[News Culture] Sleep may be one of the most instinctive parts of human life, yet for many people it has become increasingly difficult to secure. Sleepless nights, chronic sleep deprivation, work that stretches deep into the evening and persistent anxiety have turned sleep from a private matter into a reflection of contemporary social conditions.
That tension is at the center of How Is Your Sleep?, an interdisciplinary humanities-and-arts performance opening in Daehangno in October. Built around sociologist Chan-ho Kim’s book The Sleepless Society, the production approaches sleep through lectures, music, theater, dramatic readings, picture books and direct conversation with the audience.
Kim wrote The Sleepless Society after examining his own experience with severe insomnia, using it as a starting point to explore both the psychological mechanisms of restful sleep and the social conditions that make it difficult. The book asks a broader question — why are people unable to sleep? — and traces how work, anxiety, relationships and the rhythms of modern life shape what happens after people go to bed.
The stage production expands that inquiry beyond the format of a conventional lecture. Rather than explaining sleep from a single academic perspective, it moves among different artistic forms, allowing the subject to be heard, performed, narrated and discussed from several angles.
The program includes musical performances of “Summertime,” “A Night Left Alone” and “Island Baby” in choral form; staged readings including The Miracle on the Han River and the Nights That Disappeared and The Person Who Delivers Sunsets; lectures titled “What Is Sleep to Human Beings?” and “In Search of the Lost Night”; the audience-participation discussion “Can You Sleep?”; and a picture-book segment centered on Grandma Hildrid and the Night.
The project is presented by Inmun Yurang Theater, a collective bringing together scholars and artists including sociologist Chan-ho Kim, guitarist Hyun-dong Kim, picture-book lecturer Hee-jung Son, actors Jin-bok Kim and Eun Cho, and voice actor Chang-gi Kim.
The group was formed to move beyond the lecture-and-discussion structure commonly associated with public humanities programs. Its work combines humanities-based inquiry with music, theater, literature, performance and visual storytelling, treating ideas not simply as material to be explained but as experiences that can be encountered through different artistic languages.
How Is Your Sleep? follows that approach by asking audiences to do more than absorb information about sleep. The production creates a space in which they can listen, imagine, reflect and reconsider their own nights — and the social conditions that shape them.
Reported by News Culture M.J._mj94070777@nc.press
Copyright ⓒ 뉴스컬처 무단 전재 및 재배포 금지
