Q summary

remark that “the theatre, proper, does not seem to exist in Corea” (Griffis 1907, 291) was echoed almost a century later in a program note by director Y i Chinsun: “Our country originally had no theatre and no stage. As a result, it could not have its own dramatic form. . . . It is this that we are now trying to create for the first time.” 1 From the frequency with which such statements are encountered, one might be forgiven for supposing that theatre was unknown to Korea before the Western influences of the twentieth century—and that a distinctively Korean style of theatre was left for modern directors like Y i Chinsun to create, having no basis in traditional performing arts. But in fact the effort to develop such a style within the setting of the modern theatre has been marked throughout its hundred-year history by constant maneuvering for an advantageous position relative to the traditional—by, if you will, jockeying for tradition.

Moreover, we must be careful to distinguish “theatre” from “the theatre” or “theatres.” While it is true that the commercial indoor the- atre with separate stage and auditorium (Griffis’s “theatre proper”) came to the peninsula only with the dawn of the twentieth century, Korea, like the rest of the world, had always had performing arts that were “theatrical” or “dramatic” insofar as they involved acting and the depiction of fictional characters and events. Ever since these traditional art forms were brought into the type of performance space that the world calls a “theatre,” Koreans have been striving to create an indige- nous, “traditional” theatre form to show the world as a home-grown equivalent of China’s jingju (“Peking opera”) or Japan’s kabuki.

The most likely candidate to fill this role is ch’anggŭk, a type of opera that began to develop when the musical storytelling tradition of p’ansori was brought into the new public theatres in the early 1900s. Borrowing a phrase from Hobsbawm and Ranger’s much-cited book (1983), I have elsewhere described this process as the “invention of traditional Korean opera” (Killick 1998a). But while Hobsbawm and Ranger’s “invented traditions” are generally accepted as “traditional” within a few years (1983, 1), ch’anggŭk is still struggling for recognition as “traditional Korean opera” after nearly a century. Its unresolved process of tradition formation opens a fascinating window, not just on Korean theatre history, but on the broad social and political issues that surround it: issues of nation, gender, tradition, modernity, and the colonial encounter.

I have dealt with specific aspects of ch’anggŭk in greater depth elsewhere (Killick 1998b; 2001a; 2001b; 2002b; forthcoming). My aim here is to provide the best general introduction available in English (against thin enough competition, to be sure) to this little-known genre and its somewhat checkered history.2 This history extends from

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the period of Korea’s forcible incorporation into the modern interna- tional world order—through its colonization by Japan—to liberation, partition, and the growth of two hostile and ideologically divergent nation-states. (Since ch’anggŭk did not in the long run survive in the Democratic People’s Republic of [North] Korea, however, my com- ments on the period since partition refer only to the Republic of [South] Korea.) It is a history of intersecting and sometimes conflict- ing interests that continue to be played out in ch’anggŭk and in the con- testing discourses around it—including contestation over that history itself. There has been a great deal at stake in the invention, and the continual reinvention, of traditional Korean opera.

Origin Myths Perhaps the first question to ask is why Korea at the dawn of the

twentieth century lacked a theatrical tradition to compare with those of China or Japan. The most convincing explanation is probably that Korea had never developed the kind of substantial moneyed merchant class that supported professional indoor theatre in neighboring coun- tries (Pihl 1994, 21). It did, however, have certain amateur or outdoor entertainments of a broadly theatrical nature, such as masked dance- dramas (t’alch’um), puppet plays (kkoktu kaksi), and the “motley crew” of stock characters (chapsaek) who performed as a sideshow with farmers’ percussion bands (p’ungmulp’ae or nongaktan).3

Korea also had an elaborate form of musical storytelling, p’an- sori, that today holds an honored place among South Korea’s officially designated Intangible Cultural Assets (muhyŏng munhwajae). P’ansori may be familiar to some Western readers through Im Kwŏnt’aek’s film Chun- hyang (2000), now available on video with English subtitles (New Yorker Video, ASIN: B00005O5K6), in which a dramatization of a traditional p’ansori story is framed with excerpts from the original p’ansori narrative sung by the great Cho Sanghyŏn. In p’ansori a single vocalist, originally a male but now more often a female, delivers an entire story, or more commonly an episode from one, taking on the roles of the various char- acters in turn and also acting as a third-person narrator.4 P’ansori per- formance is said to involve three distinct techniques: singing (ch’ang) with a distinctive husky and emotionally intense vocal timbre; stylized speech (aniri); and mimetic or expressive movement (pallim or nŏrŭm- sae). The music of p’ansori is organized both by melodic modes (cho) and by rhythmic cycles (changdan), the latter outlined by an accompa- nist who strikes both the head and the wooden body of the small bar- rel drum (puk). The drummer also gives shouts of encouragement and appreciation called ch’uimsae, helps establish rapport with the audience, and may be addressed as if he were one of the characters in a scene,

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though he (drummers are invariably male) does not himself act in the role of a character.

When theatres came to Korea, all of these resources, as well as a small repertoire of p’ansori stories and much of their actual words and music, became part of a new theatrical genre that gradually absorbed imported concepts of acting, costumes, and stage scenery (Color Plate 1). Eventually —with the addition of an accompanying orchestra, a chorus of extras, other kinds of music besides p’ansori, various styles of dance, and the technical capabilities of the modern theatre—the genre would approach the proportions of grand opera. This type of opera with p’ansori -style singing has gone by various names but is now gener- ally known as ch’anggŭk, literally meaning “sung drama” and frequently glossed in English-language publicity materials as “traditional Korean opera.”

The historical origins of this transformation from p’ansori into ch’anggŭk remain a subject of debate, though it has been established at least to my satisfaction that the most widely believed story is a fabrica- tion.5 The story is traceable to what was for two decades the only pub- lished book on ch’anggŭk, Pak Hwang’s Ch’anggŭksa yŏn’gu (Study of the History of Ch’anggŭk, 1976), which quotes veteran p’ansori singer Y i Tongbaek (1866 –1947) as having recollected:

The Chinese [community in Seoul] had an opera house where Chi- nese singing actors performed operas every day. . . . In addition to Chi- nese, many Koreans also attended. . . . Korean singers who happened to be in Seoul at the time would visit out of interest and curiosity . . . and the master singer Kang Yonghwan would attend the theatre when- ever he had a chance, practically making it his home. Kang Yonghwan developed the p’ansori “Song of Ch’unhyang” into a ch’anggŭk on the model of these Chinese operas. [Pak Hwang 1976, 17; translation abridged from Pihl 1994, 45 –46]

Pak Hwang (1976) surmises that this production took place in the autumn of 1903 at the Wŏn’gaksa, Korea’s first purpose-built theatre, which had opened the previous year (pp. 21–23). He goes on to recount that the Wŏn’gaksa, as a venue for performing arts expressing the Korean national spirit, was closed down by the Japanese shortly after they established a protectorate over Korea in 1905. The performers of this early ch’anggŭk, he states, then formed touring companies to seek their fortunes in the provinces, but even these wandering troupes were dispersed in 1910 when Korea was annexed by Japan (pp. 45 – 67 ). Although Pak Hwang describes a fair amount of ch’anggŭk activity dur- ing the first two decades of the colonial period (pp. 67– 84), most scholars (such as Pihl 1994, 50) assumed that all ch’anggŭk disappeared

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from sight until the mid-1930s, when there was a large-scale revival. The consensus is that the nascent theatrical genre, created by p’ansori sing- ers on the model of Chinese opera, was nipped in the bud by Japanese imperialism.

