We sat down for a quick chat with Sarah Hyojin Kim, artistic director of Peculiar Matter, Theo Ambrosini and Jerry Faderer about Unfinished Business. This is a devised work rooted in Sarah’s personal experience of being by her grandmother’s deathbed, blending Korean ancestral ritual, movement, installation and multimedia.
Unfinished Business begins with a single word — “Halmoni” — how did that moment of personal grief evolve into a shared act of performance and ritual?
(Sarah) This project began during my time in Poland, where the Artistic Director of Song of the Goat asked me what significant story I truly needed to tell. I’d carried unresolved feelings about my grandmother’s passing for years, unsure how to navigate that grief. I realised that exploring it collectively through movement and singing could help me untie those emotions. The process has been unexpectedly therapeutic. Through devising, I also discovered the striking differences between Korean and British approaches to mourning. That contrast sparked a desire to meet UK audiences, especially those from diverse backgrounds, through a shared ritual space where grief can be experienced, questioned, and transformed together.
The piece reimagines mourning as continuation rather than closure; what does it mean to you to “keep the conversation alive” with the dead?
(Sarah) That’s exactly why people should come and see the show! For me, it’s about recognising not only that we must face grief, but how we choose to face it. “Keeping the conversation alive” means continually manifesting our relationship with the dead in different ways.
(Theo) Maybe that we try to make peace with the fact that there will always be things we want to say or ask those people we’ve lost that we no longer can. But, to keep it alive, we perform the same rituals we did with them, we can imagine, dance and sing the way we did together, and keep the conversation alive by continuing to play and embody those traditions and continue their legacy in those ways.
How did blending Korean ancestral ritual with contemporary multimedia help you bridge the space between private memory and collective healing?
(Sarah) Blending forms has become central to my artistic language, finding the most honest medium for each emotion or memory. In this piece, I brought in raw personal materials, including over a decade of home videos my grandmother recorded for me. Those images became both soil and seed for the work. Through the ensemble’s collaboration, something deeply private gradually expanded into something universal. The multimedia elements allowed my personal memories to breathe in a shared space, while the collective’s movement and voice transformed them into a ritual that belongs not only to me, but to everyone witnessing it.
You describe the work as both deeply emotional and gently humorous — how do you balance vulnerability and play in exploring loss?
(Sarah) Humour is essential when creating a safe space to explore something so personal. At the beginning, our process was introspective and tender—mapping where each of us stood in relation to grief and my own story. But once we built trust and a strong shared understanding, play naturally entered the room. That sense of fun allowed us to stay bold instead of guarded, to meet vulnerability with lightness. Because the ensemble truly holds the emotional core of the piece together, we’re able to move fluidly between sorrow and joy, letting each illuminate the other.
The project brings together artists from multiple languages and cultures; how did that international collaboration shape the way grief and remembrance are expressed on stage?
(Jerry) Our international ensemble has beautifully diversified the language of grief on stage. We are weaving together our distinct cultural backgrounds and personal relationships with loss, creating a universal language of remembrance. A the story of director’s grandmother becomes a shared exploration, expressed through a unique, collective vocabulary of movement, sound, and symbol that transcends any one language.
As the founder of Peculiar Matter, how does Unfinished Business reflect your company’s mission to “rebuild fragmented pieces from peculiar lives”?
The world often asks us to prioritise what is useful, efficient, or productive, but many of our deepest emotions don’t fit into those categories. Peculiar Matter values the fragments people rarely show: obsessions, memories, unfinished feelings, and the things we return to even when they don’t have a purpose. By giving time and artistic attention to these “peculiar” pieces, we create spaces where they can become meaningful. Unfinished Business invites UK audiences to slow down and consider how we hold grief – not as a task to complete, but as something worth tending to together.