Review: code of engagement, Coronet Theatre

Berlin-based Korean artist Hea Min Jung presents her captivating immersive installation code of engagement at the Coronet Theatre this month. It is a visually fascinating, emotionally engaging performance, unique at each event. The classic theatre stage is transformed, with huge elastic ropes criss-crossing, stretching from floor to ceiling like a spider’s web. Materials resembling pieces of shed skin or bodily parts are draped at odd intervals within the auditorium and around the stage area. This is a performance that invites the audience to reconsider the human body and the spaces it inhabits, bringing memory, spirituality and corporeal tensions into the mix, and it does so with huge skill and spellbinding dance.

Audiences are initially invited into the auditorium, seated conventionally or on the stage, where Jung moves to the music, seemingly entranced. It’s hard to take your eyes from her as she twists and undulates in unfamiliar forms to haunting music. From here, half the audience is quite quickly beckoned out, along a corridor, up some stairs to the Print Room, where a separate installation sees a long column of temple bells hanging from the ceiling. There are tiny spots of red light within them which shift hypnotically with the dance. Jung performs within the column, almost caged by it and seemingly struggling at times to burst through. Tangible tensions and energies emerge through her interactions as she responds to the movement as well as the noise of the bells she is activating. Huge shadows projected onto the walls give her a presence beyond her bodily substance. It’s an intimate space and an emotive performance that exquisitely connects physicality with spiritual being.

For the next section, we return to the first installation in the main hall; but there is little to do here as the second half of the audience sets off to the Print Room, and so we chat and watch a second artist marking the stage with pools of paint. At this point, the performance loses some continuity as the audience engagement is disrupted, which is unfortunate.

When Jung returns to the auditorium, she again captivates with her extraordinary movement, using a rod of light to lead the audience’s attention back to the stage, the light spilling slightly into our space and connecting us. The main section of the dance is challenging and compelling as her body interacts with the stretched installation, taking on alien forms as her limbs, fingers, toes, and face depict actions and shapes that are beyond the norm, given new possibilities and understanding. Gesturing to her stomach region, we understand the experience of pain. She, at one point, dons a headdress equipped with an umbilical cord, relating knowledge of birth and loss, which feels deeply personal, and it’s almost voyeuristic to watch, yet ultimately an emotional and generous sharing. The dance is throughout moving and evocative, telling of tension, entrapment, boundaries crossed and reimaginings.

Jung is an amazing talent. It’s a shame that the show splits in the way it does, as it disrupts the audience journey, which could be even more powerful if continuous. Nonetheless, her work wordlessly engages the audience in a thoughtful contemplation of the human body and subverts the norm to question our relationship with it in multiple dimensions: it’s intriguing and transfixing to watch. The dance is everything human all at once: beautiful, ugly, surprising, spiritual, connective, but subversively liberating.

Artist/Director/Producer: Hea Min Jung
Sound: James Whipple (M.E.S.H)
Installation Assistance: Nagi Gianni

code of engagement runs at the Coronet Theatre until Saturday 4 October.