Mime Festival / Summer in Chuncheon

  Chuncheon City, Korea Rep.
Sunday, June 3, 2007

HELP!  I'M TRAPPED IN AN INVISIBLE BOX!

Actually, the Mime Festival wasn't limited to stripy shirted guys with berets.  It took in Mime as any performing art that featured little to no speaking.  Perfect for an international scene.  It was full of excited energy, very foreign foreigners, shows and a theme song that was really catchy, annoyingly so, since it plays in our heads without any but a few of the words because they are in Korean. 
The festival was well organised and staffed with enthusiastic volunteers.  We really appreciated the bi-lingual brochure, as it helped us pick the shows we wanted to see most.
We bought tickets to see Traces by The 7 Fingers (les 7 doigts de la main), a Canadian group that was surprising, funny, original and multi talented.  They can do acrobatics, dancing, and piano playing, as well as some awesome routines with basketballs, skateboards and a book.  If you ever get the chance to see them don't miss it! 
The second group we bought tickets to see were called Diabolo Dance Theatre from Taiwan.  They impressed us with their friendly smiles and amazing talent from the time we first saw them perform at an outdoor rehearsal the night before the opening ceremony.  We happened to see them perform 4 times throughout the week and they were great each time.  At the end of their show we bought some of their Diabolos, a kind of yoyo or spinning top on a string.  They showed us how to use them and taught us a trick.  They were genuinely friendly and so cute that I just wish I could take them home for you to meet.
Aside from ticketed shows there were all night events all over Gosumdotchi (Hedgehog) Island from 11pm to 5am.  We had a great time with our friends.  Gosumdotchi is a wooded picnic and camping area that is very pretty.  For the festival it was decorated with surprises.  A pond was made for floating candles, paper dolls hung (and some still hang) in trees, random art displays, a crazy-must-have-for-any-party-type-of-corridor full of mirrory streamers hung from the ceiling with a projector shining shimmering rainbow lights into it.  It was really cool.  Also unexpected was an entire walkway lined with computers on the ground showing crazy, surreal, disjointed, and unsystematic artistic films / images.  I can't help feeling that if it had been in Canada, at least one of the monitors would have been kicked in.
Here we got to see many more of the troupes perform.  We didn't really appreciate the self defined modern-dance-butoh-russian-avant-guard-comedia-dell-arte-clo wning-performance-physical-theatre-art-happening company.  Their performance was an improvisation which featured a lot of emaciated and shaven people thrashing arhythmically for 30 minutes to a range of disjointed and seemingly random soundtrack ranging from Dave Brubeck's Take Five to hard core Trance/Rave/Jungle.  Expressions, gestures and actions separated from predictable human patterns gave it an empty feeling that made you think that it was all just thrown together to be shocking and incomprehensible.  It had moments but really there were way too many hyphens and in the search for original and thought provoking material they seemed to forget that theatre was meant to be entertaining.  Still it was a great opportunity to sharpen our satirical wit and make a trip to the washroom, where there was no paper but hey, there were soft, absorbent paper dolls hanging off every tree so that really wasn't a problem.
A quick mention for some of the other performers we enjoyed: 
New Circus Asia performed Liquid Souls, an interesting show with three talented acrobats.  We loved every bit except choosing a Nine Inch Nails song that featured all of the main English expletives.  Call me a prude, but there were hundreds of kids there!
Marco Carolei from Italy was very funny and good naturedly poked fun at the Korean tendencies to take innumerable photos and talk on their cell phones almost constantly.  We don't think they got the joke.  Most Koreans we know feel that it is absolutely necessary to be doing something with their phone at least every 20 minutes and consider this normal.
Chuusan and Kukuro Kouji from Japan were two of the more traditional type of mimes but they were so good at what they did that they had me clapping and giggling like I was 3 and Bryan staring with wonder and saying, "How did he do THAT!"  They were great.
We had a lot more fun than we expected.