Since Pak Hwang’s book was written, however, meticulous research into contemporary newspaper reports and other primary sources has yielded little support for his account. (See, for example, Paek Hyŏnmi 1997, 29 –90.) No definitive record has been found of a Chinese theatre in Seoul, nor of a visit by a Chinese opera troupe, before the first recorded ch’anggŭk productions. The earliest unambigu- ous references to ch’anggŭk describe performances at the Wŏn’gaksa theatre in 1908, some five years after the Song of Ch’unhyang is said to have been dramatized (and after the ch’anggŭk performers are said to have left for the provinces following the closing of the theatre). More- over, it appears that the supposed founder of ch’anggŭk, Kang Yong- hwan, died in 1900 before the Wŏn’gaksa was built (Paek Hyesuk 1992, 77–79). And yet Pak Hwang’s story remains unquestioned except among a handful of scholars.

While the documentary record is too thin to admit of any final and authoritative account of ch’anggŭk ’s origins and early history, the picture that emerges from the primary sources is one of Japanese and American influences rather than Chinese. Although there is no record of a Chinese theatre in Seoul before the emergence of ch’anggŭk, we do know that the American-owned Seoul Electric Company, which opened a streetcar line in Seoul around 1900, also operated a theatre of sorts at its generating station near the East Gate, where silent movies were shown as well as live performances (Y i Kyu-tae 1970, 222). It was to this theatre that American diplomat William Franklin Sands brought a per- formance troupe he had observed somewhere in the Korean country- side, which presented a dramatization of the popular story of Ch’un- hyang in a form that may have anticipated some aspects of ch’anggŭk (Sands 1987, 179 –181). We also know that several Japanese theatres were opened in Seoul after Korea became a Japanese protectorate in 1905 and that Korean students had been studying in Japan and witness- ing the “new school” (shinpa) plays that were popular there at the time (Paek Hyŏnmi 1997, 64 – 69). It appears to have been one of these stu- dents, Y i Injik, who first brought a group of p’ansori singers together to perform a drama that we would now recognize as ch’anggŭk. Y i Injik’s role is well authenticated in contemporary newspaper accounts, but p’ansori singer Kang Yonghwan is not mentioned at all.6

Why, then, has a story that does not square with the sources come to be so widely believed? The answer, I suggest, lies in precon- ceptions concerning the colonial relationship with Japan and the ear-

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lier tributary relationship with China. Koreans generally acknowledge China as the source of much Korean “high culture,” while the Japanese colonization of 1910 –1945 continues to be blamed for many of the country’s contemporary ills. Pak Hwang’s story may not fit comfortably with the documentary record, but it fits extremely comfortably with the received idea that China has contributed positively to Korean cul- ture while Japanese imperialism merely uprooted and suppressed any Korean aspiration toward progress. The idea of a productive Japanese influence has been virtually unthinkable within this view of history.

Y i Tongbaek’s testimony derives from interviews conducted in the late colonial and early postliberation years, more than three decades after the time to which he referred. Even if he was aware of Y i Injik’s role and motives and remembered the circumstances accurately, he would have had every reason to downplay any Japanese connections. The colonial regime became increasingly harsh and demanding during its last ten years as Japan stepped up its military program in various parts of Asia, and the colonists must have been more unpopular than ever in Korea. And after liberation, to tell the story I have told would have been to lay the ch’anggŭk performers open to the charge of collab- orationism—a charge that some of them did, in fact, have to face (Suh Yon-Ho 1994, 99). An influence from China was much more acceptable, for China had been recognized for centuries as the legitimate source of a civilization that Korea was proud to share —and China had been an enemy of Japan in the recent war. The accepted story thus emerges as an origin myth that confers legitimacy on the genre.

One of the archetypes of postcolonial consciousness is repre- sented by the protagonist of Salman Rushdie’s novel Midnight’s Children, Saleem Sinai, born at the exact moment of India’s independence, to an Indian mother and a British father. The baby Saleem is switched at birth with a child of purely Indian parents who raise him in the belief that he is their own son. In telling the story, the adult Saleem com- ments: “My inheritance includes this gift, the gift of inventing new par- ents for myself whenever necessary” (Rushdie 1980, 125).

Ch’anggŭk, too, seems to have invented new parents for itself in response to the postcolonial predicament. The newly liberated nation needed to assert its right to political independence through symbols that would express its cultural independence from its former colonists. One such symbol might be the possession of a traditional musical the- atre form that could be held up as the equal of, though distinct from, kabuki or nö. But when such symbols are themselves of colonial origin, their disreputable past is liable to be cloaked in a more attractive origin myth.

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Serving the Great

By itself, the case of ch’anggŭk might suggest that the creation of such origin myths is simply a reaction to the colonial experience—a cover-up operation to hide the skeleton of a colonial origin in the closet of a genre’s forgotten past. But a couple of parallel examples will show that similarly implausible claims of continuity with venerated Chi- nese sources have been part of the discourse on Korean performing arts since long before the colonial period. Intangible Cultural Asset 1, for instance, is the aak: Confucian ceremonial music and dance that originated with two huge gifts of instruments from Song-dynasty China in 1114 and 1116. The prevailing Korean view of aak was well expressed in 1973 by Sŏng Kyŏng-rin, who made the same claim for aak that Japa- nese writers have made for the distantly related genre gagaku:

[Aak] probably represents the most ancient tradition alive in the Ori- ent. It is only in Korea that the tradition has been maintained con- tinuously since the introduction of the music from China in the twelfth century, and it is this music alone of all the music received from China which has not been transformed totally beyond recogni- tion at the hands of Korean musicians and has been preserved, pre- sumably, in essentially unaltered form. [Sŏng Kyŏng-rin 1973, 142]

But as Robert Provine (1980) has shown, the idea that this music has been “preserved . . . in essentially unaltered form” is wishful thinking at best. The tradition of aak was anything but continuous: almost all the instruments of the original gift were destroyed when the Korean capi- tal was sacked in the Red Turban invasion of 1361, and the subsequent fifteenth-century Korean effort to “restore” the ancient Confucian tra- dition resulted in what was essentially the creation of a new Korean genre. Since then, however, aak has been faithfully preserved—pre- cisely because it was believed to represent an older Chinese practice.

