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SPAF 2025

Celebrating its 25th edition in 2025, the Seoul Performing Arts Festival (SPAF) is Korea’s leading international performing arts festival. Held every fall in Seoul,
SPAF introduces contemporary performing arts from Korea and around the world, encompassing a wide range of genres including theater, dance, and multidisciplinary arts.
Based on artistic excellence and experimentation, SPAF discovers and presents excellent Korean and international works that embody relevant contemporary perspectives and values.
Through international joint projects and mid- to long-term collaborations with the Associated Artists Program at its center, SPAF continues to expand the scope of artistic exchange.
In addition to performance showcases, SPAF offers a variety of programs including workshops that connect art with society, and creative labs that encourage exchange and experimentation among artists.
Through these programs, it aims to serve as a multi-layered platform that offers artists and audiences thought-provoking and engaging experiences.
SPAF continues to establish itself as a festival where artistic discourse is expanded and contemporary questions and sensibilities are shared through the performing arts.
As was the case last year, SPAF, Performing Arts Market in Seoul (PAMS), the leading performing arts circulation platform, and RE:BOUND, a festival showcasing outstanding regional performances,
will all be held in October, when the majority of performing arts events take place, as part of K-Stage Festa.
This alignment of events aims to strengthen the fundamentals of Korean performing arts and promote more intimate connections between the public and the arts.

OVERVIEW Overview of the 2025 SPAF
  • DatesOctober 16 (Thu) – November 9 (Sun), 2025 (25 days)
  • VenuesNational Theater of Korea, SFAC Theater QUAD, Sejong S Theater, ARKO Arts Theater & Daehakro Arts Theater, TINC, etc.
  • Co-hosted by Korea Arts Management Service, National Theater of Korea & Seoul Foundation for Arts and Culture
  • Organized by Korea Arts Management Service
  • Sponsored by Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism; Arts Council Korea; Dance Reflections by Van Cleef & Arpels; Adam Mickiewicz Institute; Creative Australia; Institut Français, among others
2025 Seoul Performing Arts Festival
Entanglement and Friction

We invite you to experience the "Entanglemant and Friction" created by diverse artists-forces that challenge the aesthetics of smoothness.

In Saving Beauty, Korean-German philosopher Byung-Chul Han defines the aesthetic of contemporary society as a pursuit of “smoothness.” He notes that aesthetic experiences today are becoming increasingly “smooth, clean, and uniform”—and that art is no exception. Yet, Han argues that true meaning and beauty emerge not from flawlessness, but from imperfection, conflict, negation, unfamiliarity, and contradiction. To restore this depth of experience, he proposes an “aesthetics of negativity.

Inspired by Han’s critique of the “aesthetics of smoothness” and the excess of positivity in contemporary culture, the 2025 Seoul Performing Arts Festival explores the complexity of our time—its discourses and evolving artistic forms—through the lens of entanglement and friction.

This year’s program unfolds around several thematic currents: new relationships among art, science, and technology in the digital age; expanded and transformed performance languages of sound and new music; contemporary dance vocabularies reimagined in collaboration with VC&A Dance Reflection; and perspectives on contemporary issues from artists across the Asia-Pacific region.

Beginning October 16, the festival will run for four weeks, featuring 22 works in theater, dance, and interdisciplinary art, alongside workshops and collaborative creation labs. Through the many layers of “Entanglement and Friction” expressed by these artists and artworks, the festival seeks to create a space for rethinking the true meaning of beauty in our time.

We deeply thank all those who continue to journey with us.

Kyu Choi, Artistic Director