Farmland on the outskirts of Seoul, combining a family recreation park, botanical gardens and a free-range animal reserve. For its 20th anniversary in 1996, the facility was renamed Everland and expanded with Caribbean Bay, South Korea's first water park. Now operated by Samsung C&T, the resort draws more than 5.5 million visitors a year.