Performing Korea (Patrice Pavis (Auth.) )

PERFORMING KOREA
Patrice Pavis
Performing Korea
Patrice Pavis
Performing Korea
Translated by Joel Anderson
Patrice Pavis
Honorary Fellow
Queen Mary University of London
London, United Kingdom
ISBN 978-1-137-44490-5 ISBN 978-1-137-44491-2 (eBook)

DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-44491-2
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To my colleagues and students at the Korea National University
of the Arts in 2011 and 2012
Prologue: Empire of Signs: From Japan
Towards Korea?
Often, during my two-year stay in Korea (2011–2012), I asked myself what

book might best help me understand this new environment. Roland Barthes’
cult book, Empire of Signs, often came to mind. The book is not about Korea,
but rather the Japan of the late 1960s. Nevertheless, despite all the obvious
differences, it seemed useful for elucidating the preoccupations of my stay,
whenever I wanted to “read” the signs of a culture that was “new to me.”
After all, how can you speak of a theater, a civilization, a society, or a foreign
nation when you do not know the language, the customs, or the politics?
And so I chose Empire of Signs as vade mecum, nevertheless conscious of
the difficulties and misunderstandings that this choice would surely engen-
der. The book, published in French in 1970, was written by Barthes in 1969,
I found myself in the Empire of Signs. In the grip of a strange kingdom. Like
Roland Barthes before me, during his travels in Japan.
To find my point of view. To give a meaning—sense, value, and direc-
tion to my observations on Korea.
To be a flâneur in this strange “Land of the Morning Calm.” To grab a
few impressions. Examining with a well-meaning or enthralled gaze a few
works. Not forcefully transmitting something that might get damaged in
the process.
I still have a few thousand photographs that I cannot bring myself to
look at or to sort out.
Now, for the work of sorting and mourning, all I have is writing.
vii
viii PROLOGUE: EMPIRE OF SIGNS: FROM JAPAN TOWARDS KOREA?
following three short trips to Japan in 1966 and 1967. I reread the book at
the start of my stay, with a particular lecture at the university in mind, more
than 40 years after having discovered it when it came out, long before the
semiological wave of the 1970s.
In the teaching work I undertook there, my reflections once back “home”,
and when accounting for my time in Korea to friends, readers, and myself, I
never stopped questioning the Barthes “method”. It is a method that precisely
is not one, since the author is “in no way claiming to represent or to analyze
reality itself” (3), seeking only to “isolate somewhere in the world (faraway) a
certain number of features (a term employed in linguistics), and out of these
features deliberately form a system. It is this system which I shall call: Japan.”1
(3). How did Barthes manage to describe a “system” as complex as “Japan”?
And, more to the point, how, from contemporary Korea, can one “deliberately
form a [comparable] system” (3)? As a last resort, I called upon the protec-
tion of R. B.; I attempted to find his point or points of view. But was this still
possible, or, rather, still reasonable? To which Barthes should I devote myself?
Barthes’ Point of View

He himself identified, in his Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes (1974),
three steps to his approach: (1) A demystification phase (in Mythologies);
(2) A moment of semiological science; (3) An approach to textual theory.
Empire of Signs belongs to this third and final phase, the point at which
Barthes abandoned his condemnation of “bourgeois” ideology, and came
to be suspicious of the pseudo-science of semiology, becoming definitively
open to The Pleasure of the Text,2 to writing “in place of life” as much in
the place of life as in life’s place.3 The 1966–1970 period marked in the
academic world a break with structuralism and the earliest form of semiol-
ogy, something thinkers like Derrida, Lacan, and Barthes all noted at the
famous 1966 “poststructuralist” conference at Johns Hopkins University.
It was nevertheless still as a semiologist, and not as an anthropologist,
sociologist or philosopher of ideas and mentalities that Barthes became
interested in the “Japan-text.”4 He does not turn himself over to a socio-
economic analysis of Japan in the 1960s. Scrutinizing a few traits of the
“Japan-System,” he still locates himself in a semiology of objects and cul-
tural practices; he remains in search of what seem to him to be indexes,
traces of the Nippon culture. Unsurprisingly, his gaze is drawn to everyday
objects and sensations linked to the body. Food and cooking, sex and
PROLOGUE: EMPIRE OF SIGNS: FROM JAPAN TOWARDS KOREA? ix
sexuality, are all “incidents of the body.” But his point of view changes
with each observed object.
His point of view is, however, never that of a self-assured Westerner:
ironic, and bloated with superiority, imagining himself to know the func-
tioning of another culture simply because he is able to see from a universal
perspective, or at least believes as much. The symbolic systems he extracts
are always arbitrarily chosen; the Orient, he admits, is “indifferent” to
him: if he appreciates Japan, he does not accord it an inferior or superior
worth, and seeks neither its essence nor its secrets. His interest in Japan is
more egotistical and individualist: the country, he points out in no uncer-
tain terms, would not have revealed anything to him if he had tried to
photograph it, to gather some trace; but it did help him to write: “The
author has never, in any sense, photographed Japan. Rather, he has done
the opposite: Japan has starred him with any number of ‘flashes’; or, better
still, Japan has afforded him a situation of writing” (4). Retrospectively,
we actually realize that this “situation of writing” is that upon which the
Japanese “empire of signs” is founded. But this empire is also the influ-
ence (the empire, in French) that writing exercised on the author Barthes,
already in this work and throughout the ten remaining years of his life.
This is certainly not the first time that an ethnologist has claimed that a
foreign country has revealed to him his inner world. Barthes gives us permis-
sion to engage our subjectivity and our creativity in the study of a “foreign”
human reality. Unfortunately, I dare not do the same here, for numerous
reasons, and not just through timidity or an understandable inferiority com-
plex. On the one hand, I am hesitant to place myself too fully in a “situation
of writing,” since I am still seeking a somewhat objective truth as regards the
objects I intend to interpret, and I still feel a bit constrained by academic
and editorial institutions to distinguish poetic and theoretical writing. On
the other hand, I am no longer, like Barthes with Japan, trying to sketch a
“Korea-object.” The metaphor of a system seems rather problematic to me;
it would not allow me to address the Korean examples I have chosen for this
book. Finally, and here I concur with Barthes, I am not seeking “the very
fissure of the symbolic” (4), the fissure that “cannot appear on the level of cul-
tural products: what is presented here does not appertain (or so it is hoped) to
art, to Japanese urbanism, to Japanese cooking” (4). Apart from the chapter
on “falling” as a metaphor for a fragile Korea, my Korean examples are
always cultural products, specifically artistic ones. These are thus conscious
artistic constructions, and not practices of everyday life: a theater produc-
tion, a painting, an opera, a photograph, an installation, a choreography.
x PROLOGUE: EMPIRE OF SIGNS: FROM JAPAN TOWARDS KOREA?
Nevertheless, and here I do sign up to the Barthesian project, I realize that

