EMILY L.
by Marguerite Duras
Production at Ob/Scene Festival, Seoul.

The text on one level tells a story about love, of the relation between gaze, desire and disappearance. But simultaneously, and maybe more importantly, the text is a story about writing and imagination as a double-life; how this paralell destiny exists as a shadow next to any ”real” life story. Also, and maybe primarily, the story revolves around the relation between the Self and the Other; how the gap of alterity can never fully be bridged, the fear residing in that fact, and how this is both the gift and law of imagination. Finally, it’s a text accepting and investigating the lack of any story’s self-identity; a text about a story continuously searching for it’s own hidden secret. The tension built in the slow investigation of this secret is the focal point of the performance.

The performance of Marguerite Duras’s novel is done with four actors from Seoul. Rather than adapting its story, the performance will encounter Duras’s writing as material: rhythms, repetitions, hesitations and silences producing sensations and thoughts of their own. Characters appear without becoming fixed; stories surface and disappear. Acting becomes a practice of listening rather than interpretation. Between love and possession, intimacy and unknowability, words, bodies and images coexist without explaining one another, leaving meaning open to what the spectator sees, hears and imagines.