“It might be a little strange to say it in a place like this, but...”
When Koo Ja-ha (42) started singing, the audience of about 700 people gathered at the National Theater in Oslo, Norway, burst into laughter as if they understood what she meant.
Koo Ja-ha said, "To be precise, I dislike plays that remain in the form of the past while losing a contemporary sense. I dislike plays that do not pay attention to how the world we live in is changing."
Jaha Koo, a performing arts writer, composer, and video artist, received the International Ibsen Award and a prize money of 2.5 million kroner (about 358 million won) from the Norwegian government on the night of the 26th (local time).
He explained the irony of receiving the Ibsen Award, the most prestigious award in the world of theater, as he has repeatedly said that he hates plays, or more precisely, plays that follow Western traditions.
“I am not a person who makes plays because I love theater, but perhaps I am a person who makes plays because I keep doubting theater. I want to keep asking questions about what a play should be, who can stand on stage, who can speak, and whose voices we are not yet hearing.”
Koo Ja-ha was recorded as the youngest and first Asian writer ever to receive the International Ibsen Prize, known as the ‘Nobel Prize in Theater’. The Ibsen Award was established in 2007 to honor the Norwegian playwright and director Henrik Ibsen (1828-1906). Since 2010, the award has been given every other year.
Unlike other theater awards, such as the Olivier Award, which targets works in one season, the Ibsen Award evaluates the overall work of a writer or theater company. John Fosse (2010) and Peter Handke (2014) won the Nobel Prize in Literature after winning this award.
The judging committee's criteria for selecting this year's winners was 'imagination of theater as an in-between space in a world that is too often divided into pros and cons, a space where people can gather to imagine and be inspired by things we don't know.'
Ingrid Lorenzen, artistic director of the Norwegian National Ballet, who chaired the jury, went on stage and said, "He has an amazing ability to go beyond the conventions of ideology and platform," and added, "When you see Koo Ja-ha's work, you leave the theater with questions. It is a theater of wonders that should be cherished and praised."
Koo Ja-ha graduated from the Korea National University of Arts Theater Institute and has been living and working in Europe since 2011. After briefly performing electronic music in clubs in Berlin, Germany, he pursued a master's degree in contemporary theater at the Amsterdam University of the Arts in the Netherlands. Currently, he is working as a collaborative artist at CAMPO, a performing arts organization in Ghent, Belgium.
He has broken the mold of traditional theater that focuses on human performance by using various media such as music, video, text, and robotic objects. The 'Hamartia Trilogy', completed over a period of six years starting in 2014, is a work that starts from personal experience and looks into linguistic, economic, and cultural imperialism in Korean society.
Koo Ja-ha said, "What does it mean for me to receive the Ibsen Prize? I haven't found the answer yet. And maybe I don't need to find it. Going forward, I want to continue to question the era in which I live and move toward a place that has not yet been drawn, rather than the center of a map that has already been drawn."
Jaha Koo called Eun-kyung Jeong (scenographer) and Dries Duibi (dramaturg), who have worked together on all of his works so far, on stage and gave credit to them, saying, “We sometimes argue fiercely, but together we have imagined something that did not yet exist.”
After the acceptance speech was over, the audience all stood up and clapped. Ibrahim, who works as a screenwriter, said that Koo Ja-ha is already a "big-time artist" and said, "The writers who have received this award so far have almost finished their careers and are elderly. I believe that with this award, Koo Ja-ha will lead the world of theater."
