Meet Chaesong Kim | Theater Director & Performance Artist

We had the good fortune of connecting with Chaesong Kim and we’ve shared our conversation below.

Hi Chaesong, we’d love to hear about how you approach risk and risk-taking
Let me start with shout outs to the fellow risk takers. Riding with inertia is comfortable. However, breaking away from stasis takes effort. I would argue that daydreaming the “what if’s” and deliberating whether to act on the challenging decision are included in this brave act. I would like to honor the countless sleepless nights that kindled the adventures of the past, and those to come.

Making a positive difference has been one of the central values in my practice as an artist, and risk taking continues to be only necessary in pursuing this. I gravitate towards big and difficult questions, and ask them to myself, my team, and my audience through my work.

While I primarily sourced energy for my earlier works from rage, I am in the process of discovering the power of joy. Risk taking can also be joyful. The premise of a trust fall is hope. It is deeply connected with curiosity and a wish for a better future. Especially when embedded in communities, risk taking cannot help but assume big love for each other.

As a director, I strive to create a braver space for the team during the creative process by first ensuring a safer space. While one should stray away from mistakenly assuming that any space can be perfectly safe for everyone, we certainly can strive for it, and in the risky act of communal effort towards a safer space, a team discovers trust. This in turn becomes the foundation for further experimentation.

Please tell us more about your work. We’d love to hear what sets you apart from others, what you are most proud of or excited about. How did you get to where you are today professionally. Was it easy? If not, how did you overcome the challenges? What are the lessons you’ve learned along the way. What do you want the world to know about you or your brand and story?
To break the fourth wall for a moment, it took me weeks to find the best way to answer this question. I am a young artist, often in the middle of the ping-pong of anxiety attacks of not being booked enough, and burnouts from being overbooked every couple weeks. In my eyes, I still have a long way to go, but thankfully some see how far I’ve come, and ask for my advice. In this thick of a middle, formulating one solid answer for this question was challenging, because how I saw where I was in my career fluctuated.

What I landed on is to lean into what others spoke about my work to a) achieve some imposible “objectivity” b) shout out to my colleagues and mentors who have offered me kind words to ground myself in, and c) to take this opportunity for publicity of my work to take up space, and quite frankly, brag a little. Here we go.

One of the most humbling moments in my career was when David Henry Hwang, who is a Chinese-American playwright best known for Yellow Face and M. Butterfly, told me after watching my work, that I have a versatile talent in pulling out the unique beauty in different plays of wide variety and designing an experience for the audience to be immersed in. David is a 선배님 (that can be translated as a senior, or mentor) and a 선생님 (that is not just used as a teacher in this context, but a master) I look up to with utmost respect. This moment of my hero recognizing some of the virtues I prioritize as a theater director made me feel so seen.

I always strive to be adaptive, multifaceted, and inventive. I choose stories that deeply move me, then carefully create structures that best fits the telling of them. To this day, I believe in 진심 (or, earnestness, sincerity, truth). I trust that my falling in love with the material, the team, the audience, and the theater as a place we all meet will bring us together, breed a safer and braver communal space and time for a cathartic moment to share similar pains, but also bask in collective joy.

I was gifted the concepts of a “safer and braver space,” social justice driven theater making, and non-hierarchical interdisciplinary art through Ping Chong and Company. Through their teachings, I could meld my social activism background with art making, and free myself of the rigid myth of conventional performance disciplines’ boundaries. They also taught me to prioritize trauma-informed processes over product.

Thanks to the wisdom the numerous 선배님s and 선생님s I look up to including Ping bequeathed me, as well as courage I owe to my forever inspiring community of colleagues, my audiences frequently tell me that “they have not seen or experienced something like” my work, or thank me for having “cried on their behalf,” and “creating a cathartic space that [they] feel seen and held in.” As a result of trauma-informed and community-oriented performance making practice, I seek for a positive change in the world, liberating colonized bodies and thoughts. This is why such interaction with the audience is burned to my heart to this day, and pushes me to keep going.

As I write this, I am looking forward to the opening night of Alien Play by Carolina Đỗ as a part of Short Play Festival at The Tank with Makers Ensemble, followed by The Queen of the Living Room by Mijuan Ye as a part of New Play Festival at Lenfest Center for the Arts, and She Walks the Air XI, the eleventh iteration of my intermedia project that started in 2017, that will return with the support of LMCC as a site-specific performance installation in West Harlem.

If you had a friend visiting you, what are some of the local spots you’d want to take them around to?
I would love to start the day with lattes and pastries at The Hungarian Pastry Shop. It’s so warm and cozy there. If it gets crowded, we’ll hide in the little patch of green of Amsterdam Garden, and admire the view of The Cathedral Church of St. John the Divine, one of the largest churches in the world.

Then we’ll walk through Central Park, saying hi to various critters that inhabit it, making stops at benches to 물멍 (spend time looking at the ripples of water) and spot occasional 윤슬 (the sparkles on the water as sunlight breaks into it). We could walk or bike to slowly make our way east towards the ferry on East 90th. We could add a stop at the Guggenheim on the way if called to do so.

We’ll hop from one pier to another along each side of the river, play games, read, chat, wave to the Statue of Liberty, draw, and write as the breeze envelops us all the way through Sunset Park. If we’re feeling adventurous, we can hunt down cute eateries, cafes, flower shops, or perfumeries along the way. Just before the sun sets, we’ll catch the ferry back towards Manhattan, and observe the million shades of pink the clouds and waves turn into.

If we’re not too tired by then, I’d hop on the train towards Chinatown to grab a bite at Nom Wah Tea Parlor or Buddha Bodai. Then we’ll end up at a theater in the East Village for a night of experimental performance or an old movie at The Village East.

If the night still feels young, we could end up in the sky lounge at Gaonnuri in K-town, have a celebratory cocktail as we admire the night skyline. Alternatively, we could get lost in a 노래방 (Korean karaoke). We would still need another day or two to explore the Korea towns of Flushing and Fort Lee for affordable and authentic goodness, but this Korean haven in Manhattan could satiate a little nostalgia for the night.

Who else deserves some credit and recognition?
I must thank Ping Chong and Company, Bearnstow, and Samita Sinha for generously bestowing upon me so much of their wisdom, as well as creating space for me to grow in. Ping taught me to commit to challenging the boundaries of form, telling the stories of underrepresented communities through interdisciplinary performance, devised theater, and documentary theater. Bearnstow taught me to deeply tune into the bodies of myself, others, nature, environment, and time-space. Samita taught me that, through voice, we touch, vibrating our own bodies, the air surrounding us, and each other, discovering that we are truly all thoroughly connected beyond the bounds of flesh and time. I would not be close to where I am without them.

I graduated from Columbia University’s MFA program in theater directing last May, and I’m continuing to find the ways in which it has shaped me. Two gifts from my time there that I can clearly verbalize at the moment are my deep respect for dramaturgy that I developed during my time there, and the truly special colleagues I’ve met. To my utter delight, with one of them I recently vowed to share the rest of our lives together. For my family I found here in New York, as well as the one I was born into in Korea, I cannot express enough gratitude.

Website: www.chaesong.kim

Instagram: @kimchaesong

Image Credits
Anthony Sertel Dean, Carol Rosegg, Richard Termine, Tayler Everts, and Phyllis Graber Jensen