A broken machine. A manual. Three people trying to follow the instructions. But was the machine ever broken? Who decides what works in the first place?

A broken machine and a manual. Reader, Mover and Player attempt to follow the instructions and repair what has stopped working. But was the machine ever broken—and who decided that the manual worked in the first place?

User Manual for a Broken Machine is a darkly comic interdisciplinary performance by KASSNA, combining text, movement, live music, sound and video.

Using the language of instruction manuals, troubleshooting guides and malfunction reports as its performance score, three performers read, repeat, mistranslate, test and attempt to repair. As the instructions accumulate, the distinction between the people, the machine and the systems governing them begins to collapse.

Taking a broken Daewoo vacuum cleaner as its starting point, the work explores South Korea’s rapid industrialisation, capitalism and diaspora, asking how labour, migration, gender and family assign people roles and determine who is considered useful or functional. When a person can no longer follow the instructions, what is actually broken: the person, the machine or the system that wrote the manual?

For its Voila! iteration, the work introduces live cinema and AI-generated characters to expand its exploration of classification, authority and systems of control.

This performane will be in English and Korean.