Orange Polar Bear - a cross-cultural performance piece for teenagers in Seoul and Birmingham

Peter Wynne-Willson

Orange Polar Bear (2014-19) is an innovative bilingual theatre project created by Hanyong Theatre, the National Theatre Company of Korea and Birmingham Repertory Theatre. The main research aims were to develop a methodology for devising and presenting bilingual work in a way that maintains equality between collaborative partners, and, by focusing on the experience of teenagers in Seoul and Birmingham, to consider what young people can teach adults about bridging cross-cultural and language divisions. The research resulted in a novel methodology for devising bilingual theatre leading to a cross-cultural performance for young people in two languages, presented in the same form in South Korea and the UK. It was unique among Anglo-Korean collaborations for its focus on the experience of teenagers, and conscious balance of languages, cultures and practices. Additionally, the research demonstrates the value of adopting a child-led approach to creating cross-cultural theatre and has created new insights into long-term approaches to developing fair and equal cross-cultural partnerships.

Images from the workshop in Seoul in 2014, when three teenagers from Birmingham joined the Korean young people's group, and they together took the ideas from the individual workshops into a devised 'performance' called Jiyoung and William. The workshop was run by a mixture of Britsh and Korean artists. [Lorna Laidlaw, Dan Tyler-McTighe, Kim Mijeong and Park Young Ju] This is a clip from a video about the workshop, edited by the young group in Seoul.

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