'There was no wolf' — composer Lee Ha-nuri dismantles a dark fairy tale

"You can't actually eat the wolf. There was no wolf to begin with. It was a being that never existed." — Lee Ha-nuri

The work borrows the shell of the classic fairy tale "The Three Little Pigs" — but anyone expecting good-natured, industrious pig brothers will be in for a surprise. The world built by this 21-year-old rising composer has shed every trace of the familiar original. So what, exactly, is the wolf? Lee says the wolf that threatened the three brothers from outside the door never existed at all.

Lee Ha-nuri (20), a composer who has emerged as one of the most exciting new voices in the performing arts, will present her first music theater work, "And So the Wind Blew, and I Ate My Two Brothers," through Sync Next 26, the Sejong Center for the Performing Arts' contemporary summer festival.

Taking on the production as both director and composer, Lee said that fairy tales and Aesop's Fables she read as a child looked very different when she revisited them as an adult. "They weren't the wholesome stories for babies I remembered," she said. "I wanted to strip away the pretty packaging and lay it all bare in my own way."

She chose "The Three Little Pigs" out of a desire "to take a story everyone knows and lead it somewhere no one would recognize." In her work, the wolf is a phantom with no real substance. The three brothers are not separate characters but fragmented selves of a single individual.

The title is striking. In the original tale, the youngest pig devours the wolf that had eaten his two older brothers — Lee's music theater piece takes that moment as its title. "Ultimately, the second brother exists inside the third, and the first is layered inside the second, so the third eating the first and second becomes a process," she said. "Whether he actually ate them or whether the two simply died — I'm not sure, and I wanted to leave it in that ambiguous state."

For Lee, who has been working as composer-in-residence with the Seoul Metropolitan Traditional Music Orchestra, this production marks her first time overseeing full stage direction. Her creative process began with sound.

"When I write music, I first decide what mood a section needs and what kind of action I want to happen," she said. "Then I work backward — asking what process would be needed to make that action possible."

For a composer accustomed to staring at scores, building a stage meant a relentless series of compromises. Scenographer Yang Jeong-uk, an installation artist, handled the set design, coordinating wooden structures and the movement of light within the theater's strict safety requirements to capture what he called the "formal essence" of a house.

"At first I had so many ideas — I said I wanted to put monitors and cathode-ray TVs all over the stage," Lee recalled. "Yang laughed and said, 'Ha-nuri, you've never done music theater before, have you?' I learned from my sunbae how to align the tone of a stage and how to pare things back." Joining them were composer Lee Han, who handled the electronic elements, and composer Shin Ye-hun, who worked with analog synthesizers, together forming the backbone of the production's sound.

The production's format is itself unconventional. In the interlude that serves as the second act, all performers leave the stage for 15 minutes, leaving audiences alone with video work by artist Kimberly Lee and the installation set. The sequence brings the spatial sensibility of a gallery into a theater, blurring the line between performance and installation art. In the third act, working notes, directorial instructions and libretto text — metadata the audience was never meant to see — are read aloud onstage, and the work exposes itself as fiction.

The epilogue features footage associated with "Elsagate," a phenomenon in which bizarre children's content was mass-produced across the internet in the 2010s. The segment draws on Lee's own experience as an elementary school student being exposed to such videos through YouTube's recommendation algorithm without any warning.

"When I was little I watched Elsagate-style videos without realizing anything was wrong," she said. "Looking back now, it was a kind of terror — hundreds of thousands of videos with no clear origin or purpose, churned out indiscriminately. I felt that event, where sourceless images overwhelmed reality, connected to this story about blindly believing in an invisible wolf."

Beyond composing, Lee took on administrative duties and budget management herself, spending a considerable amount of her own money in the process. Even so, she said she was satisfied to have created a space of solidarity with fellow artists who share a genuine love of the stage.

"I kept spending my own money, but I was grateful to have a reason to work with Yang Jeong-uk and Kimberly Lee, whose work I had long admired, and with the composer brothers," she said with a laugh. "I figure I can earn money somewhere else."

The production runs three acts over one hour and 40 minutes, but Lee has written different endings for the Saturday performance and the Sunday and Monday performances. "I wanted to make it impossible to predict how the show would begin or end — to keep everything ambiguous," she said. The Generation Z composer has dismantled "The Three Little Pigs" to tell an entirely new story. "It's about the fear of things we cannot see and the process by which we come to believe those things are real," Lee said. "Ultimately, it's a piece that asks what we believe and how we construct reality."

Lee burst onto the scene in 2022 as the youngest winner of the composition category at the Bartók Competition. Pianist Lim Yun-chan performed piano pieces commissioned from her at venues including Wigmore Hall in London and the Tongyeong International Music Festival, calling her "a musician chosen by heaven." She continues to push across genre boundaries as composer-in-residence with the Seoul Metropolitan Traditional Music Orchestra, and next month she will premiere a new orchestral work with the Seoul Philharmonic Orchestra.