Provine concludes that while “Koreans have for centuries con- sidered a-ak to be Chinese in origin, style, and spirit,” in reality “Korean a-ak . . . is no more Chinese than seventeenth-century opera is Greek or all piano music is Italian” (p. 23). He adds that his findings might “not be welcomed by those who consider Korea a cultural dependency of China and who like to think that it is authentic Chinese ya-yüeh which now survives in Korea” (ibid.). But as late as the 1970s, when both Sŏng Kyŏng-rin’s article on aak and Pak Hwang’s book on ch’anggŭk were published, to claim a Chinese origin for something was to enhance its image in Korean eyes.

This attitude clearly reflects the traditional Korean deference to

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the Middle Kingdom, a principle known as sadae (“serving the great” ) or, more pejoratively, sadae-juŭi (sometimes translated as “flunkeyism”). Hwang Byung-ki (2002) uses the latter term in a paper that traces the Korean habit of claiming Chinese origins back at least to the time of the original gift of aak instruments. Hwang reexamines an account of the origins of the Korean zithers kayagŭm and kŏmun’go from the oldest extant Korean source on music, Kim Pusik’s History of the Three Kingdoms. Dated to 1145, this work cites a still earlier but no longer extant vol- ume, the Silla kogi (Old Record of the Silla Kingdom), which is said to have stated that the kŏmun’go was modeled on the Chinese qin (Song Bang-song 1980, 26). But as Hwang points out, the two instruments resemble each other only in the most superficial way. While both are of the “long zither” type, the kŏmun’go has raised frets, movable bridges, and a pencil-like plectrum, none of which is found on the qin. Similar raised frets are, however, found on the ja-khe of Thailand (Miller 1998, 239) and the mì jaùń of Myanmar (Burma; Becker and Garfias 2001, 571–572), which are much more likely relatives according to organo- logical evidence.7

Intriguingly, Hwang suggests that Kim Pusik associated the kŏmun’go with the qin because of its function rather than its form: both instruments were vehicles of self-cultivation for the literati. The logic is the same as that of Robert Van Gulik in his celebrated book on the qin, The Lore of the Chinese Lute ( Van Gulik 1969, ix), where he chooses to translate qin as “lute,” though aware that it is technically a zither, because of his view that the qin held a position in traditional Chinese culture equivalent to that held by the lute in Renaissance Europe. Kim Pusik’s objective, similarly, was perhaps to show that Korea had an instrument equivalent to the qin, revered as a symbol of cultivation and refinement among the ruling class.

Here again we find a Chinese antecedent invoked to legitimize a Korean cultural product, and the origin myth of ch’anggŭk begins to reveal itself as just one instance of a deeply rooted Korean discursive practice. In placing the origins of ch’anggŭk in a more proper context than the origin myth provides, we will need to range beyond the Korean peninsula to the Asian continent and its broad history of encounters between indigenous performing arts and the encroachments of colo- nialism.

The Pan-Asian Context Theatre forms in many ways analogous to ch’anggŭk were taking

shape under parallel circumstances all over Asia in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Such dramas formed the subject of a series of panels in the conference “Audiences, Patrons, and Performers

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in the Performing Arts of Asia” at Leiden University, the Netherlands, in August 2000. In the call for proposals, the panel convener, Hanne de Bruin, suggested the term “hybrid-popular theatres” as a name for these novel forms of drama that arose in various parts of South and South- east Asia as a result of “direct and indirect contacts between indigenous expressive genres and Western, melodramatic performance conven- tions and proscenium stage techniques, which were ‘imported’ into Asia during colonial times.” 8 She further noted: “The emergence and rise to popularity of the hybrid-popular theatres appear to have been stim- ulated by the demand among local audiences for ‘novelty.’. . . For their revenues, the hybrid-popular theatres depended on the new convention of ticket sales and on the exploitation of a newly emerging ‘perfor- mance market.’ Their grounding in a commercial base distinguished them from earlier theatres, which depended on community or royal patronage.”

It was immediately clear to me that according to this definition, Korean ch’anggŭk would be a good example of “hybrid-popular theatre.” I also noticed that Northeast Asia had not been mentioned—no doubt because the region was not extensively colonized by European powers and had its own well-established theatrical traditions long before West- ern-style drama came on the scene. But Korea was the exception: it had never developed its own forms of commercial indoor theatre like those of China and Japan, and it did undergo colonization, not by a Euro- pean power, but by a highly westernized Japan. It was largely through the increasing Japanese presence in the years preceding annexation in 1910 that Korea came to develop a form of drama closely matching de Bruin’s description of hybrid-popular theatre. Though this art form arose without the direct influence of the broad hybrid-popular theatre movement in South and Southeast Asia, much less of Western theatre itself, it reproduced the defining characteristics of that movement in a separate but parallel development.

In the most general terms, all parts of Asia had some form of drama before coming under the influence of the West. Except in China and Japan, however, these dramas were not performed in public the- atres but in the private courts of the elite or the open communal spaces of the folk, often as part of a religious festival. Typically, mythical sto- ries of supernatural beings were conveyed through song, dance, and mime, and everything was stylized and exaggerated. What distinguishes hybrid-popular theatre is that elements of these local narrative and dra- matic traditions are brought together with conventions deriving from Western theatre: performances are given in an enclosed space open to all those, and only those, who will pay the price of admission; the sub- ject matter is more human; and the presentation is more realistic.

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The first Asians to perform theatre of this type appear to have been members of the Parsi community in Bombay around 1850. Many Parsis had become wealthy by trading with the British East India Com- pany and were eager to send their children to the recently opened Elphinstone College, where British-style amateur theatricals became fashionable among students. From these emerged professional Parsi theatre troupes that enlivened the spoken dramas with songs and spec- tacle to appeal to a diverse audience and help them cross linguistic bar- riers when they began to tour widely in India and abroad in the 1870s (Hansen 1992, 79 – 85; 2002).

By the end of the century, traveling Parsi troupes had performed in Singapore, the Malay Straits, Penang, Burma, and the Netherlands East Indies. And wherever they went, their popularity inspired the for- mation of local troupes following their example. In British Malaya, for instance, the hybrid-popular theatre genre that later became known as bangsawan first emerged in the 1870s under the name of tiruan wayang Parsi or “imitation Parsi theatre” (Tan 1989, 231). In Java the visiting Parsi troupes inspired not one but several local forms of hybrid-popu- lar theatre: the short-lived komedie Jawa and wayang cerita of the 1870s and the more intensively commercialized and influential komedie Stam- boel of the 1890s (Cohen 2001, 315 –330). In India they spawned innu- merable local derivatives such as the “Special Drama” (special natakam) and “Boys Companies” of Tamilnadu (Seizer 1997, 66).