I cannot approach artistic works without resituating them in their socio-
cultural context, without getting heavily involved in Korean everyday life, or
immersed in a Korean atmosphere that is still unknown to me.
Deep down, like Barthes 50 years ago already, I feel caught up in a still-
poststructuralist conception of our era. This conception has taken its distance
from an overly functionalist semiology, centered on the objective description of
its object; but, at the same time, it is still in search of a method and of a system
(a text, in the semiological sense) that is more precise and technical than the
new metaphors of performance and performativity. Indeed, moving from the
semiology of the 1960s towards the “situation of writing,” Barthes anticipates
the performance studies of the 1980s. He abandons a system of objects or rel-
evant characteristics of a semiological whole, leaning towards a place in the
“situation of writing,” a dynamics of writing that is now called performative
writing. His performance of writing is certainly eminently probing, but at
the cost of abandoning any objective point of view on reality, as if, in Barthes’
Japan as in my Korea, “the sign does away with itself before any particular
signified has had the time to ‘take’” (108).
The “fissure of the symbolic,” which Barthes sought between signi-
fied and signifier to protect the object from reduction to a fixed meaning,
enables him to “live in the interstice, delivered from any fulfilled meaning”
(9). It is thanks to this fissure that “in Japan the body exists, acts, shows
itself, gives itself, without hysteria, without narcissism, but according to
a pure—though subtly discontinuous—erotic project” (10). This body
is all the more erotic because the words that accompany it do not create
a screen for the contemplation or the expectation of the observer. This
fissure is not simply contradiction, the bad faith of Barthes’ objects of
ideology in the 1950s, driven out by the mythologies of everyday life; it
is perhaps a hairline crack in the certainties of a culture, illuminated by
Brechtian distantiation, still the hiatus between the signifier and the signi-
fied, between the pre-symbolic and the symbolic. Hence the dream: “to
know a foreign (alien) language and yet not to understand it: to perceive
the difference in it without that difference ever being recuperated by the
superficial sociality of discourse, communication or vulgarity” (6).
This attitude of the observer is uncomfortable. On the one hand, the
Western essayist hopes to understand the world he is discovering; on the other,
he knows only too well that such an understanding is more intuitive than
objective, that it will seem debatable to some (the locals) and to others (for-
eigners). The will to remain in the interstice does not prevent awareness of
PROLOGUE: EMPIRE OF SIGNS: FROM JAPAN TOWARDS KOREA? xi
deceiving everyone, including oneself. Such witnessing seems useful to me: an

understanding from inside as much as a vision from outside. These points of
view have in any case only moved closer together with the progress of globaliza-
tion, specifically since the 1960s. The confrontation and mixing of different
points of view ends in perspectives being confused, rather than converging.
Often my Korean colleagues would express interest in my perspective, as a
Western scholar, on “their” theater, their pansori, or their literature; but I
often felt a certain reticence, an understandable one at that, to distance their
cultural objects with the Hegelian telescope, dissect them with the Cartesian
scalpel, or critique with Marxist or Brechtian jargon, without having some
idea of their Buddhist philosophy, their Confucian education, and their rules
of everyday life. Since I was working on artworks, and not on objects from
everyday life like Barthes, I felt somewhat excused, and almost forgiven.
The Objects Analyzed by Barthes

The strength of Barthes’ analysis precisely lies in not settling for interpret-
ing artistic products from an aesthetic and subjective point of view, but
instead analyzing everyday practices drawn from his own experience of
wandering Japan. Food is at the top of the list for any tourist, even a lead-
ing semiologist! Because, “Japanese food also takes the least immediately
visual quality, the quality most deeply engaged in the body…” (12). Rice,
for the French semiologist (and we should not be surprised!), is a textual,
fragmentable object: “Cooked rice … can be defined only by a contradic-
tion of substance; it is at once cohesive and detachable; its substantial
destination is the fragment, the clump, the volatile conglomerate…” (12).
Should these reflections on the fragmentary character of rice be taken seri-
ously? From a culinary or metaphysical perspective, perhaps; from a poetic
perspective, probably, since one dreams of a poetry to describe objects,
like that of Francis Ponge in his The Voice of Things.5 But this poetic culi-
nary vision always leads to very affirmative anthropological conclusions,
to the umpteenth comparison of Occident and Orient: “Occidental food,
heaped up, dignified, swollen to the majestic, linked to a certain operation
of prestige, always tends toward the heavy, the grand, the abundant, the
copious; the Oriental follows the converse movement, and tends toward
the infinitesimal” (15). The opposition of the bulky and the delicate, a
common site of the rivalry between the Occident and the Orient, end-
lessly repeats itself, as if it were a historical and eternal truth, throughout
the book. Thus the knife and fork, Western aggressive, predatory (or even
xii PROLOGUE: EMPIRE OF SIGNS: FROM JAPAN TOWARDS KOREA?
paternal) tools, are contrasted with chopsticks: “maternal, they tirelessly

perform the gesture which creates the mouthful, leaving to our alimentary
manners, armed with pikes and knives, that of predation” (18).
Barthes’ observations are not wrong, even when applied to Korea, whose
food is nevertheless very different from that of Japan or China. If, as accord-
ing to the German expression “der Mensch ist was et isst”, (‘you are what you
eat’), homo koreanus is impregnated by the essence and the taste of kimchi:
fermented and spiced cabbage, served with every single meal, like bread in
France. Is kimchi the key to the Korean psyche? No doubt, but it would require
the talent and imagination of R. B. to know how to describe the texture and
the configuration. A fan and practitioner of kimchi before the Lord, I can but
confirm the virtue of kimchi as accompaniment and metatext in all its forms
and all its meals. Its very spicy character, which is striking to any Westerner,
prepares the Western eater to pass the entrance examination for Korean cook-
ing. He must first of all accept that a spiced vegetable might take the place
of bread and be allied with rice, the other must of any Korean meal, and be
served as both a condiment and a main course (at least often in the past).
Kimchi is a link, a universal shifter between people, classes, genders, and
observances. For a Western visitor, it also marks a required liminal passage
towards a very “different” gustatory structure, which ends either in enthusi-
astic acceptance or definitive rejection.
Most of the objects that intrigue Barthes lead him to comparisons with
Western practices, which are deemed rather masculine. For instance, coin-
operated machines: our cafe pinball machine, Barthes assures us, “sustains
a symbolism of penetration: the point is to possess, by a well-placed thrust,
the pinup girl who, all lit up on the panel of the machine, allures and
waits” (28). The Japanese pachinko is force-fed by the players: “from time
to time the machine, filled to capacity, releases its diarrhea of marbles”
(29). Barthes sees in this a confirmation of the opposition between a male
and aggressive, imperialist and predatory Occident and a feminine, passive
and conquered Orient.
These simplifications actually capture practices and relations between
genders illustrated in acting techniques. The opposition between activity and
passivity is not merely sexual; it is transposed into the political dimension. It
certainly corresponds to the historical reality of Western imperialism and its
accompanying orientalism. But should we not today, 50 years after this visit
to Japan, after the decolonization of the whole world in the 1950s, challenge
such dichotomies bastardized into essentialist stereotypes?
PROLOGUE: EMPIRE OF SIGNS: FROM JAPAN TOWARDS KOREA? xiii
To re-evaluate Barthes’ sexologico-cultural position, a position very

