SPAF brings global and experimental works to Seoul this fall

The 26th Seoul International Performing Arts Festival will bring a wide range of work to Seoul stages this fall: a Han Kang novel adapted for the stage fresh off its Avignon premiere, a documentary-style piece built around the testimony of one of Korea's first openly transgender performers, and an inclusive ballet grown out of community workshops, organizers said at a press conference Tuesday.

The 26th edition of the Seoul Performing Arts Festival, or SPAF, runs from Oct. 8 to 25 at major performance venues across Seoul, including the National Theater of Korea, Daehangno Theater QUAD and ARKO-Daehangno Arts Theater. Under the theme “Multiverse of Art,” the festival brings together international productions and experimental works by Korean artists, exploring different ways of seeing the contemporary world through intersecting cultures, memories and senses.

"It isn't a world that converges on a single aesthetic or a fixed answer," artistic director Choi Seok-kyu told reporters during a press conference on Tuesday, "But it's a space where different lives, senses and perspectives meet and intersect to create meaning." He said the festival was designed "to be one where dialogue and relationships begin, as we share unfamiliar perspectives and imagination."

Among the festival’s seven international guest productions, “Oiseau,” the French stage adaptation of Han’s “We Do Not Part,” is expected to draw particular attention. Directed by Julie Deliquet, artistic director of Paris’ La Colline National Theatre, the production stars French screen and stage actor Isabelle Huppert alongside Korean actor Lee Hye-young. Its Korean premiere takes place Oct. 10-11 at Mary Hall Grand Theater at Sogang University.

The international program also includes works presented through SPAF’s festival-to-festival partnership with the Avignon Festival.

“Between” by Tiago Rodrigues, artistic director of the Avignon Festival, explores the distance between generations and relationships through the story of a daughter who leaves for Mars and her father who remains on Earth. “Beyond Memory,” a documentary theater work by Malicho Vaca Valenzuela, brings personal and urban memories to the stage and was acclaimed at the 2024 Avignon Festival.

SPAF is also presenting the results of its SPAF collaborating artists program, which pairs creators with producing institutions for extended periods. Through the program, five new works have been developed. It aims to experiment with new performance forms and production methods from the earliest stages of creation while helping completed works reach audiences at home and abroad.

Among them is “The Third War,” an opera by Park Bon, jointly selected by the National Asian Culture Center and SPAF in 2024. After a workshop performance in 2025 and its full premiere in Gwangju in May, the completed production will be presented at SPAF in October. Soprano Im Sunhae, actor Kang Ae-sim and Anupam Tripathi, known for Netflix’s “Squid Game,” appear in the production.

"You Can't Make a Life Out of Not Getting Slapped in the Face" centers on an elder transgender woman, a pioneer of Korea's trans community, who takes the stage herself to testify about her own life.

Director Khoo Ja-hye said she set out to preserve, through art, a history she sees as inseparable from Korea's own modern history.

"I wanted to record, through art, histories that had been erased until now," Khoo said. "The most important thing was not fitting her into a theatrical frame," she added, explaining why she herself stands onstage as a prompter rather than asking her nonprofessional performer to memorize lines like a trained actor.

Choreographer Yoon Sang-hyun's "Meta Ballet: Declaration of Coppelia," built from his "Ballet for Every Body" workshops for participants with no formal dance training, returns with a wheelchair-using performer newly joining the cast. "It's not ballet to be watched, but ballet to be done," Yoon said.

Rounding out the group are Kim Jae-hoon's "Harmony Practice," which draws on the rules of music theory, and "A Moment's Moment" by the company Elephants Laugh, which uses sand as its central material.

An Asia-Pacific creation lab will introduce staged readings of two plays by emerging and midcareer writers from Hong Kong and Japan. Lectures, master classes, workshops for young dancers and a forum for international festival professionals will round out the program.