But the burgeoning of hybrid-popular theatre forms in late- nineteenth-century Asia was not simply a response to the Parsi theatre and its widespread influence. Even within India, the extensive touring of the Parsi troupes was not the only factor promoting the emergence of more or less westernized theatre styles outside the Bombay area. A firsthand account of the origins of the modern Bengali theatre by musi- cologist and composer Sourindro Mohun Tagore (1963, 84) does not mention the Parsi troupes at all but gives the impression of a separate and almost contemporaneous development. Such genres could arise without the influence of the Parsi theatre if the social and political conditions were propitious, and these conditions were generally brought about by colonization. In Calcutta as in Bombay, the social and economic transformations wrought by British colonization had spawned a prosperous merchant class with the leisure and disposable income to support professional theatre, while visiting European troupes and British amateur theatricals had provided models for a style of performance that was perceived as up-to-date and cosmopolitan. Sim- ilar transformations accompanied Dutch colonization in Java, where wayang wong drama changed from a royal court entertainment to a commercial art form without emulating the Parsi model (Cohen 2001,

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323 –325), and French colonization in Vietnam, where drama adopted Western conventions such as spoken dialogue without ever being exposed to the Parsi theatre or its derivatives (Gibbs 2000).

Evidently, hybrid-popular theatre in Asia is a phenomenon of polygenesis rather than pure diffusion. Without direct influence, sim- ilar conditions in different places led to the repetition of the same pat- tern: colonization brings economic change, of which one symptom is the commercial indoor theatre with its ticket sales, proscenium arch, and realist conventions. New forms of theatre are inspired by the desire to emulate the colonist and to meet audience demand for nov- elty. But familiar local elements, frequently musical, are retained to avoid challenging the audience too much. Seen in this comparative context, the origin of ch’anggŭk need not be explained through stories like that of the Korean p’ansori singer inspired by Chinese opera; the genre was a predictable response to conditions that were producing similar responses elsewhere.

Inventing a Tradition Insofar as there was a single originator of ch’anggŭk, the evidence

suggests that it was not a p’ansori singer at all but a figure much less pal- atable to Korean nationalist sensibilities: the pro-Japanese writer and politician Y i Injik (1862–1916). While studying in Japan around the turn of the century, Y i Injik had become familiar with the popular Japanese interpretation of Western melodrama, shinpa geki or “new school” the- atre (Kim and Pak 1995, 553). At that time shinpa still bore traces of its earlier incarnation—the late-nineteenth-century “political dramas” (söshi geki) that were used for campaigning in the early days of Japanese democracy—and this may have led Y i Injik to see the stage as a suit- able platform for his political ideas.9

With this in mind, in 1908 Y i Injik brought together a group of p’ansori singers to perform a drama of his own composition. He must have realized that these singers were the only available performers with dramatic skills that would be relevant to his objectives. For his part, he knew p’ansori well, having earlier translated one of the stories into Japa- nese, and thus was capable of writing in the p’ansori style. Accordingly he wrote a novella called Ŭnsegye (Silver World), the first half of which was made to resemble the style of a p’ansori text so that it could be per- formed as a drama by a group of p’ansori singers. The story exposed the hopeless corruption (as Y i saw it) of Korea’s social order and thus, by implication, advocated the need for external intervention.

Borrowing another idea from shinpa, Y i Injik advertised the pro- duction as an example of sinyŏn’gŭk (new drama) in contrast to the kuyŏn’gŭk (old drama) of traditional arts like p’ansori. ( The Japanese

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term“shinpa” had been coined in 1897 to contrast with the kyüha or “old school” of kabuki; Leiter 1997, 588.) He began instructing the p’ansori singers in the new dramatic techniques that would be needed to pre- sent Silver World on the stage. Meanwhile, to defray expenses, the p’an- sori singers performed episodes from their existing repertoire, gradually adopting the new theatrical mode of presentation they were learning. These fundraising performances became the earliest presentations in ch’anggŭk format of which any contemporary record survives.

We are fortunate to have a detailed account of one of these per- formances, written by one Major Herbert H. Austin, who happened to visit the Wŏn’gaksa (which he called the “Theatre Royal”) during a week’s trip to Korea in October 1908:

Desirous of seeing Korean life in all its different aspects, we paid a visit after dinner to the Theatre Royal, close by, and derived no little enter- tainment from watching several acts of a Korean play, performed mainly by men and boys. The building in which it took place was one of some size, the seats in the body of the hall being raised in steps until they reached the level of the gallery or promenade, on which we had our seats in a private box on the right-hand side. There were four or five boxes on each side of the hall; those on the left, reserved for Korean ladies, being all full. Not understanding a word of the lan- guage, we were, of course, unable to fathom the plot—if there was one at all—though a gigantic paper or cardboard pumpkin, which was repeatedly being cut, seemed to be the chief cause of interest in this highly sensational drama. Most of the dialogue was chanted to the accompaniment of a drum played by a man on the stage, and from time to time supers strolled across the scene as though they regarded themselves as invisible for theatrical purposes. The music was by no means discordant, and the high falsetto voice so commonly heard in India appeared to be considered worthy of commendation in Korea, as applause occasionally broke out when a peculiarly high note had been successfully grappled with. At the end of each scene a red-and- white curtain, running along a wire, was pulled across the stage from one side, and a member of the company would come before the foot- lights and hold forth to the audience, whom he was apparently inform- ing what might be expected in the scene about to follow. [Austin 1910, 196 –197 ]

Though Austin showed no awareness that he was witnessing something new to Korea, this passage is the earliest description of a ch’anggŭk per- formance that has come to light, predating any surviving Korean source. It bears unmistakable references to both the repertoire and the sing- ing style of p’ansori, while indicating that the performance was given by multiple singing actors in dialogue format and that some degree of

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visual presentation was attempted. The reference to a “pumpkin, which was repeatedly being cut” identifies the story as that of Hŭngbo, one of the popular heroes of the p’ansori repertoire, and the drum that accom- panies the singing is presumably the barrel drum (puk) that provides the sole instrumental accompaniment in p’ansori. The “member of the company” who would “hold forth” between the dramatized scenes is evidently the narrator (toch’ang), a device that probably arose when dia- logue passages from existing p’ansori texts were performed by two p’an- sori singers taking the roles of the characters while a third was needed to deliver the third-person narration. Later, when stage scenery was added, the narrator became a convenient device for holding the audi- ence’s attention while the set was changed—a practice still seen in ch’anggŭk today.

