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| A scene from the play, "Borderline" / Courtesy of Judith Buss |
By Park Ji-won
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"Borderline," a play created jointly by South Korean and German artists focusing on the issues of defectors and refugees in each country, will be performed offline in Seoul.
Directed by Lee Kyung-sung of Creative VaQi, Producer Group DOT and Residenztheater, the work explores the experiences of people who are trying to settle in a new location after leaving where they usually live. German theater critic and playwright Jurgen Berger conducted research for the play by traveling between Germany, Thailand and Korea over the past few years, interviewing a wide range of people, then writing about them as well as the meanings of borders, division and reunification.
"Just like many refugees from Africa or Syria here in Germany, the refugees try to attract as little attention as possible and want to avoid being recognized as refugees. This happens in Korea mainly through the language, because the North Korean dialect differs from the South Korean (one) and South Koreans notice it straight away. One refugee I interviewed said that she first rid herself of her North Korean dialect and adopted the South Korean dialect. Because recognizability also leads to exclusion," Berger was quoted as saying in an interview with the Goethe Institut last year when the play premiered in Germany.
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| The poster for the play, "Borderline" / Courtesy of Producer Group DOT |
Performing the work on the stage is forms the basis for the filming process of the documentary film. Five actors, whom Berger met during the interviews, will appear, conducting the interviews, appearing in scenes and playing roles. The process will be filmed live and projected onto a screen in the theater hall.
The five actors include a person who crossed the Mediterranean from Somalia, a North Korean defector living in Seoul, a person who witnessed Germany's reunification at the age of six and moved from East Germany to West Germany, Berger's father, who was traumatized by deportation in the Czech Republic and actor Jang Seong-ik, who moved from Jeju Island to the mainland of South Korea.
The COVID-19 pandemic also likely inspired how the production addresses the rapidly changing concept of a border.
For two years starting from 2018, Creative VaQi and Producer Group DOT from South Korea and Residenztheater from Germany, traveled between Germany and South Korea for workshops, aiming to turn their research into a performance for the stage.
The work premiered Munich, Germany in October of last year and also aired in South Korea the same year. It was supposed to have premiered offline in South Korea in November of last year, but was released online in October instead due to the pandemic.
The 100-minute performance will be presented at Mary Hall of Sogang University from Nov. 3 to 9. The performances on Nov. 6 and 7 will have German subtitles.
