In a modern
city, scarred by constant construction and reconstruction, a small Korean girl
is looking for her friend, a stray cat called Yoghurt.
She meets two other children, both
strangers and both from different cultures to her own.
As the sun goes down their fear of monsters and concerns for a broken
world take them on an extraordinary adventure in which they dig for
The latest Hanyong project, Looking
for Yoghurt, is being created at the moment, and will open in May
2009. It is a collaboration with artists in three countries this time, with performances in
Japan, Korea and Britain. Independent Producer Judy Owen has been added to
the Hanyong team for this project, and new co-producers have
joined the team in all three countries
- The Birmingham REP, Joyful Theatre, Seoul and the Kijimuna Festa, Okinawa,
Japan. The play will aim to follow
the success of Hanyong's first project - The Bridge [see below] with a conscious intention to create a partnership
of equals between artists from these three nations. The working method of
the company will once again address the inequalities of previous cultural
'exchange', and seek to find new common ground. Once again the inspiration
for this approach comes from young people.
There is now a blog which is following the progress of the creation of the new play, and you are welcome to contribute to it at http://hanyongtheatre.blogspot.com The process so far has involved workshops in Seoul, Tokyo and Birmingham, and the script is in a draft form.
The most recent draft of the script is also online in an english version. Please click here
The rest of this site is not yet up to date with the development of Looking for Yoghurt, but over the next few weeks we will be updating it. Details of the project will be on this site, and there are really interesting opportunities for involvement in it too - attending events during the creation of the project in all three countries, or becoming a sponsor of this significant work....
In May 2005, a play opened in Seoul, South Korea. It featured four Korean
actors and three English actors, and was performed in two languages.
Called The Bridge, it was received with huge enthusiasm by its mixed audience
of adults and young people. Later that year it opened again in Birmingham,
and toured the UK, with equally positive responses from equally diverse
audiences. It has just been presented at the World
Congress of Young People's Theatre in Adelaide in May 2008 - one of only twelve
plays selected from around the world. Following the performances in
Adelaide, it will now be performed in Okinawa, Japan in July, as part of the Kijimuna Festa.Written from a long process of research, devising and co-writing, across three years in total, The Bridge tells the story of a young man doing his National Service in England, who finds himself sent to Korea and pitched into a horrific and incomprehensible war 6,000 miles from home. He forms a relationship with three young children, who help him to survive, and change everything....
The play is about war, but it is more than that about reaching out, about understanding across cultures, about communication and understanding. It is about the wisdom of children....
Hanyong
Hanyong is the Korean word for Anglo-Korean. The company evolved from the appointment in 1999 of Birmingham-based Young People’s Theatre Writer Peter Wynne-Willson as 'Visiting Professor' at the Korean National University of the Arts, which remains a key partner in the work. Already many projects have been influenced by this collaboration.....[see Previous Projects]
