Wednesday, August 02, 2006

Illusions -performance by Penelope Thompson at Madangkuk Festival, Mokpo, Korea



I was invited to Mokpo City, Jeolla province Korea, to take part in the Madangkuk Top Festival 2006, which is an annual festival of traditional Korean outdoor performance and music.

I was asked to do 2 performances - firstly, The Great Australian Tea Ceremony (see my earlier blogs for more photos and videos of previous performance) as part of the opening ceremony for the festival.

On the second night I performed a new piece called 'Illusions', which developed out of my earlier performance called "In & Out" at the JIPAF Festival in April 2006.

In this performance I wanted to express ideas about the modern industrialised way of life, which is based on the illusory concepts of separateness - from each other, and from nature.

The performance space was outdoors under the trees and I was again dressed in business-like attire with briefcase.
I used a roll of plastic cling wrap to create a separate, sterile space for myself between two trees.




Then, after a while,



like a spider caught in it's own web,



I struggled to be free of the restrictions of my own making, throwing away the contents of my briefcase and casting off my shoes so I could touch the earth.

Interestingly, the Korean children were only too happy to acquire the very things I was casting off, or even try to return them to me!

You can watch a short video of the performance here:

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