Seung Hwan Lee: Choreographer · Performer · Dance teacher · YEAY!

Contemporary dance has a language problem. To many people it seems abstract and closed, as if it assumed a background knowledge they do not have. Within the scene, it is surrounded by words: statements, concepts and conversations that sound important and often say little, sometimes not even to the people who speak them. In a field where recognition depends on how a practice is presented, the ability to talk about work can quietly take the place of the work itself.

Theo Lee turns this into a culture podcast. The guest, Theo Lee, is a choreographer fluent in words that sound profound and offer nothing tangible. The host speaks for the general public: she wears an animal sleep mask and admires what she does not understand. At the edge of the light, a dancer nobody introduces keeps working: she rehearses, searches and gets better, without a name and without a seat at the table. When the microphones go off, guest and host can only shout at each other in silence: a conversation that never became one.

With dry humour, the piece asks: Who gets to be heard, and why? When does explaining art become a substitute for making it? And what happens to a body whose work no one talks about?

In Korean culture, the phenomenon of one's entire life flashing before their eyes in the final moments is known as "Jumadeung" (The Revolving Lantern). It is a mystical second where decades of memory are compressed into a single, radiant heartbeat.

explores the metaphysical journey of three souls standing on the ultimate boundary—the "Limen"—between the familiar room of life and the unknown expanse of death.

From the physical deconstruction of the body and the hyper-rotation of memory to the ultimate dissolution where all boundaries vanish, witness the violent beauty of letting go and the radiant traces of a life lived before it fades into the eternal void.

Three souls navigate the volatile passage from the heavy deconstruction of the physical body to the boundless state of dissolution. On this ultimate threshold, memory is a burden, light is a question, and the self stops having edges.

One figure amplifies the sounds of consumption — eating, dragging, breathing — while the other receives what remains: noises, objects, pressure.

The piece reflects colonial structures through metaphor. Who is heard. Who is silenced. Who controls the narrative. The performers’ interaction reveals the tension between voice and voicelessness, dominance and survival — an echo of the historical and contemporary weight of colonial reality.

The project brings together a contemporary dancer and an urban dancer, each shaped by distinct training methods and aesthetics. Through a series of exchange tasks, the dancers learn, translate, and adapt each other’s phrases, finding a space between flow and precision.

The work also focuses on spatial perception. The audience is imagined on four sides, and the choreography moves in all directions. The duet shifts between two modes of focus — moments where the dancers face the audience, and moments where they turn toward each other in dialogue.

Without words or emotion, the piece studies movement as a form of communication. Liquid Angles creates a physical conversation where differences coexist, overlap, and form a new shared language.

Masturpiece : Major Tom began with a small laugh at the way things get wrapped in the word “art.” We live in a time where almost anything can become art, where anyone can call themselves an artist. Inside that reality I often feel split. Am I actually making something, or just showing the appearance of making?

The work grows out of that tension. It begins without declaration, and carries no clear story. On stage there is a pair of shoes, a folded piece of clothing, and a body that appears and disappears. It seems to suggest meaning, but whether that meaning is necessary remains uncertain.

The title borrows from David Bowie’s Space Oddity. Major Tom drifts in space, cut off from ground control, suspended in a kind of quiet disconnection. The song enters the piece only briefly — not to push a story but to pass through, almost like a signal sent but never received.

Masturpiece floats in that same space between sincerity and irony. It holds something genuine, but doubts that very sincerity. It is less a statement than a confession — not laughter from the outside, but from within.

This question is not easy to answer. I have asked myself the same many times, often without a clear response. But for me, the person I ultimately want to be is my true self.

The journey is about discovering and embracing one’s inner value rather than conforming to external expectations or societal roles. Compromise and adaptation can become routine, and in doing so there is a risk of losing one’s essence.

Looking For Someone To Be tells the story of a person who tries to live up to the image others hold of them, and loses themselves along the way. Through the solo journey of one figure on stage, the piece invites us to rediscover the beauty and meaning of self-acceptance.

Anibody explores these questions through movement and the body. It challenges us to consider whether our senses can help us rediscover instinctive behavior, and whether this instinct — often suppressed by modern life — might offer new perspectives on survival in times of climate crisis, war, and cultural alienation.

The theme of survival runs throughout the piece: from the survival of identities and ethnic groups during displacement, to the evolutionary adaptability of animals over millennia.

The work asks whether a return to instinct in times of crisis is not regression, but a reconnection to something original — a bodily intelligence that may not only secure survival, but also enable a new form of being.

In Soliloquy I look for a body language that communicates as if I were talking out loud to myself. This is also how the piece got its title: a soliloquy is the act of speaking one's thoughts aloud when by oneself or regardless of any hearers, especially by a character in a play.

I want to find movement and body images that communicate my thinking process, so that an audience can experience this intimate reveal through my dancing.

As movement research I looked for qualities that resemble different thought processes: continuous, fast, isolated, locked, floating, melting, chain reactions, animating. I was curious when and how these dynamics appear on their own. The work lies in transferring a process that normally happens by talking to oneself into a body expression.

Arriving at an emotional junction filled with wondering and loneliness opens up a space of emptiness and a feeling of being trapped. The state of mind is that of an uninhabited island, where a culmination of thoughts opens the gate to questioning one's identity and life at its core.

12 September 2017 was a few days before I went back from Germany to Korea. I had no money left and could not eat properly. In that moment a doubt came up: am I doing this right?

That day I switched on a camera and asked myself questions. Those questions are the only sound in the piece: there is no music, only the text of what I asked.

The piece marks the date on which I arrived in this emotional crisis and reflects on it through a dance monologue: an intimate and vulnerable portrait of a moment in time that might be relatable not just to one individual but to the human condition in general.

I made Unpaved Road out of my first time in Germany. I did not speak the language, I had no information, and everything was hard.

An unpaved road is how that time looked to me: I knew the way ahead would be rough, and I wanted to keep walking it anyway.