Haenyeo

Haenyeo is an multidisciplinary hydro-opera inspired by the women free-divers of Korea, blending electroacoustic music, voice, movement, and water-based instruments. Using hydrophones (underwater microphones) and electronics, the music forms a water orchestra that accompanies the vocalists and performers. Haenyeo is a site-specific performance set around a body of water, such as a swimming pool, with the audience seated around the water while the performance unfolds in the center. The piece is composed for nine voices and is structured into five scenes, which I call “vocal sculptures.” Vocal sculptures are living, breathing forms, sculptures in motion, shaped by voice and gesture. At the center of the performance space, the sculpture of nine voices and bodies pulsates, surrounded by the audience, creating an immersive experience. The minimalist vocalizations of these intertwined bodies flow through melodic cycles, sequences, and patterns, with its repetition creating an abstract, meditative state.

The piece moves through a series of choral “sculptures” that merge voice, ritual, and water into an evolving sensory landscape. It begins with a Korean folk–inflected summoning of the winds, rocks, and haenyeo of Jeju Island, where field recordings, percussive stones, and shamanic choreography honor an ancestral entanglement with nature. From there, the performers enter the water, their voices captured by hydrophones and blended with electronic marine atmospheres. Organic sound gradually gives way to encroaching industrial noise, reflecting the pressures reshaping our oceans and environments. As the work deepens, the performers embody hungry ghosts, using extended vocalizations and ritual gestures to grieve ecological loss. Long strips of white cloth are torn, knotted, and offered back to the pool in a gesture drawn from Korean funerary traditions. A bathhouse-inspired chorus follows, where performers scrub one another’s backs while singing in overlapping rounds: a tactile expression of interdependence, care, and communal repair.

In the final movement, bodies float in water as language dissolves, and the Korean pronouns “na, nuh, oori” (I, you, we) erode into a fluid, collective “we are.” Throughout, questions emerge from the water itself: We will heal you—will you heal us? We will love you—will you love? It envisions a future where humans have a more porous relationship with the world around them. Drawing on hydrofeminism, as explored in Astrida Neimanis’ Bodies of Water, the piece reflects on the interconnectedness of all bodies and species through water.