본문영역 바로가기 메인메뉴 바로가기 하단링크 바로가기

PAMS

ABOUT PAMS Creative Collaborations
2026 Seoul Performing Arts Festival Poster
OVERVIEW Festival Overview
  • DatesOctober 8 (Thu) – October 25 (Sun), 2026 / 18 days total
  • VenuesNational Theater of Korea, SFAC Theater QUAD, Arko·Daehakro Arts Theater, Sogang University Mary Hall, NC Cultural Foundation Stage Black
  • Hosted by Korea Arts Management Service, National Theater of Korea
  • Organized by Korea Arts Management Service
  • Supported by Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism, Arts Council Korea, Embassy of France in Korea, Institut français, Goethe-Institut Korea, Dance Reflections by Van Cleef & Arpels
  • In Cooperation with Seoul Foundation for Arts and Culture, Asian Culture Center, Korea National Contemporary Dance Company, NC Cultural Foundation, Festival d'Avignon
2026 Seoul Performing Arts Festival 
Multiverse of Art

Not long ago, I watched a television documentary about the addictive pull of the digital age. On screen, I saw us reflected with unsettling clarity — tamed by the glow of our smartphones and the rhythm of dopamine. Look around any subway car or bus, and everyone is bent over a screen, alone with a world that exists only in their hands. The warm voices and glances we once exchanged with family, friends, and colleagues are slipping further into the past.

Alongside the rise of AI, we are living through an age ruled by speed and efficiency. Amid an endless stream of information and stimulation, we are more connected than ever — and yet the moments in which we truly sense and feel for one another grow fewer.

So what role can art play in a digital age?

Perhaps art is the force that calls us back out from behind the screen, out of our isolated corners. A shared space where people face one another, breathe together, and exchange sensation and emotion. A place where different lives and experiences meet, where unfamiliar perspectives and imaginations cross paths, where new relationships and conversations begin. That, perhaps, is the most valuable public space art can create today.

Believing in this value of art, the 2026 Seoul Performing Arts Festival unfolds as a “Multiverse of Art.” Comprising 19 performance works alongside creation labs and workshops, this year’s festival is a journey in which artists and audiences imagine together, connect their senses, and build a new universe of dialogue and coexistence.

The “Locality and Trans-locality” section brings together diverse theatre works from Korea, Asia, and South America, along with the Asian Playwrights Project, to look at the spaces, times, and memories of the past we inhabit through multiple layers. Through this, audiences will encounter not a single narrative but a universe of differing perspectives and interpretations.

“Experiments at the Edge of Creative Aesthetics” explores the boundaries of artistic form through matter, technology, installation, music, and sound. These experiments are pluralistic trials in the rules and irregularities of art, revealing how art generates new territories of sensation. Here, the artist’s work is not a finished product but a universe of relations that continually expands as the audience’s senses and imagination intervene.

“The Expansion of Contemporary Dance Language” traces how dance, beginning from the aesthetics of the body, has developed through physical technique, expression, and the refinement of movement. Extending into conceptual dance, fusion with visual art, and discourse on AI and the body, this section reframes the body not merely as a tool of expression but as a universe of thought unfolding through movement.

“Festival d’Avignon @ SPAF 2026” is a project born of close artistic exchange between festivals, continuing its connection to the Korean-language invitation program of the Festival d’Avignon, which marks its 80th edition this year. Beyond works of theatre, dance, and multidisciplinary art, it includes a staged reading by Korean and French actors based on Han Kang’s novel We Do Not Part, creating a universe of ongoing connection and sharing.

The 2026 Seoul International Performing Arts Festival’s “Multiverse of Art” is a world where differing perspectives, media, aesthetic rules, and modes of sensation coexist. Rather than converging audiences toward a single notion of beauty, it will guide them into an infinite universe of creation — one where different viewpoints collide, intersect, and generate new meaning.

We invite you to a multiverse of art where we imagine together and connect with one another.
 

Kyu Choi, Artistic Director
ASSOCIATE ARTISTS SPAF Associate Artists

SPAF Associate Artists is a collaborative program with artists who pose questions about the contemporaneity of art and pursue their own distinct artistic directions. Together with four associate artists for 2025–2026, the festival explores its curatorial direction and works to build international connectivity and expansion from a transnational perspective.

25-26 Associate Artists
Kim Jaehoon
Kim Jaehoon

An artist sharing contemporary narratives with musical experiments

Kim Jaehoon is a musician and director who translates contemporary narratives triggered by different factors into the language of music and the performing arts based on minimalism. He is interested in transformation of tradition in a certain culture amid technological development and experiments staging different elements of music. He works on music, performances and videos in order to form a discourse pursuing diversity in the performing arts scene.

His representative works include his albums (2019) and (2021) (He composed and performed all the pieces.), performances (2023) and (2023) and documentaries (2022) and (2023).

Bonn Park
Bonn Park

Bonn Park, born in 1987 in West-Berlin, Germany, is a German-Korean writer and director. From 2008 he was part of the youth theatre of Volksbühne Berlin. He later studied at the University of Arts Berlin and at the Zurich University of the Arts in Switzerland.

Bonn Park has received many nominations and awards for his work, among them the Innovation award of Heidelberger Stückemarkt 2011, the Else-Lasker-Schülerpreis 2015, the Stückepreis of the Berliner Theatertreffen in 2017, the Friedrich-Luft-Preis 2019. In 2018, he won Show of the Year (ZITTY) for writing and directing the opera at Volksbühne Berlin.

He was nominated for the Berliner Theatertreffen 2021 for his show and was most recently awarded the Anna-Seghers-Preis 2023 for his complete work – and others.

Jang Young
Jang Young

Jang Young is a playwright and dramaturg. The one and steady goal of her work is to find out how to reduce people’s pain. Through her theatrical works, she seeks to share insights into multilayered elements constituting people’s lives. To be more specific, she is greatly interested in the possibilities of shifts in consciousness and the transpersonal.

Her major plays include (winner of the 60th Dong-A Theater Awards (category: Best Play)), , and .

Soo-Hyun Hwang
Soo-Hyun Hwang

Soohyun Hwang began her career as a professional dancer before transitioning into choreography, where she has been reinterpreting the norms and sensory layers embedded in dance performance. Her work focuses on the vibrations, breath, and micro-movements of dancers as primary materials, paying particular attention to how subtle changes in the body transfer sensory experiences to the audience.

Through this, she expands the experience of dance from ‘watching’ to ‘a sensory community formed through bodily encounters,’ exploring the potential for dance performances to function not only as art but also as social practice.