Corea in 1950. 전쟁, the three-year war between North and South Corea, which ended on 27th July 1953 and resulted in 4 Mio. victims on all sides.

What matters a war from the last century in nowadays? It left traumatized people, one of them is the absent shadow which is present in the performance NAMI shown during the dance festival Tanzwerkstatt Europa in Munich.

NAMI is about rewriting the history of HER story by breaking patterns to move forward and towards a new co-existence in the future.

The choreographer and dancer Susanne Schneider guides through the introduction and invites the audience at the Schwere-Reiter Theatre in Munich on 6th and 7th July 2026 to lie down on the floor and to relax for a moment: Listen to your body and breath. Breath is a symbol for stamina and endurance. After a while you calm down; the door to the stage opens and the audience enters the space where the performance will take place.

You see signs on the floor. Colored Origami paper shapes symbolize body and mind that can be folded and unfolded to discover patterns and disorders. You see green, red, blue, yellow stripes, arrows which properly show directions, but could even be Corean signs. You see two women, Jin Lee, a young dancer and choreographer and Kyung Mee Lee, an elder female performer. Daughter and mother: they are walking around the room; they ignore each other, their relationship is obviously distanced, or is it the Corean culture that does not allow too many emotions… we do not know, yet.

NAMI means in ancient Corean “sea”, and in modern Corean language “stranger”. Nami is the title of this performance of three generations of females, the Corean war 6.25, the violence between a mother towards her own child and the mother’s burden as a grown-up in raising and loving her own daughter between pain, depression, rage, care, etc. and in the very end it’s about freedom: Kyung Mee Lee was mistreated by her mother, Jin Lee’s grandmother. A heritage that makes it difficult to love and accept her own daughter how she is.

NAMI is about being hurt by your own family, it is about how to break the logic and chain of violence by accepting and trusting you and your child both as strong characters. 

NAMI is about the sadness of not being supported, of not being loved, of being rejected, of missed occasions. It is about being misunderstood, the continuous dialogue between education and freedom, authority, power and force and the antagonist freedom, about letting go and holding on.

The daughter straightens her arm and invites the mother to move in her direction with her. The mother does the same, but her arm directs to the opposite side as if she would not allow any control by her daughter. Finally, both start to follow each other for one arm length, vice versa, and this might be the most evident moment of the show, because this simple change of arms, hands and direction demonstrates the care and trust for each other, and it opens the course for the future.

At the end it is a Corean mother-daughter couple to teach the audience from a Western hemisphere how to allow emotions, how to be touched by their story, and to reflect our own mother-child relationships. This is intercultural exchange as its best. But it is much more: It reflects our relationships with women bodies as birth givers and the vulnerability of man- and womankind. Birth hurts, and so does family. At the end of tears, traumatic experiences and several episodes of re-traumatization stands literally – on a huge paper unfolded on the theatre’s wall, carrying the number of years beginning with 1962, and Corean signs, photos of mother and daughter, emotional status descriptions handwritten on stripes that form waves and the final word: FREEDOM.

A must see. A must repeat. Be excited to learn... more about Zinada.