focused on the Japan and the bipolar world of the 1960s, it is probably
necessary to be attentive to another incidental remark concerning the dif-
ference of sexes and of sexuality: “in Japan – in that country I am calling
Japan – sexuality is in sex, not elsewhere; in the United States, it is the
contrary; sex is everywhere, except in sexuality” (28–29). What does this
tell us? Was this really the case then, and is it still today, in Japan or in
Korea? In the United States, at that time, sex did indeed display itself
everywhere, in all types of representation (advertising, the free press, the
media). But sexuality, eroticism, and relations between the sexes were a
great deal more timid, colored even by prudishness or puritanism, and so
sexual liberty seemed to have stopped at the couple’s door and assumed
sexuality. Conversely, the Japanese society of that time did not represent
sex so openly or publicly; the society was modest, even closing in on itself:
it was necessary to search behind the masks a bit, for a less public, but thus
a more concentrated, sexuality that did not need to exhibit itself openly
or crudely (in the media or in everyday language, for example), or to be
voluntarily limited in its individual or familial manifestations.
Fifty years later, in Japan as in Korea, things have changed a great deal.
And yet, Barthes’ comment remains relevant, if one continues to compare
Japan or Korea with the USA or with the Americanized world. The media and
the increasingly insidious forms of advertising and neoliberal ideology have
certainly invaded Japanese or Korean culture, but the distinction between sex
and sexuality and their usage in different contexts remains relevant and helps
us reflect on the other—non-American or non-European —culture.
What about sex in contemporary Korea? Big question! One must turn
to the media and advertising: sex is highly present, but is not on display in
any crude way. In public places, couples often will not even hold hands, and
homosexual couples certainly do not. Dance and theater shows and musicals,
as well as the actors themselves, are dazzlingly beautiful, and certainly very
sexy, but they are rarely vulgar or direct. The limits of the representation of sex
seem to be rather clearly defined. The representation of sexual scenes is not con-
trolled by any religion or ideology, but is implicitly regulated through a strict
educational grounding that remains Confucian. In the mass media (adver-
tising in public spaces and on television), in songs, K-pop, or musicals, sex is
only suggested, and specially prepared for the gaze of middle-aged men. The
woman in these arenas is very young—almost a Lolita—and there are few
middle-aged women to be seen. The media ideal, but also that of companies
and large industries is a young woman who is beautiful but voiceless, child-
xiv PROLOGUE: EMPIRE OF SIGNS: FROM JAPAN TOWARDS KOREA?
less, and with no future on the job market after the age of forty, “disposable”
once used, quickly “ejected” from the company. A seductive appearance has
become a categorical imperative, an obsession justifying all manner of plastic
surgery, making Korea a haven for “surgery-tourism.”6
Package, bouquet, box: in these seemingly trivial objects, Barthes per-
ceives the trace of a writing of the void, which is also the key to politeness:
“the Japanese bouquet has a volume; … you can move your body into
the interstice of its branches, into the space of its stature, not in order to
read it (to read its symbolism) but to follow the trajectory of the hand
which has written it: a true writing, since it produces a volume and since,
forbidding our reading to be the simple decoding of a message (however
loftily symbolic), it permits this reading to repeat the course of the writ-
ing’s labor” (45). To appreciate the bouquet is to know how to read it,
interpret it; “to follow the trajectory of the hand which has written it”
(45). Thus, to write is to make a movement; to read is to repeat this move-
ment, to retrace its steps. The body moves into the interstice between the
branches: it positions them, and it creates the concrete experience of a
journey through still-unformed material: the receiver of the bouquet, the
reader, must repeat this journey and imagine her own. The bouquet/the
text will effectively be traveled and rewritten by the user.
For the bouquet as for the text, there are two kinds of reading: a pas-
sive reading for easily readable text; an active reading for writerly text,
demanding that the reader perform an act just as creative as writing. The
gift and the box that inevitably encloses it fascinate Barthes because of
the emptiness they transport: “The gift is alone:/it is touched/neither by
generosity/nor by gratitude/the soul does not contaminate it” (67). The
Empire of Signs compares Western impoliteness and Japanese politeness.
Politeness is, in the West, “regarded with suspicion”, courtesy “pass[es]
for a distance (if not an evasion, in fact) or a hypocrisy” (63). Whereas the
other politeness, the Japanese kind (and we might add the Korean kind),
“by the scrupulosity of its codes, the distinct graphism of its gestures,
and even when it seems to us exaggeratedly respectful (i.e., to our eyes,
‘humiliating’) because we read it, in our manner, according to a metaphys-
ics of the person – this politeness is a certain exercise of the void…” (65).
Greeting takes forms and meanings that are very different according to
the specific cultural region. It is not easy for a Westerner to understand
that politeness, like writing or haïku, is an empty sign, “The Form is Empty,
says – and repeats – a Buddhist aphorism” (68). Even more so, since the
choice is not between a Japanese body that deeply bows and a Western
PROLOGUE: EMPIRE OF SIGNS: FROM JAPAN TOWARDS KOREA? xv
body that refuses any bodily movement of submission. The choice, rather,
is between different techniques of the body, between a deep inclination,
repeated and rehearsed from earliest childhood, and a facial expression
or a handshake, considered a sufficient symbolic movement and a neutral
gesture.
With this question of politeness, Barthes remains, half a century later, rel-
evant, less as regards a philosophical difference between the West and the East,
and more in terms of the difficulties of changing gestural habit, of transform-
ing one technique of the body into another. In accordance with the theory of
Mauss, there is actually nothing striking in the fact that a Westerner has
trouble changing bodies when changing culture.
Over the last five decades, the marked differences between different tech-
niques of the body used in greetings have blurred, as a result of the process of
homogenization entailed by globalization. Interference has occurred between
the two major systems of politeness. One can no longer contrast as mutually
exclusive the empty formalism of Asia and the guilty conscience of America.
Sometimes, faced with a Western interlocutor, the Korean simplifies or modi-
fies the way of greeting. She extends her hand, to put you at ease. You respond
offering your own, but with a bit of a delay and a certain reticence. She
notices and “feels silly” for having wanted to play the Westerner instead of
being herself. You thus realize that you have inadvertently caused her to make
a faux-pas. If by chance you attempted a bowing of the head, or of the upper
body, you too will find yourself in an awkward position. But this inversion of
systems sometimes leads in the end to a moment of gestural relaxation and
an ironic physical introduction to the other’s culture. This involuntary pas-
de-deux is typical of the difficulties of intercultural communication. It is at
the same time characteristic of the imbrication of cultures, of points of view,
of subjectivities. It suggests that the great dichotomies, like those described by
Barthes half a century ago, are on the verge of diminution, but not of extinc-
tion, despite global standardization and the deployment of globish language,
behaviour, and thought.
In his observations on habits and customs, practices of everyday life, we
see Barthes at his best. Applying his method to Korean contemporary life,
we would most likely find details that would intrigue the Western visitor,
beginning with the politeness and amiability of the people we meet. I have
chosen to reserve these observations for another kind of discourse, less every-
day and more academic: discourse on performances. Beyond the objects and
practices of everyday life, what counts are mentalities, the attitudes of people
and specifically those of artists. In a world that is more and more globalized
xvi PROLOGUE: EMPIRE OF SIGNS: FROM JAPAN TOWARDS KOREA?
and mixed, I abandon the illusion of being able to distinguish the individual
characters and the specific cultural characteristics. The challenge, for today’s
observer, is perceiving differences despite the steamroller of globalization, not
explaining Korean culture through European culture. Globalization erases
differences; we lose any sense of specific local characteristics, as well as our
criteria of distinction for profound differences or surface variations. What
catches my attention, and confuses me, is thus not exotic scenery or practices of
everyday life; it is mentalities, ideological presuppositions of social communi-
cation, the implicit principles that might be considered obvious and unques-
tionable for Koreans, but which stand out for me. These implicit principles
are, for example, the way of working, of reading a text, of rehearsing, of
obeying orders or authorities, and the resulting dramaturgical or aesthetic
choices. I must note that it is difficult to separate cultural, political, aesthetic,
and artistic factors. It is impossible to disentangle Korea, and to find myself:
I am neither in this culture, nor completely outside it, but perhaps to the
side, at its side. Was this not also Barthes’ position with Japan: facing the
Empire while in its grip? More even than him, I lose myself, and I understand
one thing at least: I can only speak of this country and its inhabitants from
behind the mask of fiction.
The Future of the Barthes Method