Although we have no comparable account of Ŭnsegye itself, we know that it created a sensation and proved a hard act to follow. Y i Injik moved on to other interests, and no one was ready to step into his shoes. With the advent of actual shinpa dramas performed by Korean troupes, as well as imported silent movies with live interpreters (pyŏnsa), ch’anggŭk was unable to compete for novelty value. Its exponents tried to appeal to the sense of tradition instead and changed its name from “new drama” to kup’a (old school) or kuyŏn’gŭk (old drama) before it was in fact even five years old (Paek Hyŏnmi 1997, 91–116). Thus began the project of inventing traditional Korean opera.

National Drama If progressive-minded Koreans could find their entertainment

in films and spoken plays, those who wanted something traditional could still hear p’ansori and other indigenous performing arts. Falling between these two stools, ch’anggŭk was unable to find a fruitful niche in the “performance market” and became mainly a matter of drama- tized highlights from the p’ansori stories performed with minimal the- atrical equipment by struggling itinerant variety troupes.

Ch’anggŭk limped on in this form through most of the colonial period until its vigorous revival in the mid-1930s through the activities of an organization called the Chosŏn Sŏngak Yŏn’guhoe (Korean Vocal Music Association).10 The background to this revival goes back to the March 1 Independence Movement of 1919, which convinced the Japa- nese authorities of the necessity to allow a safe outlet for Korean nation- alist aspirations. The safety valve took the form of a limited “cultural movement” that would promote Korean national culture to the point where, at some remote and indefinitely postponed future date, the colony would be sufficiently “advanced” to stand alone as an indepen- dent nation (Robinson 1988). By the early 1930s, the movement had

C H’AN G GŬ K Opera 55

inspired a growing interest—on the part of Japanese as well as Korean scholars— in Korean folk culture as an expression of national identity. Meanwhile the popular media began to publicize the idea that this iden- tity might be expressed in cultural forms such as the performing arts.

Thus on March 29, 1931, the newspaper Tonga Ilbo stated: “Our Korea, which has had its own culture from ancient times, has also had its own [way of ] singing. The joy expressed in that singing was our joy, and the sadness expressed in that singing was our sadness, so that this [singing] was the mouthpiece of our lives.” Such statements laid a foundation for the idea, taken for granted in the postcolonial period, that the affective life of Korean people was different from that of other nations and, moreover, that distinctive styles in the performing arts captured this difference.

It was during this period that the genre name ch’anggŭk came to be used for the first time, and in other respects as well the Chosŏn Sŏn- gak Yŏn’guhoe created a new form of ch’anggŭk with most of the fea- tures we would recognize in the genre today. The performance of com- plete dramas, rather than separate episodes, became standard; spoken dialogue was added in the process of dramatization; an orchestra of tra- ditional instruments supplemented the puk barrel drum of p’ansori; and visual appeal was enhanced with more elaborate costumes, scenery, and dancing. The scale of most productions, however, remained mod- est by today’s standards, especially when the shows were taken on tour.

The final years of the colonial period, as mentioned earlier in connection with Y i Tongbaek’s retelling of the origins of ch’anggŭk, witnessed an increasingly harsh regime in which the public expression of a separate Korean identity was no longer tolerated. While the authorities believed that the theatre could become a powerful vehicle of state propaganda in Korea as it had been in Japan, they strove for a compromise between allowing it to retain enough familiar elements to attract a Korean audience and insisting that every performance be given at least partly in the Japanese language.

With liberation from Japanese rule in 1945 came the partition of the Korean peninsula into Soviet and American occupation zones, each of which established itself as a republic in 1948. Communist North Korea—regarding traditional culture as, at best, material for improve- ment and at worst a hangover of a stratified feudal society—eventually replaced ch’anggŭk with its own version of revolutionary opera (Suh Yon-Ho 1991). The South, by contrast, developed an ideology of pres- ervation that maintained the colonial-era view of traditional music as an expression of the unique Korean national identity. In the South the performing arts were brought into the agenda of nation building as all forms of traditional Korean music came to be known by the generic

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term “kugak” (national music) while ch’anggŭk took the name “kukkŭk” (national drama) (Paek Hyŏnmi 1997, 334 –339). The stage would appear to have been set for at least one part of Korea to assert itself as a distinct nation with a theatre form of its own. But from the beginning, the nature of the new nation and the right to represent it in perfor- mance were hotly contested.

Nation and Gender The first female p’ansori singers, trained in the late nineteenth

century, had been kisaeng entertainers, the Korean equivalent of the Japanese geisha. During the colonial period, p’ansori came to be more and more the province of this profession to the point where what had once been an all-male art form came to be dominated numerically by women. Groups of kisaeng had performed scenes from ch’anggŭk, taking the male as well as the female roles, as early as the 1910s. But it was not until after liberation that they developed a fully fledged all-female opera form inspired by Japan’s Takarazuka Revue but using traditional rather than Western- style music (Color Plates 2–3). Since the usual name for ch’anggŭk at the time was kukkŭk, the all-female version was dubbed yŏsŏng kukkŭk (women’s national drama).11

But for some in Korea’s patriarchal society, “women’s national drama” seemed almost a contradiction in terms — or at least a threat to the assumption that whatever is “national” ought to be defined and controlled by men. This point of view was expressed by Pak Hwang, whom we encountered earlier as the author of the first published his- tory of ch’anggŭk. Pak saw the new subgenre as inimical both to artistic standards in ch’anggŭk and to proper gender relations in society. The audience for yŏsŏng kukkŭk, like that of Takarazuka, has always been predominantly female, and the advent of the new theatrical sensation drew crowds of married women whose lives (as Pak rather wistfully observed) had been largely restricted to the home (Pak Hwang 1976, 189). For these women to identify with female actors, cast in the roles of brash and vigorous male heroes, seemed dangerous enough to pro- voke Pak into some remarkable rhetorical flights. After quoting a Korean proverb, “ When the hen crows, the house is ruined,” he com- pared the all-female troupes with the mythical creatures called pulga- sari that were said to eat metal and tried to overthrow the ancient kingdom of Koryŏ (p. 229). To Pak, himself a librettist of mixed- cast ch’anggŭk, yŏsŏng kukkŭk represented a threat not just to the traditions of p’ansori and ch’anggŭk but to the Korean nation itself. As Korean fem- inist writers are now starting to show (Kim and Choi 1998), one part of the postcolonial project of nation building has been the scramble to ensure that the nation is structured along patriarchal lines.

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Ch’anggŭk has participated in this patriarchal agenda—not least through its constant and approving display of the self-sacrifice of women. The established repertoire of ch’anggŭk consists of only four stories, all derived from p’ansori, of which the most frequently per- formed are the stories of Sim Ch’ŏng and Ch’unhyang, both paragons of female devotion to men. Sim Ch’ŏng, the filial daughter, sells herself to a crew of sailors—as a human sacrifice to ensure safe passage across a treacherous sea—in exchange for a donation to a Buddhist temple that will result in the miraculous restoration of her blind father’s eye- sight. Ch’unhyang, the virtuous wife, remains faithful to her absent hus- band in the face of a brutal beating and the threat of death. Some of the musical and literary highlights of both stories are expressions of the heroine’s grief.

