KASSNA, an East Asian women-led arts collective working across different art forms, combines words, movement and music to explore the personal and social histories held within a household appliance in User Manual for a Broken Machine.
The title of KASSNA’s User Manual for a Broken Machine made me curious about how an instruction manual might come to life on stage. Would we watch a vacuum cleaner being repaired, or see a person moving according to its instructions? The performance moves between these two possibilities, making us think about what is really broken.
The performance took place at Holy Cross Church as part of Bloomsbury Festival (1–31 October 2026), which brings arts, culture and science to spaces across London’s Bloomsbury area. Inside the church, a vacuum cleaner and the unfamiliar movements around it invite the audience to look at an everyday object in a new way. KASSNA, an East Asian women-led arts collective working across different art forms, combines words, movement and music to explore the personal and social histories held within a household appliance.
Written and directed by Namoo Chae Lee, the work centres on a broken vacuum cleaner made by the Korean brand Daewoo. Once a familiar sight in homes across South Korea, it becomes a lens for exploring the country’s industrial development and economic growth. Using a machine that once sucked dust from the floor to explore how a society grew is a clever and playful idea. Within this single object, the history of machines that made daily life easier meets the lives of people who worked without rest for a better future.
Suyoung Park’s movements bring this connection to life on stage, alongside Eden Jun’s voice as she reads the manual. The words explain how to operate the machine, but the body’s responses move beyond those instructions. Park’s fluid, light movements hold our attention. She wears parts of the vacuum cleaner on her head or wraps them around her body, creating different shapes with her body and the machine’s separate pieces. At first, she follows the manual closely, and the vacuum cleaner works well, but then it stops. What begins as a check on whether the machine works starts to look like a test of how closely a person follows instructions. Following the manual should solve the problem, but it remains unresolved. The gap between instruction and action creates both humour and questions.
Seayool’s playing of traditional Korean instruments gives a sense of the society behind the story. The unfamiliar sounds and their echoes fill the church, bringing a sense of another time alongside the modern household appliance. Flowing between the reading and the movements, the music does more than establish the Korean setting: it makes that presence felt throughout the space.
From the workings of a vacuum cleaner, the performance gradually turns towards the roles people are expected to fulfil and how much they are expected to produce. Studying and working hard, and doing one’s part, were values that supported South Korea’s rapid growth. The work raises the question of whether people also came to be seen as having set functions to perform and results to deliver. The manual’s instructions and the body’s response to them suggest a relationship between society’s demands and the individual trying to meet them.
The broken vacuum cleaner then becomes more than an object in need of repair. Just as we suspect a fault when a machine stops working, do we also look for a fault in the individual when someone cannot fulfil an expected role? The attempt to repair the vacuum cleaner gradually becomes an exploration of the gap between a body following instructions and the instructions it has been given. As South Korea grew in pursuit of a better life, the performance broadens its focus to the effort demanded of individuals and the pressure to achieve.
User Manual for a Broken Machine will be performed at Theatro Technis on 11–12 November as part of Voila! Theatre Festival.
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