The Empire of Signs remains in any case a major book that has opened
the eyes of several generations of researchers, and has proposed a path for
many: semiologists in search of a polymorphous object, theorists of the
text and of writing, anthropologists of the everyday, analysts of cultural
performances in their different incarnations. This model constitutes the
book’s renewed modernity in semiology, ethnology, theories of text and
culture, phenomenology, and ultimately in all the humanities disciplines
benefitting from Barthes’ influence on their thought.
We must nevertheless keep from mechanically transposing Barthes’
reflections on Japan, a Japan that is more textual and poetic than soci-
ological and political. Are all these observations verifiable? Not readily,
however subtle the discourse of the Barthes method. Should we ask the
Japanese whether this hymn to their culture managed to capture their
society and their soul? Not necessarily: they neither hold a monopoly on
Japan nor do they enjoy the necessary distance from their culture. In any
case, these Parisian subtleties are easily lost on anyone who has not care-
fully followed the author’s journey around the Left Bank.
PROLOGUE: EMPIRE OF SIGNS: FROM JAPAN TOWARDS KOREA? xvii
Can we, then—returning to my initial question—apply the analysis of

these Japanese signs to the South Korean peninsula? Nothing could be less
certain! But you won’t know until you try, and try while remaining critical
of Barthes’ “imperial” method and open to other possible approaches.
Some of the claims in Barthes’ essay might trouble the reader if taken
at face value, rather than as a poetic meditation on cultural difference. For
example, the comparison between Asian and Caucasian eyelids: Barthes
here sees a difference between the Western eye and the Japanese face,
a difference that is both physical (obviously) and metaphysical: “The
Western eye is subject to a whole mythology of the soul, central and
secret, whose fire, sheltered in the orbital cavity, radiates toward a fleshy,
sensuous, passional exterior; but the Japanese face is without moral hier-
archy; it is entirely alive, even vivid (contrary to the legend of Oriental
hieratism), because its morphology cannot be read ‘in depth,’ i.e., accord-
ing to the axis of an inwardness; its model is not sculptural but scrip-
tural…” (102). We clearly recognize the Barthesian notion of the soul
as a profound instance that is exteriorized in a physical expression of the
passions. On the other hand, we understand his vision of the Asian face
as an impenetrable surface of writing that does not produce an interior
and prior signified. But this polarized vision is hardly convincing, as we
cannot really see the Japanese face as a pure exteriority, a writing without
signifieds, a surface without psychic vibrations. This comparison might
make us smile, or might anger an ethnologist, but only if we deny Barthes
the poetic licence of a metaphor suggesting that expressiveness is more
or less accepted depending on the culture. But is the form of the eyelids
therefore a consequence of cultural and metaphysical differences, differ-
ences that translate into a different morphology of the face? We realize
that supposedly objective observations of bodies and objects in the human
environment are, in reality, merely the fantasy projections, poetic visions,
or metaphysical conceptions of the author.
Then why not, we might ask, simply call on poetry, instead using a
pseudo-scientific discourse? Travel writers, like Victor Segalen, Blaise
Cendrars, or Nicolas Bouvier also surrendered to a poetic account of
their discoveries of distant peoples and cultures. Adopting the style of
obsessional and “objective” analysis, the poetry of Francis Ponge provides
another possible model. Barthes keeps up the theoretical speculation: he
never makes the leap; his writing does not present itself as poetry or the
book as a novel. With the benefit of hindsight, however, we observe that
after Empire of Signs, Barthes’ works—from Roland Barthes by Roland
xviii PROLOGUE: EMPIRE OF SIGNS: FROM JAPAN TOWARDS KOREA?
Barthes to A Lover’s Discourse and Camera Lucida—become autobio-

graphical and/or fictional. They achieve a fragile balance between elevated
theoretical writing and an auto-fiction, a mixture of indirect personal con-
fession and fictional inventiveness. It is as if Japan had placed him forever
in a “situation of writing” (4), but of mixed writing, whose object became
a photographic self-portrait taken by the unknown, “novelistic object” (3)
that he had come to observe: Japan.
As for me, having neither the audacity nor indeed the talent of Roland B.,
I wondered how I might take him at his word and allow Korea to photograph
me and, if also possible, to place me in a “situation of writing.” Each morn-
ing when walking to the University, I passed two mirrors situated at a curve
in the street. I would first take a photograph of a cart and of two brightly
coloured cones, arranged differently each time. Then, I would photograph
myself and another slice of reality in one of the mirrors: a very tricky exercise,
since the ideal angle was impossible to find. No passer-by seeing me taking
photographs of parking cones and a mirror ever made any comment, nobody
called the police, like they would in Germany, or the psychiatric hospital, as
they would in France (I imagine). But, one day, a nun from the Buddhist
temple opposite my place looked at me with a mixture of shock and pity, and
murmured: “But why?” Having thought that my daily act bore witness to the
impermanence of the world, I was disarmed by her question.
They say that we only see in the other (the other person or the other culture)
that which we project of ourselves. I would test this adage on a daily basis,
never managing to place in the same frame an original piece of the world,
a fragment of my body, and my view of both. Until, one day, after several
months, when I discovered a little inscription chiselled into a corner of the
mirror, a sentence in English, hard to read on the reflective material: “I
flooded the world, to see the reflection of myself on its surface.” I never quite
managed to photograph the sentence in its entirety, without truncating it.
It was only when I abandoned the idea of including a part of my reflection
in the mirror, of wanting to authenticate my discovery, that I managed to
photograph the phrase without butchering it, and also managed to capture
the reflection of a lady passing by, perhaps worried by my actions, but also a
mute and kindly witness of this Korean world in which I was submerged,
and which resisted my reading. From that point on, my attitude towards this
faraway country, towards my research, and towards others started to change.
I understood that there would be no point in flooding the world with my sim-
plifications, with my theories, or with tears shed for the past.
Prologue: Empire of Signs: From Japan Towards Korea? xix
Notes
1. Quotations by Barthes are from Empire of Signs, trans. Richard Howard,
New York, Hill and Wang, 1982. Passages in roman type are reflections on
Empire of Signs; those in italics refer to my stay in Korea.
2. To borrow from the title of his 1973 book.
3. See the remarkable intellectual biography of Barthes by Marie Gil: Roland
Barthes au lieu de la vie, Paris, Flammarion, 2012.
4. A term—“texte-Japon”—that Maurice Pinguet takes up in his essay on
Empire of Signs and his book, Le texte Japon, Paris, Seuil, 2009.
5. New York, McGraw-Hill, 1972.
6. Lili Barbery-Coulon, « La beauté fait son marché en Corée », Le Magazine
du Monde, 9 Novembre 2013, pp. 47–53.
Acknowledgements
The idea for this book, and a great deal of encouragement, came from
Professor Lee Meewon, my colleague at the Korean National University of
the Arts. I thank her for her trust and enduring help during my stay there.
My relationship with Korea is a long love story for which many people
are responsible; the list of which would be very long, almost as long as
Korea itself. I remember my friends and colleagues Professors Choe Junho
and Shin Hyun-Sook who, even back in Paris in the 1980s, told me all
about their country, and later invited me there for short visits. Professor
Kim Yun-Cheol, Dean of the School of Drama at the time of my stay,
subsequently invited me to KNUA for a longer visit, during which I
started taking the teaching notes that would later become this book. My
interpreter and regular translator Mok Jung-Won also guided my journey
through Seoul’s performing arts, practicing a spontaneous dramaturgical
analysis of all the performances we saw together, which she would sum-
marize, and almost translate, live for me.
During these years, I enjoyed the company of all my colleagues, who
assisted me in every possible way, from helping me find theaters, concert
halls, exhibitions, museums, to recommending excellent restaurants, as
well, obviously, as offering insights into their culture and their own cre-
ative work. I am happy to name them as a token of my gratitude:
Choi Jun-Ho, Choi Sang-Chul, Choi Young-Ae, Hwang Ha-Young,
Hwang Ji-U, Kim Kwang-Lim, Kim Kyung-Wook, Kim Mi-Hee, Kim
Soo-Gi, Kim Suk-Man, Kim Sun-Ae, Kim Tae-Wong, Ko Hee-Sun, Kwon
Hee-Chul, Lee Mee-Won, Lee Sang-Woo, Lee Seung-Yeop, Min Eon-Ok,
xxi
xxii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Nam Geung-Ho, Nam Jeong-Ho, No Yi-Jeong, Park Geun-Hyun, Park

