Interview: Namoo Chae Lee on User Manual for a Broken Machine at Holy Cross Church and Theatro Technis

It is a fun show.

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It is physical, musical, and lyrical.

User Manual and its instructional languages are the starting point of the show. Nobody reads the manual closely until the actual problem begins. It is very interesting text. It looks neutral, but it imposes a lot of things. That’s what fascinates me.

Following the dramaturgy of the manual, the piece shows the relationship between the user and the manual, an individual and society, and how we function in the world. In the end, the show asks: “What happens when a person can no longer follow the instructions?” and “Can the instruction be wrong from the beginning?”

It is a jumble of things. It is defying the traditional concept of dramaturgy by not following a single protagonist. It is about how an individual tries to function in the societies around them, how we turn ourselves into part of the machine, and what happens when that machine breaks down.

We’re using a vacuum cleaner from a Korean brand, but anybody who has used a hoover can relate to it.

As the writer and director, what first inspired you to create a piece centred around a broken vacuum cleaner and the language of instruction manuals?

It was a day when my housemate was struggling with a new vacuum cleaner. After weeks of exchanges with customer service and reading manuals, I realised it was a brand that I knew very well. It was a Korean brand.

A broken Korean hoover in the middle of my London house. That felt metaphoric to me.

Before working as a theatre-maker, I used to work as an overseas sales representative for that specific company. I was the very person writing those manuals for international customers, even though my product was not a hoover.

I felt for that broken hoover.

Then I also realised how much that specific brand evokes my personal memories.

That was when I started thinking about language. I was fascinated by how deceptively neutral the language was. I wanted to start from completely dry language and move towards something very personal because, of course, language is never neutral.

The work explores themes of productivity, failure and the systems that shape our lives. Why were these ideas important for you to examine through performance?

I jokingly said that, as a Korean who lives outside Korea, our lives are divided into the pre-Gangnam Style era and the post-Gangnam Style era. It is way before the K-pop boom, BTS or BLACKPINK.

I remember the time when we were picked on by being called “Kimchi-eating” people. It was something to be ashamed of, something smelly, people who eat what others called “rotten” food, though we called it fermented. Most people did not know where Korea was or had never even heard of it.

Then somehow the world changed, and suddenly being Korean became quite fashionable.

I feel a bit jet-lagged by that change.

At the same time, I think I belong to one of the last generations that grew up very directly inside the story of Korean industrialisation. There was this idea that you work hard, endure things, sacrifice now, and wait because eventually life will get better. That is what made modern Korea.

It was only after I left Korea that I started questioning that more. I began to realise that “work hard for the future” can also be a way of asking the individual to disappear behind the company, the family, the institution, or the country.

So I started to question what it actually means to be productive. Who decides that somebody is functioning well? And when somebody cannot function in the expected way, does it mean that we are failures?

I thought this attempt to put people in boxes, and call them failures if they do not fit, was a very industrial concept. So I wanted to investigate who decides those concepts and what is behind this societal control.

I wanted to investigate it through human bodies in front of people’s eyes. You see someone trying, repeating, trying again, obeying, but failing, unable to help themselves, and still being told what to do.

User Manual for a Broken Machine combines text, movement, live music, electronic sound and video. How did you approach bringing these different art forms together into a single production?

Excel files! Haha.

I’m a director with a deep interest in different theatrical languages: music, movement, objects and technologies. I imagine a show where these different languages are all telling the story together, but in their own ways. Sometimes they collaborate, and sometimes they betray one another.

It involves quite rigorous dramaturgy. I divide everything into columns: movement, music, text and later video, and then start putting the pieces together. The process is more like making a mosaic than drawing a fully sketched portrait.

And all three performers are not simply performers. They are creators in their own right. Suyoung, one of the core members of KASSNA, is not only a physical performer and dancer but also a choreographer and visual artist. Seayool plays the Korean traditional double-reed instrument, the piri, as well as live electronics, and he composes the whole soundscape. Eden, the Reader, has recently written a novel, so she also comes into the room very much as a creator in her own right.

So this isn’t really a traditional actor-director relationship. It’s a partly devised process where all of us are drawing the map together, within the story and structure that I initially proposed.

So, going back to the question, the script is actually full of columns and colours.

The production evolves between its appearances at Bloomsbury Festival and Voila! Theatre Festival. What can audiences expect to be different between the two versions of the show?

I’m very keen that every tool we bring into the show is there for a specific reason.

The piece is partly about how systems classify individuals. The three performers, the Mover, the Reader and the Player, control, help, interrupt and collaborate with one another over the course of the show, and their roles keep shifting.

The version at Holy Cross Church focuses mainly on the relationships between those three people and on their relationship with the space itself.

A church is a very particular place. It isn’t a theatre, but it already creates a kind of separation from everyday life. It is also a space associated with the divine, with something we cannot necessarily see. When I was studying theatre in South Korea, I was taught that theatre is a place where the invisible becomes visible, where you materialise something that cannot normally be seen. That idea has stayed with me.

Our show is actually quite simple: three performers, a vacuum cleaner, sound, text and movement. At Holy Cross, the whole building becomes part of the set, so I hope the audience feels that they have entered the world of the piece rather than simply sitting in front of it. I am particularly excited about the acoustics of the space.

At Theatro Technis, we develop the dramaturgy further by introducing an AI character and live cinema. This is where the individual begins to investigate what is behind the system in more detail. By bringing more technologies into the piece, we’re not only talking about the system through the text. We’re also investigating it through the form itself.

I’m interested in AI partly because I think it can expose the absurdity of the systems we already live with. When we interact with a machine or an institution, who are we actually interacting with? Is there a person behind it? A company? An algorithm? Nobody?

So the two versions are connected, but I see them as two different stages of the same research. Holy Cross looks more closely at the people inside the system. At Theatro Technis, we start looking behind it.

What would you say to anyone thinking of booking to see User Manual for a Broken Machine?

You know that feeling when something doesn’t work, so you follow the instructions exactly, and somehow it becomes worse? That is basically where the show begins.

Be ready to laugh, but also be ready to read something you thought you already knew in a different way. You might hear things you’ve never heard before, but somehow find something very familiar in them.

I think anyone who has ever had a broken interaction with a machine, a bureaucracy, an institution, or just the world around them, will probably recognise something in it.

You don’t need to know anything about Korea. Or theatre. Or technology.

Just come and see what happens when three people try very hard to follow the instructions.