Ja Hye Khoo

Playwright/director – Seoul, South Korea
Participant International Forum 2019

The director and playwright Ja Hye Khoo was born in Seoul, South Korea, and studied literature and philosophy at the university. Until the age of thirty, she didn’t have any field experience. She assisted authoritative male directors mostly under good circumstances, in the so-called mainstream. During that period, she doubted the conventions of plays and theatre, so she made her own play “theatre, definitely” in 2012. And the title of that play became the name of the collective group where she worked, asking questions about what we always take for granted and what a play should be. The principle of her plays is to penetrate the fourth wall in order to ask the audience questions through the actorsʼ attitude and intensity. Based on that principle, she made the plays “series of perpetrators” (2015), “commercial, definitely” (2015), “Killing Time” (2016), “A study of perpetrator: with an appendix how to write an apology” (2017). Between 2014 and today, there have been so many significant events in South Korea, such as the ferry disaster, impeachment, citizen's Candlelight Revolution, censorship for artists and #MeToo. Ja Hye Khoo thinks that issues derived from those events have strongly motivated her to make plays. And she makes plays based on the point of view of feminism, definitely.