Program Notes for JAHA KOO: Cuckoo
Jaha Koo
Cuckoo
February 6-8, 2025
McGuire Theater
Cuckoo
Concept, Direction, Text, Music & Video
JAHA KOO
Performance
HANA, DURI, SERI & JAHA KOO
Cuckoo Hacking
IDELLA CRADDOCK
Scenography & Digital Support
EUNKYUNG JEONG
Dramaturgical Advice
DRIES DOUIBI
Technique
BART HUYBRECHTS
Production
KUNSTENWERKPLAATS PIANOFABRIEK
Executive Producer
CAMPO
Co-production
BÂTARD FESTIVAL
Support
CAMPO, STUK, BUDA, DAS, SFAC & NOORDERZON/GRAND THEATRE WITH THE SUPPORT OF THE FLEMISH COMMUNITY
In English & Korean, with English subtitles
Tonight’s performance runs approximately 55 minutes with no intermission.
Please join us before and after the performances in the Walker’s Cityview Bar.
Friday, February 7th: Post-Show Q&A with Jaha Koo, moderated by Katie Bradley, Interim Artistic Director of Theater Mu
Accessibility Notes
Audio description (AD) is planned for the Friday performance.
Content note: This performance contains profanity, images of police brutality and violence, and videos and discussions of suicide.
Sensory note: This performance contains strobing lights.
For more information about accessibility, visit our Access page.
For questions on accessibility, content and sensory notes or to request additional accommodations, call 612-253-3556 or email access@walkerart.org.
About Cuckoo
A journey through the last 20 years of Korean history told by a bunch of talkative rice cookers.
One day when his electric rice cooker informed him that his meal was ready, Jaha Koo experienced a deep sense of isolation. ‘Golibmuwon’ (고립무원) is an untranslatable Korean word expressing the feeling of helpless isolation that characterizes the lives of many young people in Korea today.
Twenty years ago there was a major economic crisis in South-Korea, comparable to the financial crash in the United States and Southern Europe in 2008. This crisis had a huge impact on the young generation to which South Korean artist Jaha Koo belongs. He witnessed many endemic problems including youth unemployment and socio-economic inequality. Rising suicide rates, isolation, acute social withdrawal and a fixation on personal appearance are but a few of the symptoms.
In bittersweet and humorous dialogues, Jaha and his clever rice cookers take you on a journey through the last 20 years of Korean history, combining personal experience with political events and reflections on happiness, economic crises and death.
Cuckoo forms the second part of Jaha Koo’s Hamartia Trilogy. Together with Lolling & Rolling and The History of Korean Western Theatre, the trilogy consists of three intelligent documentary theatre performances, each telling a story about ‘hamartia’, Greek for ‘tragic error’. The common thread here is the far-reaching imperialism of the past and present, and its sometimes unexpected personal impact. Each time, Jaha Koo interweaves his personal stories with historical, political and sociological facts. Often themes that involve a clash of Eastern and Western culture: from the clipping of tongues to make it in the West, to the heavy personal toll of Western interference in the macroeconomic sphere.
About the Artist
JAHA KOO (he/him) is a South Korean theatre/performance maker, music composer and videographer. His artistic practice oscillates between multimedia and performance, encompassing his own music, video, text, and robotic objects.
His Hamartia Trilogy includes Lolling and Rolling (2015), Cuckoo (2017), and The History of Korean Western Theatre (2020). The trilogy represents a long-term exploration of the political landscape, colonial history and cultural identity of East Asia. Thematically, it focuses on structural issues in Korean society and how the inescapable past tragically affects our lives today. His newest creation Haribo Kimchi premiered in June 2024.
Koo majored in Theatre Studies (BFA, 2011) at Korea National University of Arts and earned a master’s degree (MA, 2016) at DAS Theatre in Amsterdam.
Learn More
The day after the South Korean president declared martial law, Koo sat down with Philip Bither, the Walker’s curator of performance, to discuss how art, performance, and hacking rice cookers can address the inescapable past that casts shadows across our lives today.
For over three decades, the Walker’s annual theater series Out There has surveyed leading theater and performance makers from around the world who approach the art form of theater in fresh and new ways. Inviting a carefully curated group of global projects, Out There reflects a spectrum of new ideas and approaches to what we think of as theater.
Living Land Acknowledgment
The McGuire Theater and Walker Art Center are located on the contemporary, traditional, and ancestral homelands of the Dakota people. Situated near Bde Maka Ska and Wíta Tópa Bde, or Lake of the Isles, on what was once an expanse of marshland and meadow, this site holds meaning for Dakota, Ojibwe, and Indigenous people from other Native nations, who still live in the community today.
We acknowledge the discrimination and violence inflicted on Indigenous peoples in Minnesota and the Americas, including forced removal from ancestral lands, the deliberate destruction of communities and culture, deceptive treaties, war, and genocide. We recognize that, as a museum in the United States, we have a colonial history and are beneficiaries of this land and its resources. We acknowledge the history of Native displacement that allowed for the founding of the Walker. By remembering this dark past, we recognize its continuing harm in the present and resolve to work toward reconciliation, systemic change, and healing in support of Dakota people and the land itself.
We honor Native people and their relatives, past, present, and future. As a cultural organization, the Walker works toward building relationships with Native communities through artistic and educational programs, curatorial and community partnerships, and the presentation of new work.
Acknowledgments
Producers’ Council
About the Walker Art Center
Media Partner
To learn more about upcoming performances, visit 2024/25 Walker Performing Arts Season.
