USER MANUAL FOR A BROKEN MACHINE to Play Bloomsbury and Voila! Festivals
Written and directed by Namoo Chae Lee, the East Asian women-led collective explores systems of control through instruction, choreography and ritual.
User Manual For A Broken Machine will come to Bloomsbury Festival from 9–10 October 2026 and Voila! Theatre Festival from 11–12 November 2026.
A broken vacuum cleaner. A manual. Three people trying to follow the instructions. South Korean theatre-maker Namoo Chae Lee writes and directs KASSNA’s User Manual for a Broken Machine, a darkly comic new work from the East Asian women-led interdisciplinary performance collective, asking what happens when a person can no longer follow the instructions they have been given.
A machine has stopped working. Armed with its manual, three performers—Reader, Mover and Player—attempt to diagnose the problem and make the necessary repairs. But was the machine ever broken? And who decided that the manual worked in the first place?
Combining text, movement, live music, electronic sound and video, User Manual for a Broken Machine uses the language of instruction manuals, troubleshooting guides and malfunction reports as a performance score. The performers read, repeat, mistranslate and test its instructions until the distinction between the people, the machine and the system controlling them begins to collapse.
At the heart of the production is a broken Daewoo vacuum cleaner. Once a familiar feature of South Korean homes, it provides an unexpected route into the country’s rapid industrialisation and economic growth —and the human cost of measuring people according to their productivity.
From employment and migration to gender and family, people are continually assigned roles and judged on how successfully they perform them. When they can no longer fulfil those functions, failure is often located in the individual rather than in the system that created the conditions for it.
Absurd, physical and unsettlingly funny, User Manual for a Broken Machine transforms instruction into choreography, repair into ritual and failure into a possible act of refusal.
The production is performed by Eden Jun as Reader, Suyoung Park as Mover and Seayool as Player. It was developed through Bold Theatre’s Bold Makers programme, with mentorship from Paul Hunter of Told by an Idiot.
The work will evolve across its two festival appearances. At Bloomsbury Festival, Holy Cross Church becomes an immersive performance environment, bringing audiences inside the world of the manual and its systems of instruction. At Voila! Theatre Festival, the production moves into Theatro Technis, incorporating live cinema and AI-generated characters to extend its exploration of classification, authority and control.
Each iteration tests how the work’s central questions shift through architecture, technology and the changing relationship between performer and audience.
The running time is approximately 60 minutes without an interval. Age guidance is 12+.
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