Pay 50,000 won to do nothing for 3 hours: What 'waiting' means in the dopamine age

Walk into the theater and you are met by 30 actors. A piano melody drifts through the air, and when the lighting shifts, something resembling a sports broadcast begins — a live commentary on a total solar eclipse.

Anyone expecting the familiar sight of a stage facing a seated audience will be disappointed. The actors on stage are not acting, at least not in any conventional sense. Unlike traditional theater, both the form and the story are deliberately broken. Whatever you expect, the work will not meet it. "Waiting for a Total Solar Eclipse," presented by creative collective Eumion at the Sejong Center for the Performing Arts' contemporary performance festival SyncNext26, runs Thursday through Sunday. The actors are not the only ones waiting for the eclipse — the audience must wait alongside them for a full three hours. It is a voluntary act of waiting, purchased for 50,000 won ($35) a ticket.

Director Kim Sang-hun told reporters recently that "'Waiting for a Total Solar Eclipse' is a performance about waiting."

"These days we simply do not wait anymore," he said. "But life in Seoul offers no satisfaction in the present either. If we are not waiting for the future, we should at least find contentment in the now — yet neither seems possible. That is why I wanted to make a performance that helps people reclaim their own time."

Waiting has all but vanished from modern life. Even the brief minutes spent at a bus stop are filled with short-form videos and webtoons. In 2026 Seoul — a city that prizes extreme efficiency and instant gratification, where happiness is measured in dopamine hits — this deliberately inefficient and purposeless performance takes the stage in the heart of Gwanghwamun.

The group's name, Eumion, is borrowed from the world of pseudoscience, in the same vein as terms like "silver nano" and "hexagonal water." The name hints at the collective's artistic direction: just as those terms promise unverifiable benefits, Eumion has pursued what might be called a "quasi-theatrical" subversion of the conventional theater ecosystem.

"Waiting for a Total Solar Eclipse" began as a 60-minute piece with six actors at the Doosan Art Center, and has since expanded dramatically for the Sejong Center stage — now running 180 minutes with 30 actors.

A runtime three times as long does not simply mean more to watch. Director Kim conceived the three hours as a directorial device in itself — a quantity of time that forces audiences, so accustomed to acquisition and consumption, to feel the full weight of 180 minutes of waiting, with no narrative reward or twist promised in return.

The actors do not deploy method acting or crowd-pleasing tricks to hold the audience's attention. Dramaturg Jeong In-hyeok and the directing team have reimagined the ancient Greek theatrical chorus for a contemporary sensibility, dissolving the boundary between stage and seating. The 30 actors drift through the theater space as an element of the environment itself — like lighting or sound — rather than as performers delivering a story.

For three hours, they share the audience's condition, running a live commentary on the eclipse while layering subtle choreography and piano melody to embody a "state of waiting." Actor Jeon Hye-in, who appears as the eclipse commentator, said the work is not about actors showing something to a passive audience. "It is about what kind of relationship can form between us in an empty stretch of time and space," she said.

"It is not that there is truly no acting — but rather than performing better, rather than preparing a more spectacular show to make people wait for the eclipse, we are thinking about how to open up a different kind of relationship and dialogue in the theater, beyond the kind that is built that way." (Kim Sang-hun)

Eumion's approach to the stage — and to its relationship with the audience — breaks with established theatrical convention. Audiences are free to enter and leave at any point during the three hours, with full autonomy to stay or step away. There is no pressure to sit rigidly in one's seat. Actor Kim Jung-yeop said the company is "neither flattering the audience nor looking down on them," adding that it is "doing its best to find a democratic form of theatricality."

In forging this new relationship, Eumion brings what might be called a politics of waiting. "In this era, even waiting has become a transaction — time exchanged for something to be gained," Kim said. Stand in line for an hour and you get a limited-edition item; wait long enough and a reward follows. Modern waiting always comes with a return on investment. Some forms of waiting have even evolved to fit a capitalist logic — you can simply pay someone else to do it. But in this performance, there is no proxy buyer, no substitute waiter. Kim said he wanted to create, within the theater, a stretch of time that promises no reward at all.

"When you do theater, theater happens; when you swim, swimming fills your time — and that is a good thing. Waiting is the same. I felt we needed time not to gain something else by waiting, but to simply share the act of waiting itself." (Kim Sang-hun)

What matters in this work is not the eclipse itself but the time spent waiting for it. So why a total solar eclipse? Kim said he researched natural phenomena a person might encounter only once in a lifetime — those with the longest intervals between occurrences. "A total solar eclipse visits any given city roughly once every 375 years," he said.

The work's starting point was a personal experience. Kim once kept a phone call open for an hour with a long-estranged friend so they could watch a live broadcast of a total solar eclipse together from Texas. They talked so much that they missed the eclipse itself — but the call became the moment of reconciliation between them. The waiting had a purpose to begin with, yet what it left behind was not the eclipse but the person on the other end of the line.

The question "Waiting for a Total Solar Eclipse" poses is no different. When was the last time we waited for something — or with someone — for no particular purpose? Finding that answer is left to the audience.

Eumion brings instead a stretch of inefficient, deflating time into the theater, upending the assumption that a performance must deliver something new, clever, entertaining or worth the price of admission. "The theater must always stand at the opposite pole from the city," Kim said. "The city demands too much of people — work, consume, grow, and even spend your leisure time efficiently. That is the age we live in, so the theater must be the opposite: a place that demands nothing." His previous work, "Pavilion 72," made a similar point — showing a theater that stood still inside a city that never stops moving, with actors and audiences coexisting in a single space for 72 hours to create a new kind of theater together.

Throughout the three hours, the audience experiences waiting. Everyone waits for the eclipse alongside the actors, yet each person reads it differently. One person may be waiting for a call that never comes; another for someone who will never return; another for a dream that keeps slipping out of reach; another for a windfall so unlikely it borders on the impossible. The natural phenomenon that visits a city once every 375 years may be the eclipse itself — or it may be the private longing each person carries inside.

The eclipse does come, in the end. It arrives like hope found at the far edge of despair. Kim said he thought carefully about the fact that audiences would come already prepared to wait. "My strongest hope was that they would leave having shared at least one thing together with the people who waited alongside them," he said. "Though I do not want to make the kind of promise a traditional theater might — that a single performance will resolve everything."