Talking rice cookers, accidental explosions: how do you capture austerity on stage?

https://www.theguardian.com/stage/2019/oct/24/talking-rice-cookers-accidental-explosions-how-do-you-capture-austerity-on-stage

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It doesn’t take much to turn a rice cooker into a bomb, according to South Korean theatre-maker Jaha Koo. He discovered this accidentally, when trying to reprogram a rice cooker to talk.

This wasn’t an idle endeavour. Koo had decided he wanted to create a play in which he could interact on stage with AI-enhanced rice cookers. As metaphors for the contemporary South Korean experience go, rice works on a number of levels: it sustains life, it bonds together – and it’s subjected to a great deal of outside heat and pressure.

Yet the mechanics of this also posed a considerable challenge. For one thing, Koo had to employ an especially gifted hacker to get his cooking utensil co-stars to do what he wanted. “He told me that the most difficult hacking material is home appliances. If there is a high-temperature heating system, then it’s a real challenge,” Koo tells Guardian Australia.

This, it turns out, is an understatement. “During the try-out process, there were explosions of rice cookers,” he says. “One took out the electricity of our entire studio building.”

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The endeavour, though, was ultimately successful, and the talking rice cookers form part of Cuckoo, one of a trilogy of plays by Koo showing in Adelaide at OzAsia festival – a sprawling program of contemporary art which takes in everything from music to theatre. The offerings include a 20th anniversary performance of Nitin Sawhney’s Beyond Skin, the Japanese troupe Miss Revolutionary Idol Berserker’s utterly bonkers Totes Adorbs ❤ Hurricane, and a play based on the recent economic history of South Korea as told by one man and three telerobotic rice cookers.

Cuckoo opens with Koo on a bare, black stage. In front of him are three high-end rice cookers: round, squat, nondescript, with wisps of steam rising up into the lights. He begins a monologue which starts with the International Monetary Fund approving a $55bn loan to South Korea and ends with a nation counting the human cost of their US-led rescue.

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Koo’s own visual montages and soundscape punctuate the monologue, as do the AI-enhanced machines. They interject, argue and even sing.

The elements might be quirky, but Cuckoo is about something quite serious: the political and economic story of Koo’s home country and how international intervention affected people’s lives, including those of Koo and the people around him.

“Around 1997, there was a severe economic crisis in east Asia including South Korea,” Koo says. “At that time, I was a middle school student and I was easily able to hear family rumours at school. For example, someone’s father was fired, someone’s family business went bankrupt, someone’s family lost their house or apartment, someone’s parents got divorced.”

He says when he decided to make Cuckoo, in 2014, South Koreans were not interested in interrogating what the financial crisis had meant. “But I couldn’t forget,” Koo says. “I lost many friends by suicide. The reasons were diverse, but they were within the same context – depression combined with economic problems and social pressure.”

This has affected the way the show has been received internationally. In some places it works almost as an idiosyncratic history lesson, but in others it’s all too familiar. A run in Athens, Greece – another country ravaged by IMF-decreed austerity – was a cathartic experience for all involved.

“Some audience members came to my dressing room without permission because they wanted to talk about their stories. It was a very heavy and sad day. Their vision was also very dystopian, even apocalyptic,” Koo says.

Touring the show has given Koo some curly experiences in airports, travelling through international terminals as he does with bags containing five interestingly wired devices. “Sometimes they are caught by luggage checkers at the airport,” he says. “Then we have to explain who we are and what they are.”

Another problem emerged with touring. Once they’d worked out how to create the necessary AI for the show, they realised the cookers couldn’t understand Koo’s English. “It was not easy to make the program in Korean. But we have officially performed about 80 times internationally so far and there have only been computer errors for two of these.”

Another – less emotional – variable in each performance is the rice itself. “For the performance, I need premium sushi rice. And sometimes they are not sticky enough, so we have to cook to check the quality of rice during rehearsal.”

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Koo is currently making tweaks to The History of Korean Western Theatre, the third part of what he calls his Hamartia trilogy. Cuckoo will soon be shelved, along with the first in the series, 2015’s Lolling and Rolling, to give him time to complete it. Nevertheless, he recognises the message of Cuckoo is especially potent in the current geopolitical context.

“In macroscopic vision, [Cuckoo] can be discussed with the US policy and Trump’s trade wars. At the same time, it can be discussed with my personal or your personal stories. It’s not separated. They are tangled and mixed,” he says.

And he still has plans for it.

“Next year I will go to Hong Kong. I feel an urgency to share the work and participate in the civil revolution or activism.”

• Cuckoo by Jaha Koo is showing at Adelaide Festival Centre as part of OzAsia on 25 and 26 October.

• In Australia, the crisis support service Lifeline is 13 11 14. In the UK and Ireland, Samaritans can be contacted on 116 123 or email jo@samaritans.org or jo@samaritans.ie. In the US, the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline is 1-800-273-8255. Other international helplines can be found at www.befrienders.org.