Friday, January 31, 2025, 7:30 PM
Saturday, February 1, 2025, 7:30 PM

Cube

Performed in Korean and English with English subtitles

Please note, these performances contain references to suicide, mature language, explicit content, and strobe lights. Recommended for ages 13 and up.

These performances will last approximately 60 minutes with no intermission. 

*Run times listed here are based on information provided at this time and are subject to change. 

$25 general admission
$10 students with ID and youth 18 and under

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"Jaha Koo weaves together poignant personal stories from his native South Korea. He seamlessly alternates between speaking and listening, skillfully blending pain and sadness with dark humour."

— Medium

Europe-based South Korean theatre maker Jaha Koo uses video to closely interweave politics, history, and his own personal stories. Part of Koo’s Hamartia Trilogy, this play focuses on how the inescapable past tragically affects our lives today.

Three talking rice cookers — branded Cuckoo — are his conversation partners in painfully funny dialogues about the lonely lives a Korean generation faces. This intelligent, reflective, and haunting documentary theatre performance reveals a clash of Eastern and Western culture, such as the heavy personal toll of Western interference in the macroeconomic field.

About Cuckoo

One day when his electric rice cooker informed him that his meal was ready, Koo experienced a deep sense of isolation. Golibmuwon is an untranslatable Korean word expressing the feeling of helpless isolation that characterizes the lives of many young people in Korea today. How do you grow up in a performance-oriented and high-tech society where social isolation, youth unemployment, and suicide are rampant?

Twenty years ago, there was a major economic crisis in South Korea, comparable to the financial crash in the United States and Southern Europe in 2008. This crisis had a huge impact on the young generation, to which Koo belongs. He witnessed many endemic problems, including youth unemployment and socioeconomic inequality. Rising suicide rates, isolation, acute social withdrawal, and a fixation on personal appearance are but a few of the symptoms.

In bittersweet and humorous dialogues, Koo and his clever rice cookers take you on a journey through the last two decades of Korean history, combining personal experience with political events and reflections on happiness, economic crises, and death.

A white Cuckoo brand rice cooker sits on a white counter next to a family photo of a parent alseep next to a young child, their arms intertwined. On the screen of the rice cooker is the face of South Korean theatremaker Jaha Koo. South Korean theatremaker Jaha Koo, an Asian man with short dark brown hair and round glasses, wears a black shirt and sits at a table behind a Cuckoo brand rice cooker, the screen of which displays a red heart. South Korean theatremaker Jaha Koo, a young Asian man with short dark hair and round glasses, wears a black polo shirt and looks towards the camera, greenery behind him, in this black and white image. South Korean theatremaker Jaha Koo, an Asian man with short dark brown hair and round glasses, wears a black shirt and sits with a Cuckoo brand rice cooker in his lap. South Korean theatremaker Jaha Koo, an Asian man with short dark brown hair and round glasses, wears a black shirt and sits on top of a table between two Cuckoo brand rice cookers, another in his lap. Projected subtitles read "Hello my son, did you have a good meal?"

About Jaha Koo

Since 2014, Koo has been working on his Hamartia Trilogy. The first part of the trilogy, Lolling and Rolling, was first presented by Zürcher Theater Spektakel in 2015. The second piece, Cuckoo, was premiered at Steirischer Herbst Festival in 2017 and was also shown at CAMPO. The final part of the trilogy, The History of Korean Western Theatre, premiered at the International Summer Festival Kampnagel in 2020 and was selected for the TheaterFestival 2021 in Antwerp.

In 2021 Koo presented his Hamartia Trilogy for the first time at the Kunstenfestivaldesarts in Brussels, with a reworked version of Lolling and Rolling. He is currently touring the world, both with his trilogy and with the three performances separately. In between touring, Jaha Koo is working on a new creation, Haribo Kimchi, scheduled to premiere in 2024.

This is Koo's first performance at the Moss Arts Center.

Photos by Wolf Silveri and Bea Borgers