K-Arts Archives Unveils <1994, Act One> Exhibition Spotlighting School of Drama's 30th Anniversary

Following the previous year’s exhibition on the history of the School of Music, the K-Arts Archives holds a special exhibition, “1994, Act One,” on the history of the School of Drama. Putting the 30-year history of the school on display, the event will be held until the end of the year. It is part of a series of special exhibitions featuring the 30-year history of each school in K-Arts, which is planned for 6 years, a year for each of the 6 schools, from 2023 to 2028.

The original copies of the historical record include the official documents on discussion on the campus’s establishment site and upgrade of the responsibilities of the K-Arts president’s office. It can be learned that the School of Drama was initially born under the name of the School of Acting. There is also a report on why the School of Acting out of six schools opened second. Tracing the efforts and deliberations by the first K-Arts president Lee Kang Sook and faculty members, the records deliver us the passion and striving taken to found the School of Drama.

The exhibition space is set under theatrical concepts, alluding to each partition as an “Act.” Act 1 is filled with vintage props symbolizing the stage actors and actresses such as typewriters, notes, sewing machines, costumes, etc. The area titled, “Your Intermission K-Arts,” denoting the break time amid performances, lets intervention by current K-Arts students in the exhibition as recorders of the school’s present moment.

The stage of Act 2 consists of actual stage lighting, curtains, and wooden dolls. On the wall are the first plays selected from different categories in the archive of the Acting Center which are put together to make a leaflet of a single play. Act 3 shows the artistic records made up of the aftertaste of performers and audiences poured at once into a play. The exhibition highlights that the arts records, serving as research materials, are an eternal heritage for the next generation’s theatre artists. It also aims to inform the significance of arts records followed by creative activities complied with K-Arts’s ideology.