The collective roar and unsynchronised chatter emanating from Museum Theatre, is deafening — young students from different schools across the city are conquering the space, as they move in unstructured lines. The sheer energy in the space is overwhelming. Woogie and Boogie, the characters from Woogie Boogie , a children’s performance from South Korea, are at the aisles, donning paper caps and suspenders. They welcome children, as the latter high-five them, and sprint to secure spots.
In the city for The Little Festival, an international theatre festival for young audiences, brought by InKo Centre, the cast and crew are now on the stage, casually waltzing, playing the piano and thumping on what seems to be an empty cardboard box, minutes before the show.
Soon enough, the actors are out on the stage again — amid squealing children, whiteboards in hand. The children excitedly dart up from the seats to scribble on them — this is precisely what the performance draws focus to. Doodles and scribbles are a child’s favourite companions, especially when a blank space is involved. And most often, stories take form through these careless strokes.
Woogie Boogie , thus, travels from these whiteboards on to the stage to tell the story of two friends, (Woogie and Boogie) who go on their first adventure to the sea with their tiny friend, the turtle.
The stage comes alive when the two friends play with each other, drawing and erasing on the blank space with black ink markers. These drawings by the characters are accompanied by doodles, moving as technical projections, and turning into characters in the story. Music, played by pianist Sung San Hee, complements these movements.
The faces sprawled on the white screen behind the actors, change expressions with the tunes. Different sea creatures that the duo meets on their journey, sometimes transform and take to different antics as caricature — it’s as though a cartoon strip came alive on stage. “It is a multimedia drawing show. We combine hand drawings and projection to make these doodles come alive. The whole adventure is presented on this big white board,” says Kim Jae Woong, the video technician in the crew gesturing to the centre of the stage.
“Each button I press needs to coincide with the actors’ movements, otherwise the timing will be off. You must have seen our faces — nervous,” he continues. He also dubs voices for the animated creatures. They only communicate in exaggerated sounds.
The six-member crew is adept at all the roles and they shift between them too — “we practise continuously for over five months. So we know what everyone’s doing,” says Kim Dong Hyun, the actor and director of this show. The show was first performed at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival in UK in 2018 and has been travelling ever since. In Seoul, the cast and crew end up performing Woogie Boogie every Saturday, at different venues, mainly for young audiences.
Back on the white board, now appears a puffer fish — its expressions slowly transform from cute to evil, only to chase Boogie and Woogie. Finally, after many trials and tribulations, the little turtle is left into the sea to reunite with his friends — as the duo watch him swim away, to thunderous applause and even more squeals.
