Jinyeob Lee: "The show is quite painful, the performers don't stop swallowing water through their noses"

BarcelonaSouth Korea has one of the highest suicide rates in the world, with 29.1 deaths per 100,000 inhabitants, according to 2025 data. South Korean director Jinyeob Lee wanted to bring this issue to the stage and decided to do so by drawing inspiration from one of the country's most deeply rooted traditional practices: that of the female divers of Jeju Island, who practice free-diving to collect seafood. Starting from the diving technique, Lee devised the show "Muljil", which she has performed with the company Elephants Laugh and which will be shown this Wednesday and Thursday at the Teatre Lliure, as part of the Grec festival. The play places four cubicles filled with water on stage. In each, an performer is submerged with the water up to their nose.

The show, which arrives in Barcelona after being presented at the Avignon Festival, pushes the actors to their limits through an aquatic choreography of breath-holds and lung capacity. "It's a way of symbolizing this threshold between life and death. The divers are reborn every day, because the risk of dying in the water is very high," points out the director, who devised a series of "raw and realistic" movements that are amplified by the water. "The show is quite painful, the performers constantly swallow water through their noses," emphasizes Lee. As the actors move, the voices of their characters sound through the theater's speakers. Each actor embodies an oppressed person in Korea: a worker, a transsexual person, a pregnant woman, and another woman who is unhappy with her body and cannot stop having surgery.

"There are many deaths among the working class in Korea. There are operators who need more resources to use dangerous machinery, but there are no controls and companies cut costs. Some die because the work environment is not safe enough," says the director. The play also reflects on stage the oppression experienced by LGBTQ+ people and the inequalities suffered by Korean women. "Salaries are unequal, they have many difficulties in raising children, balancing work and life, and in professional growth. In Korea, when a woman is married, she is no longer referred to by her name," laments Lee. The fourth character, the woman addicted to cosmetic surgery, aims to show the impact of social media among young people in relation to their physical appearance. "We have many depressed adolescents because of beauty standards," says the director.

The four performers –Hyun Sung Seo, Kwanghyun Ma, Joonbong Kim and Aeri Lee0– share the stage with four volunteers who change in each city where the show is performed. In Barcelona, two people from the LGTBIQ+ collective and two refugees will participate. "Refugees are also between life and death, and in Korea there are many but they are invisible," explains the director. Muljil has been travelling the world for eight years and represents one of the few opportunities to see Korean theatre in Catalonia.

Dancing against climate change

From South Korea also arrives this Tuesday and Wednesday the new show by choreographer Sung Im. 1 Degree Celsius arose from the artist's son's concerns about the state of the planet. "One day, leaving school, I asked him what was saddening him. He replied that they had been working on the environment and climate change in class. As an adult, I felt the responsibility to do something about the planet we are leaving to future generations," explains Sung Im. 1 Degree Celsius is a show with seven dancers and will be performed this Tuesday and Wednesday at the Mercat de les Flors, also within the Grec.

The choreographer approaches this problem from simplicity. "Running, jumping, turning the body, doing a somersault. With these movements you have enough to transform the body. I look for movement in its purest state and ask the dancers to set aside technique," she points out. The performers reproduce the city's rapid rhythm using music made of urban sounds and a sound that simulates the rise in sea level.