Various street art performances hosted in Seoul this month

A preview of “Oh! Lucky Day,” an interactive street performance about quarrelling elderly ladies. / Courtesy of Seoul Foundation for Arts and Culture

By Lee Suh-yoon

The Seoul Foundation for Arts and Culture (SFAC) has been offering a series of street art performances around the capital, including circus and puppet shows, modern dance, and traditional Korean plays.

“Our seasonal street performance program, started in 2014, is one of our most representative projects, directly reaching out to some 100,000 citizens at parks and other gathering places,” Seo Jeong-hyup, head of the SFAC, said in a press statement last week. “We hope, through this autumn program, citizens can better enjoy art that is hard to come by in their daily lives.”

The annual project, which hosts a total of 45 free outdoor performances during September, aims to make art more accessible to Seoul residents.

The nine performance teams selected by the SFAC presented their various art forms at Seoullo 7017 in downtown Seoul last week, and they will perform at three more locations, starting with Digital Media City in Sangam, northwestern Seoul, this Friday to Sunday. The third round of performances _ wedged together with Chuseok holiday _ will take place at Seoul Forest Park, and the final performances in the following week will be at Dongdaemun Design Plaza (DDP).

A preview of “Degesbe,” a modern dance piece by Emmanuel Sanou, a choreographer from Burkina Faso. / Courtesy of Seoul Foundation for Arts and Culture

One of the most notable performances is “Degesbe,” a modern dance and community art piece designed by Emmanuel Sanou, a choreographer from Burkina Faso. Degesbe means “What are you looking for? There is nothing there,” in the language of the tribe Sanou hails from. The piece deals with universal themes of labor, migration and discrimination.

An interactive piece titled “Oh, Lucky Day,” about quarrelling elderly ladies, will directly involve passersby in a play which includes a tap dance scene.

Other performances include circus shows “My Dream,” “Postman” and “Frame Architect”; a puppet show “The marionette of Baladin”; a modern dance piece “The Dream of the White Wing”; and the Korean traditional play “Wife” where a man travels around the country looking for his wife who left him many years ago.

The performances will start as early as 3 p.m. and the last performances will be scheduled around 7 p.m.

The SFAC is a non-profit organization established and funded by the Seoul Metropolitan Government. For more information, visit the SFAC English website or the program organizer's Facebook page (