Seen As Threatening but As Creative, Exciting, Inspiring and Enriching

FOCUS www.inkocentre.org Issue No. 29 | JULY 2015 CONTENTS 03 Editorial 04 CineBox Puppet Fantasy, Hooray! 06 Korean puppet theatre at two Children’s Festivals in India. Chennai Chamber Biennale 08 an exposition of contemporary painting from Korea in India. Hamlet_Avataar 10 an Indo-Korean theatre production premieres in India. Heart of Matter 13 A series of reflective conversations. At The Gallery @ InKo Centre 14 - The magic of Hanji - Korean Contemporary Artists Indian writer 16 at Toji Residency in Korea 17 K-Pop Contest 18 News Picks Designed by Studio RDA © InKo Centre. All right reserved. If you wish to reproduce any material published here, kindly contact us at [email protected] EDITORIAL In an increasingly globalised world, people from diverse backgrounds are often thrown together and have to adapt to co-exist. Old and new divides are being crossed as population burgeons and becomes more heterogeneous. Cultural differences, peculiarities, once contained within national boundaries, now break free to disseminate, percolate and circumnavigate the globe. Cultural intelligence is an ability to adapt to different cultures and to understand people’s values, beliefs, attitudes and behaviours and to effectively use this information to communicate, collaborate and negotiate with people from diverse backgrounds. For those who possess it, or acquire it, heterogeneity is not seen as threatening but as creative, exciting, inspiring and enriching. Cultural intelligence analysts speak of the criticality of the core and the flex- the things that will not change or will not change easily or the core and the things we can choose to change easily or that we can adapt to, based on other people or other cultures or the flex. While the solidity of the core is our strength, so is the fluidity of our flex. How then as cultural organisations do we balance our core and flex in order to promote and sustain a meaningful cross-cultural dialogue? What is the journey that we must embark on fearlessly in order to discover and accept differences, to engage and wrestle with perspectives different from our own to connect in that shared space which, however fleeting it might seem, sets us off on new journeys yet unfathomed or even, imagined. The language of cross-cultural dialogue is often sensorial before it becomes transactional – our senses activating a response so powerful, that it translates to a feeling, a thought, a mood and an emotion, that if accepted, permeates our being and changes the very way in which we perceive ourselves and engage with the multiculturality that surround us. In this issue of focus, read about several examples of this sensorial connect that we aim to present this quarter. In puppet theatre Manetsangsahwa’s production Puppet Fantasy Hooray! traditional music called sinawi, folk dance forms such as salpuri and the lilting, melodious arirang, interlace the storytelling and complement the skill of the versatile puppeteers. The production aims to engage and connect with the audience through movement, music, mime and the magic of storytelling. The production will be presented at two well-known Children’s Festivals in South India- the Little Festival in Chennai and the Aha! Festival in Bangalore. Close on its heels, in August, we present Hamlet_Avataar, a unique Indo-Korean theatre production, an adaptation of the Shakespearean original, directed by Hyoung-taek Limb, Artistic Director of the Seoul Factory. The production, which includes a dramatic re-telling with Indian and Korean music, dance and theatre vocabularies with the concept of ‘avatar’ as the underlying theme, is developed by The Seoul Factory and InKo Centre, with support from Arts Council Korea. Hamlet_Avataar had its World Premiere in Seoul in 2014 and will premiere in India at The Hindu Theatre Fest in Chennai in August 2015, followed by shows at the National Centre for Performings Arts, Mumbai and at Ranga Shankara, Bangalore. Following its critically acclaimed run in Korea in 2014, the production has been invited to the prestigious Seoul Performing Arts Festival in Korea in October 2015. In July, we present the second edition of The Chennai Chamber Biennale, one of the largest expositions of contemporary paintings from Korea in India, presented in association with K-Art, Korea and Lalit Kala Akademi. 