User Manual for a Broken Machine

A darkly comic theatre performance exploring failure, burnout and the body under pressure reflecting Korean industrialisation, capitalism and diaspora.

A broken Daewoo vacuum cleaner. A user manual that no longer works. A body trying to follow instructions that were never written for her. User Manual asks what happens when a person can no longer follow the instructions they have been given.

User Manual for a Broken Machine is a darkly comic interdisciplinary performance using the language of instruction manuals, troubleshooting guides and malfunction reports as a performance score. Through text, movement, sound and fragments of Korean traditional music, the piece follows a performer who reads, repeats, mistranslates, repairs and gradually becomes the broken machine she is trying to fix.

Developed by KASSNA, the work explores failure, productivity, migration and the pressure placed on female bodies to keep functioning within broken systems. Moving between the domestic object and wider histories of Korean industrialisation, capitalism and diaspora, it asks what happens when a person, a machine, or a society can no longer obey its original design.

Absurd, physical and unsettlingly funny, User Manual for a Broken Machine turns repair into ritual, breakdown into performance, and failure into a possible beginning.