Futurity of the Womb: Myth of the Cyborg Kisaeng (2023-2025)
One Night Performance
August 30, 2025, 7:30-8:30PM, Kelly Strayhorn - Alloy Studios, Pittsburgh, pA
Futurity of the Womb: Myth of the Cyborg Kisaeng (2025) Photo Credit: Brendan Lott & C. Ryu; Editing: C. Ryu
Created by C. Ryu, Kayla Tange, & Mudang Jenn Kim
Directed by C. Ryu & Kayla Tange
Written & Performed by Mudang Jenn Kim, C. Ryu & Kayla Tange
Futurity of the Womb: Myth of the Cyborg Kisaeng is an experimental, 60-minute multimedia performance reimagining Korean history through the lens of feminist mythology. Blending ritual, burlesque, oral histories, and mythological storytelling, the piece unfolds in four immersive sections that interweave live performance, video projection, and audience interaction to create a multi-sensory experience.
Historically, kisaengs were enslaved Korean courtesans, forced to entertain those in power while mastering the arts. Futurity of the Womb is a time-traveling performance that redefines the kisaeng’s legacy beyond the constraints of history. The cyborg becomes a vessel for interrogating our codependence with technology, power, and identity, reflecting on power beyond or manufactured by human limitations. Existing outside of linearity, and challenging colonial timeframes, Cyborg Kisaeng moves fluidly across past, present, and future, collapsing these boundaries of space and time to reclaim and rewrite our histories through four distinct perspectives.
Mudang Jenn Kim, a Korean-American shaman, invokes the first cosmic mother of Korea, MAGO, who has been shamed for her larger-than-life power.
Kayla Tange merges the figure of the kisaeng and the abandoned Princess Bari to explore grief and adoption as a portal—dwelling in the space between the living and the dead, the desired and discarded.
C. Ryu reimagines the gumiho, a nine-tailed fox demon that consumed men’s livers and hearts to survive, as a cyborg—alchemizing complicit desire.
Drawing from speculative futurism, mythology, and embodied ritual, Futurity of the Womb offers not a single narrative, but a timeline rewritten—a feminist mythos where stories once censored, erased, or stigmatized emerge alive, electric, and here. Futurity of the Womb is an offering of a new timeline. This is not a return to history—it is a reprogramming.
