La MaMa Extends HAN! One Week

To share a tour de force performance with a wider audience, and encouraged by glowing reviews to-date, La MaMa has extended "Han!" written and performed by Hyun Ju Baek, directed by Thomas Richards, for one week. Originally scheduled for February 23 to March 5, it will now play through March 12. It's a solo performance in which a woman explores her generational memories in relation to the Korean concept of han, a combination of sadness and hope that lies at the core of life. The piece was developed by Theatre No Theatre, a successor to the Workcenter of Jerzy Grotowski and Thomas Richards.

"Han!" is performed in Korean with English subtitles. Director Thomas Richards is making his La MaMa premiere. Assistant Directors are Cécile Richards and Jessica Losilla-Hébrail.

Attired only in a simple flowing dress, performing on a minimalist set (three hanging cloths and a bench) and armed only with the actor's tools of voice, movement and imagination, Hyun Ju Baek takes us back and forth between the ancient myths of "Gojoseon" (the first kingdom on the Korean peninsula), the era of her dead grandmother, her mother's past and her own life. We are entranced as an ancient dance is performed under a neon light, a virgin ghost stares out of the TV, and a baby left alone in an apartment meditates on the nature of solitude. Three generations of Korean women are bound together in the "resilient silence" of han. How will our heroine navigate the sea of expectations that life, family, and nation have thrown her way? Her struggle to understand the complexity of her own han ignites a fire in her mind. It manifests in a dynamic meditation on myth and modernity, weighing the relationship between suffering, sacrifice, and destiny.

The Korean concept of han as a national characteristic is said to have originated from Yanagi Soetsu's theory of the "beauty of sorrow" and Japanese colonial stereotypes of Korea and its people. Yanagi, a Japanese art critic and philosopher, was influential and popular in Korea. He theorized in the 1920s that Korean art has a "beauty of sorrow" because Korea has long suffered at the hands of foreign countries. As an ideological concept, han is protean and controversial. It has been used to promote "Korean uniqueness" and ethnic-national solidarity through a sense of "shared suffering." Novelist Park Kyon-ni wrote in 1994, "[Han] is not an easy word to understand. It has generally been understood as a sort of resentment. But I think it means both sadness and hope at the same time. You can think of han as the core of life, the pathway leading from birth to death. . ."

Actress Hyun Ju Baek was born in South Korea. Her career developed mainly as a musical theater actress for a decade in Korea. She traveled to London to study theater directing and earned a master's degree at Goldsmiths, University of London, UK. Before joining the Workcenter, Hyun Ju worked as an actress, director, and playwright in both Seoul and London. She wrote, produced and directed many theater pieces including: "Flatmates V Zombies" (Tristan Bates Theatre UK and Camden People's Theatre UK, winner of a fund of the Arts Council of England); "The Lady of Burma" (Moon Light Theatre Korea), "Today and" (commissioned by Kyunggi Cultural Foundation), and "The Sound Factory" (commissioned by the Pusan Cultural Foundation). In 2017, she participated in the Workcenter's Master Course, supported by the Korean Arts Council. After attending another pedagogic encounter with Thomas Richards in Hong Kong, she organized a theater group, The Association for Theatre Craft and Creative Process GB, and held the Seoul Work Encounter in 2018, inviting to Korea the Workcenter's Focused Research Team in Art as Vehicle, which she joined the following year.

Director Thomas Richards is a theater director and former Artistic Director of the Workcenter of Jerzy Grotowski and Thomas Richards in Pontedera, Italy. He began as a protégé of Grotowski and became an essential collaborator of the famed Polish director and performing arts theorist, who is considered one of the greatest reformers of 20th Century Theater and one of the founders of experimental theater. Thomas is the son of famed director Lloyd Richards.

On Saturday, March 4 at 3:00 PM in La MaMa's downstairs Theatre, 66 E. 4th Street, Richard Schechner will moderate a La MaMa Coffeehouse Chronicles program devoted to Jerzy Grotowski and Thomas Richards.

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