Asian Arts Theatre Gwangju opening festival

After years of planning, the long awaited Asian Arts Theatre opens in Gwangju City, Korea in September 2015. It will launch with a 3-week long festival (September 4 - 21) hosting thirty-three international presentations, including premieres of twelve Asian productions/co-productions.

The Asian Arts Theatre questions, supports, and creates contemporary performing arts in Asia:

• What are the most vital means to discuss Asia’s now?
• What does “Asia” mean in individual practices?
• What is Asian contemporary art?

Asian Arts Theatre recognizes the importance of these questions and summons different voices articulating them. Asian Arts Theatre supports artists with unique and stirring visions, artists who can evoke, respond to, and reshape the most urgent aesthetic and social concerns of Asia today. Asian Arts Theatre’s Opening Festival will be an organic attempt to pronounce these visions and directions.

The festival will present perspectives beyond the geographical and political boundaries of Asia to create an arena of true international communication of ideas.

Asia is a region of dynamic changes overlapping with traditions. Asia is a way of thinking that challenges itself. It is a multidimensional concept that constantly calls for reworking,redefining, and revitalizing. Asia is a performative, organic framework for creativity.

The Asian Arts Theatre is a part of the Asia Culture Center (ACC), a government-funded establishment housed in the heart of Gwangju City. ACC is doubtless the most ambitious and momentous art project in Korean history in terms of budget, artistic vision, and spatial scale. Based in the newly constructed theatre complex, the Asian Arts Theatre aspires to become the hub theatre for the production, presentation, discussion, and international distribution of the most cutting-edge works in the context of the international performing arts scene.