Since about the 1970s, this grief has been given a name, han, and represented as an emotion peculiar to Koreans and arising from their national history of invasion and repression (Park-Miller 1995, 183). This special instance of the older idea that Korean affect is different from that of other nationalities has come to be so widely accepted that many people assume it has a much longer history than it does. Im Kwŏnt’aek’s popular 1993 film Sŏp’yŏnje, for instance, contains much discussion of han, although it is set in an earlier period when, as far as we know from contemporary sources, no one was talking about han in this way.12 Today the concept of han forms a link between the suffering of women like Ch’unhyang and the grim history of the Korean nation —itself feminized as a territory under the constant threat of penetra- tion by more powerful neighbors and in need of protection by strong masculine institutions such as the armed forces and an authoritarian government (Moon Seungsook 1998).

The Western imagination has long been captivated by narratives of penetration in which a hero overcomes a formidable obstacle to enter an alien territory that is both feared and desired and in so doing achieves a renewal of self. With its heterosexual and patriarchal sym- bolism, the structure governs the tales of difficult seduction that recur in novels like Dangerous Liaisons and plays from The Taming of the Shrew to Guys and Dolls, as well as adventure stories ( Journey to the Center of the Earth or the Indiana Jones series) and the fieldwork narratives of anthropologists and other cultural explorers. 13 But in the Ch’unhyang story it is precisely the resistance to penetration that is celebrated. That such a story could become the most often told tale in Korea is proba- bly not because patriarchal values hold less sway there than in the West but because Koreans have learned to see their national history in terms of foreign penetration and native resistance. Korean historians have compiled lists of over nine hundred invasions, large and small, in the

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nation’s history; representative national heroes are colonial-era resis- tance fighters and the sixteenth-century naval commander Y i Sunsin who fought off an earlier Japanese attack with his impenetrable iron-clad “turtle ships.” 14 Today, while the infiltration of Western ways and ideas into almost every sphere of Korean life is undeniable, the need to pre- serve some corner of national identity that resists this penetration is often keenly felt. It is perhaps partly this need that keeps Korean audi- ences showing up again and again for adaptations of the story of Ch’un- hyang in whatever guise: for them, there is more at stake than one woman’s refusal to yield to aggression.

State Sponsorship Historically, the discourse of han appears to have taken shape

under the authoritarian regime of President Park Chung Hee, who seized power in a military coup in 1961 and remained in office until his assassination in 1979. It may well have helped to bolster that regime by forming part of what Louis Althusser (1971) would have called the “ideological state apparatus.” That is: a workforce suffering under the harsh demands of rapid industrialization while largely excluded from its economic rewards might be less inclined to make trouble if taught to believe that suffering and resentment are an intrinsic part of their national character and that to remove the suffering and its causes would make them somehow less authentically Korean.

The point is perhaps a speculative one, but there is no doubt that ideological legitimation was a pressing concern for Park’s govern- ment. Not only had Park and his henchmen seized power by undem- ocratic means, but during the colonial period they had been trained in the Japanese military academy and served as officers in the Japanese army, rendering them subject to the stigma of collusion with the colo- nial authorities. Park seems to have addressed this concern by repre- senting his government as a patron and supporter of those symbols of Korean national identity, the traditional performing arts, in which he had never previously shown the slightest interest. In 1962, the year after he came to power, he passed a Cultural Assets Protection Act, itself ironically modeled on legislation that the Japanese government had adopted in 1950 (Yang Jongsung 1994, 49–51). Under this law, genres judged to express the Korean national culture were officially designated Intangible Cultural Assets (muhyŏng munhwajae) and lead- ing exponents, unofficially known as “human national treasures,” were appointed on a modest stipend to maintain and transmit these genres in what was considered their “authentic form” (wŏnhyŏng).15 One of the first art forms to be so designated was p’ansori.

Ch’anggŭk also received government support, but outside the

C H’AN G GŬ K Opera 59

Cultural Assets system, and this says something of the concept of “tra- dition” that was adopted and the difference in its application to p’an- sori and to ch’anggŭk. Again in 1962, a National Ch’anggŭk Troupe was established and given lavish funds for an opening production. Forty years later, this troupe continues to define the state of the art for ch’ang- gŭk though the genre has never been nominated for recognition as an Intangible Cultural Asset. The relatively short history of ch’anggŭk and its obvious foreign influences appear to have barred it from this honor, while by common consent the genre is still evolving and has yet to achieve an “authentic form” that would be worthy of preservation. Thus, instead of staging standardized dramas in an unchanging form, ch’anggŭk directors are expected to innovate in each new production in search of a format that will be, paradoxically, more “traditional” than ever before.

This complex relation to the notion of “tradition” has led me to suggest the term “traditionesque” for a category of cultural forms that hover on the margins of the “traditional” (Killick 1998a; 2001a). In this dichotomy, both “traditional” and “traditionesque” art forms base their appeal on the association with a “tradition” that embodies a valued community— in this case what Benedict Anderson (1983) would have called the “ imagined community ” of the nation. But while a “tradi- tional” repertoire is transmitted with some concern for protection from changes that would make it less “authentic” (McDonald 1996, 115), no such concern affects the transmission of the “traditionesque,” which must innovate in search of an “authenticity” that is not found in its past. To venture another speculative observation, it seems likely that “tradi- tionesque” art forms will prove particularly characteristic of postcolo- nial societies like Korea, which typically feel a need to assert the uniqueness of their nation’s cultural traditions in justification of its political independence while simultaneously keeping pace with the world in modernity and cosmopolitanism.

Jockeying for Tradition The failure to create an “authentic” form of ch’anggŭk to fill the

role of a “traditional Korean opera” has not been for want of trying. In 1967, a committee called the Ch’anggŭk Chŏngnip Wiwŏnhoe (Com- mittee for the Establishment of Ch’anggŭk) was set up under the aus- pices of the National Ch’anggŭk Troupe.16 For a concise formulation of its mission, we can do no better than return to the 1971 program note from which I quoted at the beginning of this essay:

Our country originally had no theatre and no stage. As a result, it could not have its own dramatic form. Taking the ancient drama of other countries for comparison, the Greek drama, Roman drama, and

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medieval drama of the West all had their own form [governing every- thing] from the design of the theatre to the [style of ] acting, while China’s Peking opera and Japan’s kabuki and nö bear their own excel- lent form transmitted through the ages. Our country, as mentioned above, had no theatre and no stage, so it did not have its own form of musical drama (ch’anggŭk). It is this that we are now trying to create for the first time.17

There could hardly be a more explicit statement of the ambition to “invent” a traditional Korean opera.

