English Program
The space is prepared with sound. A woman appears. This is the place where she died. Returning, can she escape death, even knowing it? But, as if by fate, she falls again. In this scene, the image of her mother, who survived Japanese colonialism flashes before her, and the breath of her ancestors overlaps. Will there be those who remember her death? If so, what meaning will it hold? The first step, where even breathing is difficult and with her broken wings she attempts to fly. To fly for those who cannot reach the sea. Collecting strength she stretches to open her wings releasing the words to fly again.
Introduction: What Remains Unspoken – Raymon Montalbetti
Hidden Echoes is a work built on a timeless muse and a prophetic breath yet to be unleashed. Rather than interpreting the text of “Dictée” linearly, we sought to embody the traces of a shattered soul through gesture, sound, music, and silence, as an instinctive response.
“Dictée” is not a closed book with a fixed meaning. We view it as an open field, leaving traces across time and space, like echoes that resonate. The actor’s actions on stage are traces that cross the boundaries between subjectivity and objectivity, sense and thought.
Our challenge is threefold: An active work of discovering the unknown within the body, or the body itself. Entrusting the moment of creation to the liberated body. Discovering hidden seeds of hope within echoes of relationships between artists and audiences.
Hidden Echoes respects the concept of traditional theater while simultaneously questioning it. Instead of offering a friendly explanation, the audience is invited into a story of uncertainty and incompleteness.
Planning Intent: Layers of Stacked Layers by Jeong Ae-ran
Hidden Echoes begins with “Dictée”, the only posthumous work by Korean-American performance artist Teresa Cha Hak-kyung. During my master’s degree program at New York University, I re-enacted her performance A Ble Wail based on a few surviving photographs, which became my graduation performance. The text used at that time was also “Dictée.”
This is the final work in a trilogy of one-person plays prepared after returning to Korea, and may be considered a reincarnation of the stage from 20 years ago. While I performed in English as an international student, I now present a Korean adaptation, under the title Hidden Echoes, as a Korean female artist.
Hidden Echoes is not simply a tribute to Cha Hak-kyung. it is also an ode to female artists who perished without even a chance to spread their wings, and to those who were left without a name amidst marginalization and double discrimination. This performance is closer to poetry than narrative. I hope that traces of fragmentation, disconnection, loss, and resistance will flow from my body. At the same time, it summons the memories of my youth, the intense times I lived in a foreign country.
Although I was frustrated by the limits of imagination, the limits of the body, and the limits of language, I seek to revive those traces through artistic gestures. Hidden Echoes is not simply a representation. No.
Broken but re-spread wings, a chorus of erased voices, may the breath of our artists continue with a little less pain, and may Korean society move toward a little kinder, a little slower…
Director’s Note – Raymon Montalbetti
I did not direct. I couldn’t. I tried only to listen. To listen is to quiet the mind, open the channels of the senses, and feel the subtle tremors of gestures, the weight of silence, the vibrations of echoes. This attitude allows an amplification of the impulses within the body and its unknowable world, ultimately discovering the body itself as the unknown.
Rooted in Teresa Cha Hak-kyung’s Dictée, we wish to honour her traces and artistic explorations through her presence on stage. On this stage, the actor does not convey a specific message. The actor, herself, is the message.
You are invited to awaken the seed of Cha Hak-kyung, who lives and breathes in all these traces, in women seeking their own colours and voices, in independent and resistant women — a living, resistant echo.
Hidden Echoes resists narrative form, unfolding as a memory in motion, a reverberation of energy reaching the audience. Hidden Echoes is a trace of what history has erased, a reminder of what has been erased.
Actor’s Note – Jeong Ae-ran
First encountering Cha Hak-kyung’s “Dictée” over 20 years ago, it felt utterly incomprehensible, yet simultaneously comprehensible. It was confusing, inexplicable, and impossible to categorize into any one genre or theme.
The nine-chapter book, titled after the Nine Muses of Greek mythology, unravels the stories of women, including Korea’s Yu Gwan-sun, France’s Joan of Arc and Saint Thérèse, Cha Hak-kyung’s mother Heo Hyeong-sun, and herself. It was an experimental attempt, framed within a postmodern framework, to explore history, femininity, and existence through the lens of a Korean diaspora woman in the United States.
When the first edition of “Dictée” was published in 1982, Cha Hak-kyung sent it to her older brother along with a letter. However, on the day the book arrived her brother was preparing her funeral. With trembling hands, he opened the first page revealing the engraved phrase, “I miss my mother. I’m hungry. I want to go home,”. He closed the book as if burned by fire. Just three days after its publication, the book had become her posthumous work.
I dedicate this stage to her, who passed away before she could fully blossom, and to the countless artists who have passed away namelessly. Slowness is not fear, but our only weapon. May the wings of art, imbued with freedom and dignity, never be broken, may they finally soar, breaking free from reality!
