UNY Presents A HELD POSTURE at Theaterlab

It was our privilege to present the New York City premiere of A HELD POSTURE by multi-disciplinary artist and filmmaker Hyung Seok Jeon. Thanks to everyone who came out to Theaterlab on a very cold weekend in January. We were thrilled by the response to this piece—four sold out shows!

We wanted to produce this work because we were intrigued by Jeon’s use of the water as a site of the imagination or psyche. Exploring the image impulse of sinking into the deep ocean, Jeon invited us to discover what lies at the bottom—on the ocean floor or in the deep spaces of personal and collective memory. From a white room into the abyss, the piece moved us through surprising moments of loss, reclamation, discovery, joy.

As curators of a growing list of underwater objects, we’re interested in the ways that things speak. Shipwrecked, cast-off, discarded or lost, the objects on our site invite us to imagine a provenance or a future. We were delighted by the way Jeon re-purposed and animated everyday objects by a precise choreography of analogue and digital effects. His experiments with puppetry, a live video feed, and a rich soundscape created with wireless headphones re-purposed the body as well. In A HELD POSTURE, the performer's body became an image of the natural world. In this way, Hyung Seok Jeon transformed something vast and, at times, perilous into something intimate—human scale.

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