In Emily L., Swedish director Anders Paulin encounters Marguerite Duras’s novel with four actors from Seoul. Rather than adapting its story, the performance approaches Duras’s writing as material: rhythms, repetitions, hesitations and silences producing sensations and thoughts of their own. Characters appear without becoming fixed; stories surface and disappear. Acting becomes a practice of listening rather than interpretation. Between love and possession, intimacy and unknowability, words, bodies and images coexist without explaining one another, leaving meaning open to what the spectator sees, hears and imagines.

Concept, direction, text adaptation: Anders Paulin
Text: Marguerite Duras, Emily L.
Korean edition: Marguerite Duras, Emily L., trans. Lee Il-hwan (Chungha, 1992).
Performers: ummeeeonn (Jeon Hyein, Kim Eunhan, Kim Joongyeop, Park Seoyoung)

Supported by The Swedish Arts Grants Committee
Commissioned and produced by Ob/scene Festival

Anders Paulin is a Swedish theatre director, dramaturg and writer whose work questions what theatre is and what it might become. Moving between directing, artistic research and self-organised practices, he approaches theatre less as representation than as a space for encounters, listening and speculation, where text, bodies and images can generate realities rather than reproduce those already known.