Sang-Ha, Park Sang-Hyun, Seo Chung-Sik, Yoon Jeong-Seop.
I am also grateful to all the artists and colleagues from other univer-
sities who would occasionally invite me to talk with their audiences or
students. I could not have written about all their valuable work, and must
stress that this study in no way claims to be an objective representation of
the arts in Korea, nor even of Korean performing arts in 2011–2012. I
chose to focus on a few case-studies, those for which I possessed sufficient
documentation and which would—I hoped at least—give my readers a
“foreign,” if strange, point of view on different aspects and trends in the
arts as I had experienced them myself.
For parts of this study, I wrote directly in English, and was fortunate to
be able to count on the strong editing skills and sound academic advice of
a few friends and colleagues: Howard Blanning, Tara McAllister and Lissa
Renaud Tyler, who had themselves been visiting professors at KNUA. Back
in Europe, Mischa Twitchin and Les Essif also helped me with the art of
expressing in English my initially French thoughts about Korean culture.
Fortunately, Joel Anderson, my faithful translator, in all senses of the term,
provided the final translation and editing of these chapters and of their
ultimate versions for the book. Again, and as ever, I appreciate his invalu-
able and disinterested help.
This work was supported by the National Research Foundation of Korea
grant funded by the Korean Government (NRF-2012S1A6A4016909),
to whom I am also deeply indebted for making my stay and my research
possible.
Contents
Part 1 Introduction to the Examples and to the Method 1
1 Theater and Theater Research in Korea and

Elsewhere: Where Are We, Where Are We Going? 3
Rerouting Theory: What (a) History! 5
Our Re-search Engines 8
Research Blockages 12
New Fields 15
Rerouting Theater, or Rerouting the Society of the
Spectacles Theater? 21
Rerouting, Diverting, Redirecting, the Politics of
the University? Changing Course? A Few Conclusions 26
Notes 31
2 Globalization in a Few Korean Performances 35

Globalization 36
Intercultural Theater, Globalized Theater 39
Globalization in Production and Reception 42
Glocalization 49
Notes 55
xxiii
xxiv Contents
3 Mise en Scène Made in Korea 59

Hypothesis on Mise en Scène 60
Koreanization: Examples and Strategies 62
Representation of One’s Own Culture: From Inter to Global 65
Examples of Koreanization: Oh, Tai-Sok’s Tempest 68
A Few Tentative Final Conclusions 77
Notes 79
Part 2 On a Few Theatre Productions 83
4 A Few Contemporary French and Korean

Playwrights: A Comparison 85
Intimacy 86
Politics 90
History 93
Narrative and Storytelling 96
Conclusions 99
Notes 100
5 Questions to the Past: The Puppet Play

Batyr Mamai by Kim Kwang Lim 103
Notes 114
6 I, Na Hyeseok, the Undesirable: A Stage Requiem

by Kim Minseung 115
Dramaturgy 117
A Discursive and Narrative Space 120
Note 124
7 A Few Productions by Kim Hyun-Tak:

125
Death of a Salesman, Medea on Media, The Maids
Death of a Salesman 126
Scenography 127
Account of the Stage Action 128
Contents xxv
Adaptation 128
Acting 131
Media 134
Dramaturgy and Adaptation 135
Corporality 137
Notes 140
8 On Lee Young-Seok’s Production of Orwell’s

Coming Up for Air 143
Narration and Storytelling 145
A New Technique for Acting and Telling: Tellacting? 146
Tellacting Style and Technique 147
Historical Background 149
Mise en Scène 149
Notes 152
9 Is Modernized Pansori Political? On Lee Jaram’s

Ukchuk-Ga (Mother Courage and her Children) 153
Analysis of a Scene 155
Dramaturgical Adaptation 158
Physical and Vocal Adaptation 160
Dramaturgy of a Rolling Stone 164
Voice and Affect 165
The Politics of Modernized Pansori 169
Notes 173
Part 3 On a Few Theatre-Dance and Dance Performances 175
10 Woyzeck as Dance Theater: A Comparison Between

Im Do-Wan and Josef Nadj 177
Adaptation 180
Transfiguration and Interpretation 181
Formalism and Organicity: Their Effects and their Reception 182
The Intercultural 184
Notes 187
xxvi Contents
11 A Seoul Song for Hong Sehee: On the Dance Solo

A Song for You 189
Imageless Memories 193
12 Self-Portrait: Three Stages of Life. On a

Solo by Nam Jeong-ho 195
Part 4 On a Few Cultural Performances 201
13 Parody in K-pop: An Analysis of the Video Nobody,

by JYP, with the Wonder Girls 203
An Example of Imitation by the Fans: Wonder
Girls vs Wonder Baby 210
What Conclusions? 212
Notes 214
14 Flowers and Tears. On Park Eunyoung’s Installation

and Multimedia Theater 215
General Disorientation 215
Installation and Apparatus 217
The Theater of Yesteryear 218
The Double Play of the Image 220
Painting or Calligraphy? 222
Notes 223
15 On Falling 225
Notes 244
Part 5 Epilogue 245
16 Can a Foreigner Watch the Performance of Others? 247

Questions 248
The Foreign: That Which Changes our Identity 249
Contents xxvii
A Spectator Who Doesn’t Have to Watch Out? 250

Which Global Theory? 254
Koreanization or Globalization? 255
A Spectator on the Road to Globalization? 259
Notes 263
Index 267
PART 1
Introduction to the Examples and to

the Method
CHAPTER 1
Theater and Theater Research in Korea

and Elsewhere: Where Are We, Where Are
We Going?
I remember asking myself, many years ago, it was in 1985 in Barcelona,

whether theater is a minority art and whether interculturalism would help
theater become a universal art, so that all peoples would be able to under-
stand it and enjoy it.
It would be just as impossible today as it was then to answer these fine
questions, but the difference is that the world, like ourselves, has changed
a great deal in the intervening time. In a word: we have all become minori-
ties, in our identity as scholars, in our art of the stage, in terms of the
political and economic weight we have in society. But I do not want to
In Barcelona, in July 2013, only just back from Korea, I wanted to use the
platform of the International Federation for Theatre Research to present my
conclusions on the state of research in the world, and particularly in Korea.
I went to that country determined to take inspiration from their working
methods for creating a mise en scène and in performance analysis. I found my
hosts were very familiar with the latest artistic trends (postmodern, postdramatic,
you name it), concerned not to miss out on the next American or European
critical wave. They had seen Wilson, Lepage, and Suzuki, who had all made stops
in Seoul. My Korean students, like their British or French counterparts, struggled
to wield the tools of classical dramaturgical analysis. My actors quickly “found”
their acting style and did not bother to find the system of mise en scène. I was
unsure about returning to Brechtian notions, to political analysis. Then, finally, I
threw myself into it: my seminars became at times a theoretical monologue. And
in addition to that, my colleagues set about ordering articles on postdramaturgy,
postdramatic theater, performativity, globalization.
© The Author(s) 2017 3

P. Pavis, Performing Korea, DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-44491-2_1
4 P. PAVIS
begin, nor indeed end, on a pessimistic note. I am not claiming either to

make up for lost time, nor to tell the story of what has happened in our
domain and in histoire universelle since 1985. I simply want to walk with
you a while, wherever you are, to imagine how each of us might find a
place on the path of the past and in the current situation, and specifically
how each of us will launch off into the future.
As it happens, the year 1985 was very fertile in terms of European
theater practice, marking perhaps the peak for intercultural theater, nota-
bly with the staging of The Mahabharata by Peter Brook, La trilogie
des dragons by Robert Lepage and L’Histoire terrible mais inachevée de
Norodom Sihanouk by Ariane Mnouchkine. This moment constituted a
carefree affirmation of intercultural theater, but simultaneously confirmed
there was a crisis in post-’68 thinking, with the advent of violent attacks
on structuralism, semiology, and Marxism, and arguments against critical
sociology and a political vision of everyday life.
We are now far from those still-optimistic years of intercultural com-
munication. We have come a long way, into an increasingly globalized
world, one in which the very idea of a path, and notions of progression, of
conveying, of encounter have become problematic or even suspect. And
yet, the old questions have not gone away: where is theater going, and is
it still theater? Where will our research lead? Can we hope to find anything
there? And to what end? In what kind of world do we hope tomorrow to
practice or think about our art?
Who could claim to have answers to such questions? Everybody, nev-
ertheless, endeavors to find a path of their own. As for me, thinking more
about future plans than old memories, even memories from 1985, I opt
to answer by asking another question, which encompasses all the others:
how can we reroute our journey, stray from the familiar track, and seek
out unknown paths?
The English term for “déroutant,” “diverting,” also has—as in
French—the sense of “diverting” (“divertissant”): so “rerouting,” is
what amuses us by diverting us from our troubles. I would like to retain
this metaphor of “rerouting,” my Ariadne’s thread, of routing/rerout-
ing, and to leave to one side, albeit with regret, another, vocal and musi-
cal, metaphor: derouting qua “disconcerting,” that is, detracting from
the harmony of the concert. I would like to allude to how performances,
cultural performances of all kinds, are moving towards their own path: we
struggle to keep up with them, to analyze them as we follow in their foot-
steps. We must ceaselessly reorient our searching and our re-searching,
THEATER AND THEATER RESEARCH IN KOREA AND ELSEWHERE: WHERE ARE... 5
which are always in danger of running out of steam, of sticking to a

