Aging, Again

DAC Artist Bonjoo is the artistic director of the theater company ‘Project Vie’. As a playwright and director, her work examines violence and survival through a wide lens, encompassing the home, school, society, environment, gender, and history. Bonjoo translates the painful voices of our time into a distinct theatrical language. In 2024, she was honoured with the Best New Director award for her production, Co-creation failure ary: Can The Survivor Project Survive?

Her latest work, Gang, follows Pi-young, a nutritionist experiencing early menopause, as she confronts the reality of her own body and those of others. While struggling through economic hardship, Pi-young grapples with a wide range of generations and encounters a series of bodies of labourers exhausted by the gears of society: Geum-ok, who survived on nothing but porridge; Cheun-tae, once a cog in the machine of the economic boom, now old and infirm; and Dorothy and Bari, temporary workers who are finding ways to connect in an uncertain, precarious future. Each embodies a conflicting vision of what a ‘good life’ truly means.

In a shared workspace, the generations—from the industrial era to the boomers, millennials, and Gen Z—collectively reveal the boundaries that confine them. Amidst these tensions, Pi-young chooses to persist rather than simply fade away, contemplating what she must consume and what she must swallow to keep moving forward.