Jaha Koo's Rice Cookers Perform South Korea's Traumas at Avignon Festival

At the Avignon Festival, Korean performer Jaha Koo stages two works—'Cuckoo' and 'The History of Korean Western Theatre'—using talking rice cookers and archival footage to critique South Korea's economic and cultural pressures. In 'Cuckoo,' three Cuckoo-brand rice cookers converse as AIs while video montages show student protests, labor strikes, and police violence, linking the 1997 IMF crisis to a surge in youth suicide. Koo, born in 1984 and raised by his grandmother in the countryside, recounts a friend's suicide and finds solace in the cookers. 'The History of Korean Western Theatre' examines how Japanese colonization (until 1945) and the dominance of Western classics like Shakespeare erased indigenous Korean theatre. Koo blends personal memories with archival clips of folk performance, using paper and fabric origami to merge past and present. Both pieces run at the Festival d'Avignon, with photography by Christophe Raynaud de Lage.