The committee, composed of senior exponents and professional scholars, was given the task of arranging texts for ch’anggŭk productions and determining the manner of their performance in a way that would eliminate the earlier pandering to popular appeal and make ch’anggŭk as faithful as possible to its p’ansori originals. Not only would the words and music of existing p’ansori material be incorporated, as far as pos- sible intact, into these ch’anggŭk productions, but even the style of speech and acting would follow p’ansori practices, while the visual pre- sentation would reflect the minimalism of p’ansori ’s physical resources. Once established, this “authentic” form of ch’anggŭk would then be protected from change —for instance, by standardizing the texts and having each new production supervised by a “leader” (toyŏn) whose responsibility was to ensure that the established conventions were followed without the creative freedom usually assumed by a “director” (yŏnch’ul) (Sŏng Kyŏng-rin 1980, 347–352).

Here again a pointed cross-cultural comparison reveals that the Korean case was not unique. Rather, Korean ch’anggŭk conforms to a widespread Asian pattern, not only in its relationship to colonization, but also in its relationship to decolonization. The closest analogy here is perhaps the Malaysian hybrid-popular theatre form bangsawan. Sooi- Beng Tan (1989) has shown that in the early twentieth century, bang- sawan was touted as modern and up-to-date and made a great virtue of its constant innovations as it responded to the changing taste of its ethnically diverse audience. “Since the 1970s,” however, says Tan, “the Malaysian government has created a ‘traditional’ past for bangsawan. Under state sponsorship, the popular type of theatre has been reshaped, Malayized, and institutionalized for new national purposes” (p. 230). This reshaping has involved the elimination of non-Malay sto- ries and musical features in order to “promote an artificial ‘tradition’ for bangsawan” as an expression of Malaysian national identity (p. 256). A similar process of “traditionalizing” can be seen at work in the history of ch’anggŭk. At first proclaimed as sinyŏn’gŭk (new drama), by the 1970s ch’anggŭk was supported by a National Ch’anggŭk Troupe that was mak- ing a determined bid for the genre’s recognition as “traditional Korean

C H’AN G GŬ K Opera 61

opera” while its colonial origins were being written out of its history (Pak Hwang 1976).

In the end, the Ch’anggŭk Chŏngnip Wiwŏnhoe did not succeed in establishing fixed texts and performance practices, and its influence rapidly declined. The jockeying for tradition, however—the effort to position ch’anggŭk in an advantageous relation to the traditional—was renewed by director Hŏ Kyu, who was responsible for most of the National Ch’anggŭk Troupe’s productions throughout the 1980s. Hŏ sought to bring ch’anggŭk closer to the “spirit” of p’ansori (rather than emphasizing the “letter” as the Ch’anggŭk Chŏngnip Wiwŏnhoe had done) by negotiating a new “contract” (yaksok) between performers and audience (Hŏ Kyu 1991, 384). This contract sought to recapture, by means of such devices as direct audience address and a projecting stage, the free-and-easy interaction that characterized the madang or village square in which p’ansori would traditionally have been performed. Hence Hŏ’s approach came to be labeled the madanghwa (madang-iza- tion) of the ch’anggŭk stage (Song Hyejin 1987, 239).

While many of Hŏ Kyu’s innovations have become standard practice in ch’anggŭk, his madanghwa project was ultimately defeated by the physical properties of the proscenium-based performance spaces with which he had to work, as well as by the passive audience habits associated with them.18 In the 1990s, therefore, the National Ch’ang- gŭk Troupe largely embraced Western realist production values and returned to an unabashedly “traditionesque” approach.

The continuing traditionesque status of ch’anggŭk is nowhere more clearly revealed than in a development of the early 1990s when the new head of the National Ch’anggŭk Troupe, literary scholar Kang Hanyŏng, decided to abolish the toch’ang (narrator). As we have seen, the toch’ang was a feature of the earliest ch’anggŭk performances on record, and by the 1990s it had become perhaps the nearest thing ch’anggŭk possessed to a venerable tradition of its own: it had an indig- enous origin and a precedent of some eighty years behind it, as well as a history of performance by some of the most distinguished senior p’an- sori singers of those years. Nevertheless, the toch’ang was not sacro- sanct. Some newly composed ch’anggŭk dramas had dispensed with the toch’ang, and during Kang’s tenure one production adopted the exper- iment of having the toch’ang interact directly with the dramatis per- sonae (Color Plate 4). More radically, when Kang himself arranged new texts for adaptations of the traditional p’ansori stories—which had always been the most “traditional” part of ch’anggŭk’s repertoire —he eliminated the toch’ang altogether, arguing that third-person narra- tion held up the action and was out of place in the “show, don’t tell” ethos of the theatre.19

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Such a fundamental change of performance convention would have been unthinkable in a “traditional” art form. But since ch’anggŭk itself was not recognized as traditional, its own would-be traditions have been accorded no guarantee of protection from change. Instead they have been readily sacrificed in the pursuit of either entertainment value or traditional elements derived from recognized “Cultural Assets” such as p’ansori. While the toch’ang has been reinstated in a number of productions since Kang’s retirement in 1995, its use is at the discretion of the director—and ch’anggŭk seems no closer to achieving “tradi- tional” status since its only recognized traditions (that is, its only prac- tices protected from change) are those it has taken from p’ansori. A tra- ditional art form, presumably, must possess traditions of its own.

National Music Ch’anggŭk has always had trouble being taken seriously as an

expression of Korean national culture. And yet, in at least one respect, its claim to represent the nation is arguably second to none—and that respect is its music. In a telling scene from a recent production of the Ch’unhyang story, the p’ansori - style singing of the toch’ang was inter- rupted by loud blasts on the straight trumpet (nabal) and conch shell (nagak) from the back of the auditorium.20 A colorful parade filed down the aisle playing the raucous royal processional music Taech’wit’a. On reaching the stage, the music changed to the stately banquet ver- sion of the same rhythmic material, Ch’wit’a, and the procession entered an elaborate set representing the yamen of the governor of Namwŏn. The wicked governor took the seat of honor, his white-robed officials stood in attendance, and a group of female entertainers (kisaeng) lined up to solicit his favors.