well-trodden path, or of things covering their tracks. But this disconcert-
ing “derouting” would not be complete without another rerouting: refer-
ence to another culture, to another cultural and socio-political tradition.
But on what roads are we traveling? We advance simultaneously along
three routes, three parallel pathways that in fact continuously intersect, as
we pass furtively from one level to another.
What are these three pathways, then, and how do we proceed along
them?
1. The path of our society: how do we follow its evolution, describe its
political, economic, or sociocultural system?
2. The path of our theater, of our performances, of the various perfor-
mative expressions: how do stage experiences, playful forms, “cul-
tural performances,” disappear and appear? How do they evolve?
3. The path of our historical, theoretical, dramaturgical research: how
do they advance, and how are they dependent on their object but
also on their being part of society?
We are in the habit of separating these pathways and these questions,

studying them as if they were moving on parallel tracks. Theater, they
tell us, has little effect on society. Scholarly research, so they say, holds
little interest for theater artists, and has even less impact towards societal
change. Perhaps. Perhaps this is indeed the case if we remain, isolated, on
only one of these three paths: we pass by, we progress from one path, from
one process, to another. We are always in search of a back-road, a short-
cut, a “path that strays from the main road and allows one to cut across,”1
a path that is also, in the figurative sense, “an alternative route.”2 On such
back-roads, sociologists, theater practitioners, and scholars will end up
meeting, speaking, and acting together, their parallel pathways and their
destinies converging. But at what cost?
Rerouting Theory: What (a) History!

To reroute oneself is to change course. The sociologist, the artist, and the
scholar have many opportunities to change course and thereby change
perspective, analysis, or interpretation. Their reflections become entan-
gled, one never makes any headway without the others. The difficulty is
6 P. PAVIS
thus to imagine a setting, be it a mountain range or an ocean, that enables

them to meet and cooperate.
History provides us with a first setting within which we can distinguish
different phases and note key dates. In geographical and cultural contexts
as different as those of Korea and Europe, these great key dates do not
match, at least until the advanced stage of globalization, at the start of the
1980s. Mondialization, which I prefer to call globalization even in French,
is a notion that appeared at the start of the 1980s to describe a phenom-
enon that would intensify from the end of European communism at the
start of the 1990s. The 1980s, in France, were marked by the socialist era
of François Mitterrand. They ended in Europe with the unexpected fall
of the Berlin Wall and of Eastern-European socialism. At the same time,
Korea lived through a very tough military dictatorship, accompanied by
a miraculous economic boom. One need only watch 1985, a film by Nam
Young-dong, to see the violence and repression, the tortures inflicted in
Seoul and the entire country. For theater of that time, one searches in
vain for the equivalent of the messages of peace from figures like Brook or
Mnouchkine. An opening up to the rest of the world, symbolized by the
Seoul Olympics of 1988, followed by the progressive return to democ-
racy at the end of that decade, describes a different landscape. Over these
same ten years, France and the Western world lived through a political
and economic mutation: the elimination of European communism did not
signal, as some had us believe for a brief moment, the end of history. The
mutation merely accelerated the process of economic globalization, which
took place in an even more accelerated fashion in Asia, and particularly in
Korea. In the twenty-first century, financial and banking crises, and the
financialization of the economy affected all of the globalized economies.
The only marked difference, post-2001, seems to be the threat of terror-
ism, which weighs less heavily, for now, on Korea than on Europe.
I unfortunately do not have the time, or indeed the capacity, to track
the recent historical evolution of our two continents. I would simply like
to stress the importance of deep knowledge of the historical context pres-
ent in each country by way of geographical and artistic specificities, but
also of some relating to those countries’ schools and universities.
The will to understand these phenomena and the will to change the
course of our analyses, our methods and our interpretations, seem even
more problematic. Why is it so difficult for a society, an art, a research
method, to change course? Changing course is not simply about changing
languages, fashions, or tactics; it is about changing destination, or even
destiny. We are indeed all determined by our language, our culture, and
our environment. Just as we are never outside our language, we find it
hard to get out of ourselves, of our cultural habits, of our little certainties.
But if we want to imagine the future of our work, our art, and our soci-
eties, let us begin on the path that we know the best, having taken it the
most often: that of historical, critical, and theoretical work.
What major roads have we, theorists and artists, most frequently fol-
lowed since the 1980s, since the advent of intercultural performance and
the emergence of performance studies?
The symbolic date of 1985 not only marks the middle of a decade that
saw the fall of pseudo-socialist authoritarian regimes in Eastern Europe,
or military dictatorships like the one in South Korea, it also marks the
era that sought to replace the political with the cultural, or even with
culturalism. This promotion of the “cultural everything”/“everything is
cultural”/le tout-culturel was accompanied by a depoliticization and a ten-
dency only to bother only with art in as much as it contributes to ending
the economic crisis.3 There resulted from this a loss of curiosity about
the aesthetic dimension of works, with a tendency to favor instead their
anthropological (rather than social) dimension, a tendency that is reflected
in the rise of performance studies. According to this tendency, which has
become more marked since, art, and particularly the art of the theater,
has been called upon to apply itself in all areas experiencing a crisis in
social life, to let us citizens participate in the cure, even if it means ridding
ourselves of all historical and political processes. This is thus the paradox
of the 1980s in Europe, a paradox that continues to follow us today: the
question of culture, of cultural and ethnic identity seems to suppress a
purely socio-political conception of society,4 which sometimes leads to an
“ethnicisation of human relations.”5
If we compare this European situation with Korean evolution over the
same period, then from the start of the 1990s we can note the fairly rapid
shift from a dictatorship to a progressive democracy, in around 1989–1990.
Militant theater, which was previously clandestine, along with farce and
political parabola, are replaced with a new freedom of expression, and with
a large-scale importing of European and American plays: these efforts are
successful, but often mediocre and apolitical. The situation is not very dif-
ferent in the former Eastern bloc: after a brief period of euphoria, theater
became more and more commercial, in order to survive. The true differ-
ence is to be found between Korea and the Western Europe of the period.
From the start of the 1990s, in Germany and in France, there was a sense
8 P. PAVIS
of weariness in the face of intercultural experimentation, against which

postdramatic theater, as defined by Hans-Thies Lehmann, proposed an
entirely new model, without definitively distinguishing itself from post-
modern art. It is this new postdramatic or deconstructionalist paradigm
that has attracted and influenced many Korean directors since the end
of the 1990s. But even in the 1980s, at the height of the dictatorship, a
director like Ki Kuk-seo did risk a series of very political Hamlets. What
might in the West have seemed banal and inoffensive was in that context
an act as courageous as it was political. Was this rewriting of Hamlet post-
dramatic and deconstructed, or was it just a new interpretation like any
other? It is celebrated now, not only as a political intervention, but also as
an example of deconstruction before the term had entered circulation, in
the spirit of Jan Lauwers or the Wooster Group. Thus, according to Lee
Mee-Won, “The director’s rearrangement can be seen as the forerunner
of deconstructionism in Korea.”6 Deconstruction and the postdramatic, in
Korea, as in Europe or the United States, is a long episode in the depoliti-
cization of theater and of society. This depoliticization takes shape in the
West by way of a blindness to neglected socio-political conflicts, favoring,
and “profiting,” cultural and individual identity instead. It expresses itself,
in post-dictatorship Korea, by way of a desire to delight in the economic
boom and in consumerism without asking too many questions. The situa-
tion of artists or scholars seems to end up the same in all countries: tricky,
or even doomed, eventually. Unless ... unless we react.
Our Re-search Engines

