From September to November 2026, Seung-Won Oh is undertaking an artist residency at Instituto Sacatar in Itaparica, Bahia, Brazil, as the inaugural MacDowell Global Exchange Fellow.

 

The residency marks the first international exchange between MacDowell and Instituto Sacatar, bringing Oh to Brazil for an extended period of artistic research and development. Situated in Bahia, a region with deeply rooted musical, performative, and cultural traditions, Sacatar offers a distinctive environment for exploring new dimensions of her artistic practice.

 

During the residency, Oh is beginning the foundational research and development of her new percussion dance theater work, The Walk. The project grows from her longstanding fascination with the physical gestures and stylized movements of percussionists observed in performances of her chamber music, extending these physical actions into choreographic material and exploring the reciprocal relationship between movement and sound.

 

The residency provides an opportunity to step beyond the conventional concert format and explore the physical and spatial dimensions of musical performance in a theatrical context—questions that have increasingly become central to Oh’s practice.