Such a mixture of theatrical presentation, p’ansori singing, and other varieties of Korean music is to be found only in ch’anggŭk. The category of music that has come to be known in postcolonial Korea as kugak (national music) comprises a diverse collection of genres that would have been performed in quite different contexts and for differ- ent audiences before the twentieth century. Certainly p’ansori and Tae- ch’wit’a would have been worlds apart in their social setting as well as their musical sounds. But ch’anggŭk directors have not hesitated to use any form of traditional music that seemed appropriate to the dramatic situation: a dirge for a funeral, a sea shanty for a shipboard scene, court music for a banquet. Antecedents for this musical eclecticism can be found in p’ansori narratives and in their presumed forebears, the mythic songs of shamans, both of which interpolated existing folk songs into their fluid forms (Hahn Man-young 1975, 17 ). But the practice is taken to an extreme in ch’anggŭk, where the principle that anything within

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the realm of kugak is fair game was perhaps finally established by direc- tor and dramatist Hŏ Kyu in the 1980s. In a work of his own composi- tion, Yongmagol changsa (The Strong Man of Yongma Valley, 1986), Hŏ incorporated regional folk songs from Kangwŏn province, shaman songs, farmers’ songs, court music, and classical kagok singing and accompanied the movements of a lion with the music of t’alch’um masked dance - drama (Paek Hyŏnmi 1997, 397–398). This degree of eclecticism has made ch’anggŭk the first single genre to draw on the full range of kugak styles without regard to distinctions of region or class origin—and on this basis ch’anggŭk could claim to represent the nation in a more comprehensive way than any of the established “Cultural Assets.” If this argument carries little weight with the gatekeepers of the “traditional,” it is probably because nationalist discourse has projected the modern monolithic view of kugak back onto the past and the dis- unity of Korea’s traditional musical repertoire, as of its traditional soci- ety, has been downplayed.

A Tradition in the Making?

When I began my fieldwork on ch’anggŭk in 1995, many people involved with the genre in one way or another advised me to study p’an- sori instead, pointing out that the performance conventions of ch’ang- gŭk were still in flux and moving too fast to hold in focus. I replied that the process by which traditions were formed (or not) was precisely what interested me. To study this process is, of course, nothing new. Students of culture and the arts have long since jettisoned the idea that only “pure,” “authentic,” and “stable” traditions are worthy of study. But I believe the study of tradition formation is particularly revealing when the process has been long, conflicted, and still unresolved, as has cer- tainly been the case with ch’anggŭk.

As this essay goes to press, the National Ch’anggŭk Troupe is pre- paring a special performance to celebrate “A Hundred Years of Ch’ang- gŭk ,” scheduled for October 18 –27, 2002. This seems somewhat pre- mature. As we have seen, the earliest contemporary records of ch’anggŭk performances date from 1908, and even Pak Hwang dates the first pro- duction no earlier than 1903. True, the Wŏn’gaksa theatre was opened in 1902, and p’ansori singers performed there from the beginning (Paek Hyŏnmi 1997, 29–39), but we can hardly assume that the tran- sition to ch’anggŭk was instantaneous. Thus the National Ch’anggŭk Troupe appears to be in somewhat of a hurry to claim the sense of tra- dition and stability implied by a hundred-year history. But after review- ing that history, it should come as no surprise that a genre whose rela- tion to the “traditional” has always been problematic should still be jockeying for tradition.

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NOTES

1. Y i Chinsun, director’s note in program of the National Ch’anggŭk Troupe’s production 16, Ch’unhyang-jŏn, September–October 1971. Transla- tions from Korean sources are my own unless otherwise credited.

2. Other than my own publications, the literature on ch’anggŭk in Eng- lish consists largely of chapters and occasional articles by authors whose main interest is in the parent genre, p’ansori. See Jang Yeonok (2000, 116 –122); Kim Woo Ok (1980, 186 –222); Park-Miller (1995, 58 –75); Pihl (1991; 1994, 41–54); Um Hae-kyung (1992, 84–99). Understandably such studies tend to rely on the most accessible Korean secondary sources, and all of them, in my view, contain inaccuracies.

3. For an overview and bibliography of traditional theatre forms in Korea see Killick (2002a, 941–944; 2002b).

4. The literary, musical, and performative aesthetics of p’ansori are dis- cussed in countless studies; perhaps the most accessible in English is Pihl (1994, 69 –109). Detailed studies include Jang Yeonok (2000); Kim Woo Ok (1980); Park-Miller (1995); Um Hae- kyung (1992).

5. At least one writer, however, has sought to defend this story (Kim Jong-cheol 1997).

6. The origins of ch’anggŭk are detailed in Killick (2002b). 7. Some significant differences between the Korean and the Southeast

Asian instruments should also be noted. Both the names and the morphology of the ja-khe (also spelled čhakhë ) and the mì jaùń (mí-gyaùng) reference the crocodile, but no similar zoomorphism is associated with the kŏmun’go. While each instrument has three strings that pass over raised frets, the kŏmun’go has three additional strings that pass over movable bridges.

8. From the call for proposals for the conference “Audiences, Patrons, and Performers in the Performing Arts of Asia,” hosted by the European Foun- dation for Chinese Music Research (CHIME) and the International Institute of Asian Studies (IIAS) at Leiden University, the Netherlands, on August 23 –27, 2000.

9. In tandem with shinpa, the influential Japanese popular songs known as enka started out in the 1880s as political songs before acquiring the senti- mental tone for which they are better known today (Fujie 2002, 371). On the “ new school” and “political” dramas of Japan see Leiter (1997, 588 – 589) and Ortolani (1990, 233 –242).

10. For more details on the Chosŏn Sŏngak Yŏn’guhoe see Killick (1998b).

11. The only scholarly monograph on yŏsŏng kukkŭk to date is Kim Pyŏngch’ŏl (1997). The only published article in English is Killick (1997). On Takarazuka see Berlin (1988) and Robertson (1998).

12. Heather Willoughby (2000, 21–22) quotes some dialogue from Sŏp’yŏnje in analyzing the relationship between p’ansori and han, though she does not adopt my critical stance toward the concept.

13. I have analyzed the structure of these narratives of penetration and its implications for cross-cultural fieldwork in an earlier article (Killick 1995).

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14. Thus the valorizing of resistance to penetration may also help to legitimize patriarchy, as when Korea’s supposedly exceptional frequency of foreign invasion is made to suggest that the nation must be defended by men. See Moon Seungsook (1998, 42).

15. For in-depth analyses of the Intangible Cultural Assets system see Maliangkay (1999) and Yang Jongsung (1994).

16. The activities of the National Ch’anggŭk Troupe and the Ch’ang- gŭk Chŏngnip Wiwŏnhoe are discussed in detail in Killick (2001b).

17. Y i Chinsun, director’s note in program of the National Ch’anggŭk Troupe’s production 16, Ch’unhyang-jŏn, September–October 1971.

18. This obstacle was identified by drama critic Suh Yon-Ho in a review of Hŏ Kyu’s production of Karojigi (reprinted in Suh Yon-Ho 1988, 338 –341).

19. Kang Hanyŏng explained his decision in a seminar (National Ch’anggŭk Troupe 1995, 14).

20. Under the direction of Kim Kwan’gyu, on May 29 –30, 2000, the performance was given in the main hall of the National Center for Korean Traditional Performing Arts (Kungnip Kugagwŏn) in Seoul by a visiting troupe from the National Center for Korean Folk Performing Arts (Kungnip Minsok Kugagwŏn) in Namwŏn.

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