How do the bodies we inhabit become machines? How do the machines we build carry our failures, our gestures, our hesitations? In a time of prosthetics, avatars, and surveillance interfaces, the question of what counts as living movement belongs in the theatre. In Under Construction at the Holand Festival, Geumhyung Jeong invites us into a workshop of failure and repair, where robot-figures assembled from medical skeleton models and mechanical components take awkward shape. What begins as an act of construction becomes a performance of collapse, adaptation, and care.
Geumhyung Jeong is a choreographer and performance artist whose work probes the relationship between body, object and technology. She studied acting, dance and animation-film in Korea, and her practice consistently uses animatronic figures and everyday objects in ways that destabilise human presence. Under Construction (2025) is commissioned by the Holland Festival and presents a hybrid installation-performance in which robot-like figures move, fail, are maintained and adapt.
Five robot figures stand in a row, left to right, each increasing in articulation and instability. The first sits low: two legs splayed, back to the floor. The second rises: spine and two legs with knee joints, hip rotating in a z-shape reminiscent of a human stretch. Jeong controls each via a hand-held device. The third adds metal hips and abduction movement, its limbs testing the affordances of its frame. The fourth, detailed with bearing joints, allows twists of the legs and ground crawling; the fifth introduces a full torso and skull structure, heavily reinforced and balanced precariously. Jeong sits behind it, stabilising it, assisting its fragile articulation. The performance opens with robotic limbs in isolation, then accelerates into a choreography of care, adjustment, and mechanical malfunction. Jeong’s dry commentary, “sometimes I move them and it feels like they’re about to break,” she says, elicits audience laughter, then quiet attentiveness. Your gaze is drawn to wires, to hinge-joints, to the awkward fall and upright recovery of one figure. It becomes anatomical class, a stripping away of our bodily assumptions: how joints hold us upright, how ground-contact matters, how the body becomes machine and machine becomes body.
What stands out is the moment when Jeong stops pushing buttons and begins stabilising the robot. The shift from control interface to caregiver opens space for vulnerability. For an instance, the fifth robot collapses; Jeong catches a wire, reattaches a joint, coaxing the torso upright. That moment reframes the earlier spectacle; mechanical precision gives way to human fragility. The performance asks: What does autonomy mean when the machine needs our help? What does movement mean when every hinge can fail? And who holds responsibility for the body in motion?
Jeong’s lineage lies at the convergence of dance, object-theatre, machine aesthetics, and visual art. Where her work, such as Find, Select, Copy, and Paste, focuses on the bare body, Under Construction reinvests in the prosthetic, the artificial, the mechanical. In the broader field, the piece dialogues with dance, robotic theatre, puppetry, and art-machines, where the artist-as-coder and the performer-as-object converge. But Jeong shifts the emphasis: rather than control and perfection, she foregrounds failure, repair, contingency. This joins a current strand of post-digital performance that treats machines as partners rather than tools.
What lingers is care: the visible labour of holding a torso upright, of re-wiring a limb mid-performance, of sitting behind the machine rather than standing apart. Under Construction does not ask for seamless perfection. It rehearses breakdown and repair, inviting us to witness machines that lean on their maker. It reminds us that our bodies are machine-like, and our machines are still very much human. In that reflection, we see not just the robot, but ourselves. Jeong has made a work that feels urgent: not because it fears machines, but because it shows how much we are already entwined with them.
Photo: Christa Holka/ICA
