Theatre - The History of Western Korean Theatre

 Theatre - The History of Western Korean Theatre

We took a group of friends to see History of Western Korean Theatre on opening night last night. My old roommate and I have performing arts degrees, one friend works in a completely unrelated entertainment industry, and another friend had no idea what he was getting into and brought bags of snacks like it was a night at the movies. 

He realized that he might’ve been in over his head when the Minister of Culture and MLA gave speeches before the performance. A conversation that always seems to dance at the edge of almost all modern performance work is how to make it understandable for an audience. How avant-garde is too avant-garde? There is a reason that comedy often lampoons dragging your friends to a dance piece where a half dozen people simply writhe in a pile of bodies to another doing handstands blowing a nose whistle. We all laugh at the mental image, not realizing that it could be someone else’s fear of not understanding and looking foolish.

I am pleased to say though that by the time Cuckoo announced “I am an actor” he was all on board. He had confided in me that as the minutes went long immediately after the audience lights faded, we watched Jaha sit meticulously folding a giant origami frog that he lamented having come knowing absolutely nothing. But as I noted, once a rice cooker had a voice, brightly dancing LED colours for a face plate, and its very own spotlight…well, you can’t help but smile at the simple elegance. Cuckoo warns us, this is not a play about learning history, if you want that, “Go read a book”. 

Then Jaha does exactly that and explains to us the actual history of modern Korean theatre. Through the lens of archival footage, he exposes us to dances, costumes, singing, and performances that one would wager the vast majority of the audience have never seen. And that too is by design, he informs us. Because more than a hundred years ago, colonialism and modernization ripped Korea from its theatrical tradition in an effort to conform to British standards. To seem modern, and worldly, the Emperor elevated Shakespeare and Proscenium theatres. That erasure of the Korean tradition was by design, a way to bend people politically to an agenda. A way for occupying Japanese forces to remove a unified remembrance that might give way to resistance. A way to subjugate the artist and force them to make more subservient art.

Jaha intertwines these musings with a personal arc, exploring his relationship with his grandmother and how she must have felt living through such a tumultuous time, even if she never truly mentions theatre. He confronts his demons about those trials, he reminisces on his love for her, and he listens with us to the archive she left for him, her voice. It is a sublime dance of informative, emotional, intellectual, and despair that Jaha guides us through.

It is through these overtures that Jaha’s HoWKT connected with my friend. Educated him on the subject just as well as any book or documentary, and gave him a jump-off point with which to discuss his own feelings about theatre, colonialism and family. We spent an hour after the show chatting extensively about elements and moments. “I’m really glad you made me go,” he tells me after. It was outside his wheelhouse, these kinds of live performing arts. Surrounded by people on all sides in a dark theatre, projections of monsters and nebulous space, a remote-controlled frog with red eyes, and an interwoven dance of white silk to Korean singing. But I also think about Jaha’s rumination, “I fantasize about what kind of theatre maker I would have been, without the cultural colonization of Korea by foreign forces.”

Me too Jaha.

The History of Western Korean Theatre plays one more time on January 25th at the Roundhouse. I highly recommend you go see it.