To react, one must first become conscious of social, aesthetic, and theoret-
ical conditions, which sometimes prevent us from making progress. What
jams our research engines? What blocks our path?
I will continue for a moment my comparison between Korea and
Europe, if only to make you aware of differences, but also of conver-
gences between our stage art-forms, our cultures, as well as our different
methods of investigation. The object of these investigations cannot be
defined in the absolute, or for all of our conditions and places of work.
Much depends on our conception of theater, which can be distinguished
from performance art or cultural performances. In most countries, the-
ater is today conceived within a larger category, that of performance, and
this includes not only stage-work or “performing arts,” but also every-
thing in the infinite grouping of “cultural performances.” But it is the
case that in Korea, as in France, scholars still only rarely work on these
new categories that emerged in the 1970s. Theater there remains linked
to the representation of fictional and dramatic actions; as such it comes
under the category of aesthetics. In this sense, the basic disciplines are the
same: semiology, structuralism, and stylistics for internal analysis; sociol-
ogy, aesthetics of reception, anthropology, studies of rehearsal and creative
processes for external analysis. If these disciplines in theory have recourse
to the same universal tools, in practice they are called upon in different
ways. Indeed, and this is the essential point, the political, ethical, and
aesthetic attitude towards a performance differs significantly. In France,
the collectivity lends “quality” theater (théâtre d’art, or mise en scène,
as opposed to boulevard theater) the role of education, edification, and
political awareness. In Korea, however, theater is not taken so seriously.
Korean theater has not had a long history of political and social struggle
like that of European theater (and for more than four centuries). It is not
“big-headed”! Hence the resounding success, at every level of society, of
lightweight forms like musicals: not simply because they are accessible, but
because the genre recovers and renews certain popular forms of music and
acting, and extends the life of pansori, the classical genre of opera.
By contrast, once it is a question of studying theories originating in the
West, the attitude of Korean scholars and that of European professionals
is often very different: where European scholars profess a melancholic and
postmodern skepticism towards new postdramatic forms and poststruc-
turalist theories, their Korean colleagues are passionate about all Western
forms, from naturalism and expressionism to the postdramatic and experi-
ments in deconstruction. This Korean curiosity for dramaturgical theory
and the most contemporary Western theater forms comes close at times to
a high-level consumerism that consists of replenishing supplies of theory
and art in order to appear “with it.” This theoretical overconsumption
can be explained by the desire of critics (more than of artists themselves)
to make up for a time-lag that is actually largely imaginary. The lag is
more about methodologies of analysis, notably performativity and medial-
ity, than about the invention of new artistic forms.7 Text and music are
not in conflict in Korean traditions, nor indeed are music and dance; the-
ater was always musical and choreographic performance, not a literary
work. Korean artists and scholars absolutely situate themselves within the
notion of performance and its attendant “studies.” This natural familiar-
ity with the notion of artistic or cultural performance somewhat accen-
tuates privileged relations with the United States. This can be checked
10 P. PAVIS
a contrario when observing the fascination of Korean critics and teachers

for dramaturgical analysis of dramatic texts and productions. It is not actu-
ally anything to do with the original, unreconstituted version of Brecht’s
quasi-Marxist analysis of plays, as practiced in Germany and France in the
1960s and 1970s, but is actually a soft variation on dramaturgy, more
aligned to the documentation and construction of staging as often found
in the United States. Only a few young dance dramaturgs make reference
to new developments in visual or choreographic dramaturgy, and do so
without awareness of recent debates in Europe about new tendencies in
dramaturgy.8
We should not fear such gaps between different kinds of research,
between different cultural or educational traditions; we should rather
learn to use them, to make them productive, instead of thinking in terms
of lagging, being late, being ahead, being on the main road, the well-worn
path. But this does not come easily, since one must determine at every
stage why and how, at a given moment, this method was the one local
scholars found best suited to the works in question. By contrast, and with
hindsight, we now understand better how more global and universal mod-
els, like semiology and the aesthetics of reception (methods developed in
the same 1980s), can ignore a great deal of nuance and local specificity.
Thirty years later, under the influence of globalization, it is plain to
see that the debate between supposedly universalist Europe and so-called
marginal, particular, and unique cultures has lost its power.9 This global-
ization irons out particularisms, or only retains them in “glocal” form, a
form adapted to local markets. The process not only applies to the com-
mercialization of manufactured products, it also applies to theories and to
art. For example, theories called poststructuralist, postdramatic, or decon-
structionist are readily adapted to the various sites of institutional knowl-
edge, to the discourse of universities, or to the language of criticism. They
are applied to all kinds of techniques of acting and interpretation. They
naturally become “glocal” once their theses are taken up by actors, audi-
ences, and local traditions.
When globalization causes uniformity of method, or of works produced,
this at least has the advantage of preventing us from addressing questions
of theory or of art in ethnic or even racial terms. Thankfully, Korean art-
ists tend to avoid all of this, even those who make reference to Korean
culture in their “Koreanized” stagings of Korean or non-Korean texts.
Thus, when Oh Tai-Sok “Koreanizes” Shakespeare’s The Tempest, by set-
ting it in a Korea-of-origin (costumes, songs, images, gestures borrowed
from the Korean cultural tradition), he does not claim to give his audience
the illusion that the play is “purely” and ethnically Korean, or that he has
extracted its true essence. He does not speak of some Korean-ness that his
actor-dancer-singers would be able to reconstitute. Similarly, Korean pro-
fessors do not seek to isolate autonomous Korean thought, and less still
“purely” and ethnically Korean social sciences. They do not lock them-
selves away inside geo-cultural (Asian, Far-Eastern) identity, be it ethnic
or racial. They do not fall for Korean nationalism in seeking to develop a
specifically Korean, or even Asian, point of view on social sciences, théâ-
trologie (theater studies), or performance studies. They avoid any “ethni-
cisation of social relations”10 that might, under the sign of “Korean-ness”
invent theories or points of view specifically linked to cultural, ethnic or
racial origins of human relations, rather than in terms of their histori-
cal or political dimension.11 They mistrust all simplifications: Occident/
Orient; North/South; European rationalism/undefinable Korean senti-
ment (jeong). As a starting point, they place themselves, without regrets
or hang-ups, in a multipolar, globalized world where Korean artists and
scholars find they contribute to the symphony of the sciences and the arts.
As Choi Sung hee suggests, Korean artists “invent their own ways out of
cultural collisions, between East and West, traditional and modern theater
forms.”12
The successes of the Korean economy, the possibility for young people
of travelling or studying abroad, and the encouragement of various types
of art all contribute to the calm assurance of Korean artists. The relation-
ship of intellectuals to Japanese colonization (1910–1945) is more ambig-
uous. It is rare that such critique draws on postcolonial studies, which
would only seek to prove the enduring influence of Japanese colonialism
on Korean culture. Indeed, and as an aside, it is even taboo to maintain
that the economic boom of the end of the 1950s would not have been so
rapid and impressive were it not for economic shifts under the yoke of the
Japanese. It also remains taboo, even today, to admit that Korean authors
convicted for collaboration with the colonizer were in reality victims of the
colonial system as a whole, and that their cultural fascination for Japan was
very real and not in any way opportunistic.13
Postcolonial studies are clearly to be deployed with great care, but can
be useful provided they are not allowed to degenerate into an “ethnic
cleansing of knowledge.”14 Postcolonial studies have had a very different
reception in the United States, in Great Britain, and in France. Here we
12 P. PAVIS
find a first research blockage, which I must merely point out. There are
many others that deserve a few words.
Research Blockages
In doing this, am I succumbing to simplistic Eurocentrism: setting out
my doubts about the social sciences or about theories that “culturalize,”
“ethnicize,” or racialize knowledge instead of resituating such phenom-
ena in a relative historical framework, taking into account never-absolute
cultural and aesthetic constructions? I will later call on Paul Valéry and
Jacques Derrida to defend me from charges of apparent Eurocentrism. Let
us for now return to a few examples of research and methodology where
a Western (basically Euro-American) rerouting has been taking place over
the last 30 years. It is time to take note of research blockages, but also to
glimpse a possible way out, thanks to new research fields, where numerous
scholars from a wide range of contexts are active. By way of three magic
words, which betray the true nature of the current situation, a research
blockage can be observed: “studies,” “turns,” and “ends.”
1. Performance Studies: The expansion of the Western notion of the-

