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So-Rim Lee started studying on the MA and Text and Performance course in September 2010.
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So-Rim Lee is studying on the MA in Text and Performance course run by Birkbeck and RADA. She was born and raised in Seoul, South Korea and went to Columbia University and Seoul National University for her masters in English Literature. She moved to London right before starting her studies at RADA.
Published Friday 21/01/11
There is something intensely beautiful about an end of school term; rehearsals that go on for hours with everyone nervously looking at the clock every five minutes, cafes packed with students labouring through glossy laptops that prove what incredibly technologically sophisticated day and age we’re living in, number of books piling upon my desk and agonies crowding into my head like scenes from a fish market in Seoul in its busiest hours. This may be a list of sentimental exaggerations, but it is indeed as truthful as language can get to depict the last two weeks of autumn term at RADA. Our presentations on Marlowe and Shakespeare turned out to be a celebration of collaborative brutality, the voice of each person contributing to every drop of blood that constituted every puddle of interpretation, be it raw, rough, rude, utterly rudimentary, or all of these.
Of all the drama last term brought about, there was the intrinsic process of learning that everything put into a performance has to hold an authority to coerce and console the audience; vegetarians were ushered for a breath of fresh air but the butchering of sheep’s heads took place throughout the Marlovian tragedy; mouths opened with horror were cooed with complimentary glasses of red wine but it was all a part of creating the florid visual impact of Titus Andronicus. The ultimate vengeance of tragedies was received, either with ready appreciation or appalled disgust; intentions were fulfilled and speeches delivered; performances began at quarter to seven and came to an end at eight. In the end, it was a ‘swell night’ in a Long Lance kind of sense; performers and audiences both acquired a sense of camaraderie that was celebrated via repeated actions and reactions. The only downside of the celebration was, if this should be mentioned at all, cleaning up the bloody carnage created during the deeds.
Picking up the pieces left behind last term, we are now moving into modernity; spring term at RADA is focused on in-depth observations on the works of Sarah Kane, Lillian Hellman and Harold Pinter. I myself have applied for a full-fledged molestation by Kane and Hellman, and so far I have been getting inspiring slaps in my face by the two viciously talented women. And of course, my director Tom Hunsinger is contributing quite magnificently to all this drama-within-drama school, just for the record.
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So-Rim Lee is studying on the MA in Text and Performance course run by Birkbeck and RADA. She was born and raised in Seoul, South Korea and went to Columbia University and Seoul National University for her masters in English Literature. She moved to London right before starting her studies at RADA.
Published Wednesday 01/12/10
Violent delights to violent ends. The line has quite overwhelmingly and consistently been the theme throughout my first term in M.A. Text and Performance. Not only as a newcomer to RADA but also as one of the first generation of students in the course newly refurbished, being jointly held with Birkbeck College starting this year, I am enjoying the cream-of-the-crop succulence both schools have to offer; attending classes at Virginia Woolf’s former residence (without being aware of the fact for the first full month), running around in studios with archaic pianos and walls haunted with memories, and consuming food on the corridors pregnant with voices trailing out from RADA choir practice already preparing for a grand Bacchic celebration of Christmas looming ahead.
But these are only a few ordinary things counted out of an eccentric, labyrinthine eight weeks spent along the course. Other things, such as what happened yesterday, may be considered as a more profound RADA experience; as any given Tuesday, we were preparing for our final term performance based on Christopher Marlowe’s Edward the Second when our ‘butcher’ proudly took out a sheep’s head from his yellow messenger bag, muscles and eyes still intact and smelling like your worst nonexistent bathroom. An inspiring carnage of bloody mess on the spot ensued. Shrieks and shivering and many splendid Kodak moments later, the entire class was treated with a dish of freshly cooked sheep’s brains. Andrew Visnevski, our scene study director, let out a delighted cry, “Oh, what a lovely feast, my childhood delicacy!” Whether he meant a feast for the eyes or the taste buds or both, we shall be writing our dissertations on.
Not your ordinary grad school experience? Welcome to Text and Performance. Reading Nietzsche and Derrida in Birkbeck and cooking sheep’s brains at RADA, we are on a full sail towards our final presentations on Marlowe’s Edward the Second and Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus under the ever-auspicious theme of violence. Will we be poking someone with a red hot spit, or cutting off hands and tongues from one another? Or will we be more lenient with the graphics and do it the minimalist way? You shall have to see it for yourselves after three weeks. In the meantime, embrace yourselves; however we decide to do it, it is going to be brutally beautiful.
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