10 renowned Korean artists will visit Chennai to introduce their work and to interact with local artists. Two small scale visual art exhibitions follow at The Gallery @ InKo Centre showcasing the wondrous qualities of Hanji paper and the range and versatility of contemporary painting from Korea. Following the success of the K-Pop Festival in June 2014, a rage in many countries which has received an overwhelming response from its fans pan-India, The Consulate General of Korea in association with InKo Centre will present the second edition of the K-Pop Festival in Chennai. We continue the Literature residencies with non-fiction writer and translator V Ramaswamy, who was a resident writer at Sangam House in 2010, as our next the Writer-in-Residence at the ARKO-InKo Writing Residency at the Toji Cultural Foundation in Korea. Join us for Heart of Matter, a series of reflective conversations that dwell on holistic living, wellness, history, philosophy, literature, art and culture. Presented by InKo Centre as quarterly editions, in association with partner organisations, these direct and inspirational conversations will focus on lived experience rather than theoretical abstractions. Read about what’s trending @ InKo Centre, as new courses and interactive opportunities open this quarter. Following the extremely enthusiastic response, the weekly and monthly Language classes, Yoga, Taekwondo, Calligraphy and Film screenings, continue at the Centre. I look forward to greeting you at our events and courses, to receiving your feedback and to deepening this dialogue with your participation and support. Rathi Jafer Director, InKo Centre CINEBOX 31 July Set Me Free 거인, 2014 Directed by: Kim TaeYong Yeongjae is a high school student who grows up at “Isaac’s Home”, a group home that he was placed in as a child to avoid his immature and reckless father. As a high school student, he is now too old to stay at the group home. He shudders at the thought of returning to his incompetent Korean auteur Hong Sang-soo’s latest film, Our father, but his age prevents him from remaining at Sunhi follows an aspiring young filmmaker who the facility. Yeongjae has secretly stolen and sold becomes the object of desire for three very different donated goods and does not believe in God. men, in this smart, nuanced comedy. Sunhi is a girl However, in order to enter a Catholic boarding who wants to become a film director but is such school he claims that he wants to become a priest an introvert that her peers have stopped trying and proclaims his religious faith by deferentially to get in touch with her since she graduated, attending Mass. All is going according to plan until because she would never get back to them. one day his father visits the group home, this time After she has finally determined what to do with her to place his little brother Minjae there. This is the future, she asks a handsome former professor, tipping point for Yeongjae and it unleashes his Donghyun to write a recommendation letter for a despair and pent-up rage post-graduate course in the U.S. On the way back from her campus visit, Sunhi stops for a drink and Set Me Free is an autobiographical coming-of-age finds herself talking to Munsu, an ex-boyfriend. film directed by Kim Tae-yong, whose film It becomes clear, as the bottles get emptied, that Memento Mori many consider as one of the most Munsu still carries a torch for the pretty and smart influential Korean horror film of the twenty first Sunhi. When Munsu tries to tell his best friend, century and a modern day classic. Choi Woo-shik Jaehak about Sunhi, another drinking session occurs, won Actor of the Year for Set Me Free at the 19th late into the night. Jaehak, who is also an introvert Busan International Film Festival, where the film also by nature becomes interested in each other, though received the Citizen Critics’ Award. only after Donghyun has also insisted that Sunhi was his favourite student. 04 28 August Montage 몽타주 2013 Directed by: Kim TaeYong A kidnapper disappeared 15 years ago without a [2003]) it’s getting harder for directors to deliver trace. Five days before the statute of limitations for breathtaking suspense without resorting to the the case expires, someone anonymously leaves a stereotypical technique of referring to significant flower at the crime scene. A few days later, another elements of the plot. kidnapping takes place using the same method, on Newcomer Jeong Geun-seop however sets the bar a similar target. Three people team up to solve the high for his first feature, both as a writer and as a case before it is too late: the grandfather who lost director. Despite that fact that Montage deals with his granddaughter right in front of him, the mother a seemingly familiar premise, it never actually looks who has been searching for the person who to clichés as its source of inspiration. The strongest abducted her daughter 15 years ago and the aspect of the presented storyline is its thorough detective with a guilty conscience who puts attention to details when it comes to building up everything into this unresolved case. the suspense and sustaining it gradually as the plot Murder mysteries have long been an important thickens. Jeong’s intention is to reveal as little as part of Korean cinema and although there are many possible and to keep the action at a rather leisurely brilliant, powerful titles in the genre (i.e.

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