ater took place over the 1960s and 1970s, and from an American
and British point of view: performance art distinguished itself from
theater and its illusions, while, at the same time, theories of the per-
formative demonstrated the symbolic and active power of words. In
making theater and all performing arts particular instances of cul-
tural performance, the notion of performance, and soon that of per-
formativity, took root just about everywhere. But old continental
Europe was more recalcitrant about adopting the term and concept.
But sooner or later, everybody had to apply this umbrella term to
the objects of their research. This came at a high price: the anthro-
pological dimension did tend to suppress the criteria of aesthetics,
fiction, and artistic creation. Dramaturgy, narratology, the structure
of the mise en scène, were left to one side, although remaining in use
in metaphorical and superficial ways. This expansion, justified in
itself, led to a dilution of discourse and of critical methods, and
eventually to a rejection of theory, deemed to be useless or
incomprehensible.
It is thus hard for scholars to evaluate the experimentation being

undertaken, unless there is the opportunity—as we have here in Barcelona
over the next days—to establish personal and professional contacts.
Establishing a general cartography of types, approaches, or even objects
of scrutiny in performance studies proves unrealistic, since the landscape
changes endlessly, closely linked as it is to the institutions in which the
enquiry is taking place. A safer bet is to interrogate—in each specific con-
text—the relevant traditions, be they cultural and stage traditions or indeed
educational and methodological traditions; to reflect on what exactly
one hopes to find out, and to consider how working conditions influ-
ence the process and the results; to imagine how other cultural regions
(China, Korea, India) recenter performance studies according to their
own traditions and their needs. All of this implies nevertheless that the
tools of analysis be refined, that the relevance of the concept be checked,
and that the goals of this transformation be clearly established, since it is
no longer enough to know that “scholars around the world [have] vari-
ously incorporated, appropriated, decentered, and challenged a “Western”
model of performance research for their own ends, anti-imperialist and
otherwise.”15 We must now take a close look at the tools such scholars
have used, the new discourses they have supported, and at the results of
this. If such scholars do not adapt “studies,” and particularly methods of
study to the specific situation they risk pasting European theater studies
over the artistic forms and the research, which in fact demand the use of
new notions. They are at risk of doing what sociologists—from Burke to
Burns to Goffman to Turner to Schechner—have done in adopting drama
terms—(re)presentation, action, actor, and so on—always done with the
light touch of an enlightened amateur.
In Korea, performance studies has rarely led to much concrete analy-
sis.16 It often awaits research projects yet to come. Hence the Womens’
University Ehwa in Seoul might begin a ten-year program of research
revolving around key notions from cultural studies, or organize a con-
ference on Practice-as-Research in dance. Soonchunhyang University is
bringing together scholars from numerous humanities departments to
present and publish research on performativity and mediality. Generally,
we should note that Korean professors, critics, and theorists (if we can
make this such Euro-American distinctions) do not see foreign meth-
ods, cut off from the needs of Korea, as invasive, as is the perception in
Japan.17 Korean colleagues may not see any immediate utility (in fact, no
more than we do in the West), but they probably sense that these new
14 P. PAVIS
techniques might prove useful one day, like a new invention kept in the
back of the Samsung lab. Awaiting that day, they rarely seem to wonder if
this or that theory borrowed from performance studies or from Western
aesthetics might help to reinvigorate theater practice or deepen theoreti-
cal reflection. The dramatic critic, very normative and subjective, is in a
position of dominance, and accords little place to theoretical debate or
historical and political musings. Critics are often at pains to define the
genre of a production: is it realist or naturalistic? Modernist or postmod-
ernist? Dramatic or postdramatic? Performance studies nevertheless finds
in Korea a huge field of operation, with a place for diverse forms of popu-
lar spectacle, and this explains the warm welcome it has received. Korean
Performance Studies is relatively hesitant as regards cultural performances,
which remain the preserve of anthropologists. Thus the American model
has not been rejected from the outset, but rather has been adapted, with-
out any judgement being passed on its relevance; it is confined to the way
the university is organized.
2. Turns in the road are marked by theorists who believe that an era
dominated by a particular theory or methodology has come to an
end, leaving room for a new and more relevant theory to take its
place. This is almost always a paradigm shift.18 This sensitivity to
change is precious, but it is also more or less subjective, especially
where turns seem to be announced with increasing frequency. Some
turns, like the linguistic turn of Saussure, which opened the way to
structural linguistics, are indisputable. Others, concerning us more
directly, must be approached with care. The semiotic turn of the
1960s and 1970s clearly took place, while the dramaturgical turn of
the 1970s, with Burke, Goffman, Turner, and Conquergood, seems
less certain. The performative turn, which everyone refers to today,
has a rather stretched chronology, and is difficult to date: Austin in
the 1950s, performance art in the 1960s, identity and performativ-
ity in the 1980s? Other turns have taken place: the interpretive turn,
the reflexive turn, the postcolonial turn, the translational turn, the
spatial turn, the iconic turn (according to Bachmann-Medik);19
there is certainly no consensus about these, although each does
point to a set of new orientations. In our domain, the postdramatic
and performative turns, although widely referenced, cannot fully
explain the reasons behind the new tendencies, and less still the new
theater forms demanding analysis.
3. Each turn gives rise to all kinds of studies, which justify themselves
by way of another litany: “ends”: the end of history, of modernism,
of literature, of grand narratives, of national identity, of drama, and
of theater. Terms of the “post-” variety, turns or ends, frequently
put a stop to any real reflection. They can also be understood as a
headlong rush, since explanations are left for later, or put off
forever.
New Fields
New fields require us to make our own theoretical propositions from within
wide categories, to unearth or pursue work that is already well underway,
and to summon all our energies. I will thus only mention those fields of
research operating with the most urgency, the ones I often encounter on
the road, as if going from one to the other created a new pathway. As we
will see, these fields almost always demand a detour, via back-roads, to get
from one road to another.
1. The intercultural model, developed in the 1980s, before the col-

lapse of the global political systems and the acceleration of globaliza-
tion, must be revised, especially if one wishes to continue to make a
distinction between the intercultural theater of the 1980s and the
globalized theater of the last decade. The 1980s saw an inexorable
change: from an intercultural, and even cosmopolitan, model to a
system increasingly subject to economic and cultural globalization.
Clearly, we were already, without really realizing it, caught in a phase
of globalization and standardization, but that did not put a stop to
a certain utopianism in the work of people like Brook, Mnouchkine,
Tadashi Suzuki, or Oh Tai-Sok. The intercultural model was thus a
source of hope, both from the Western perspective and for Asian
cultures, especially in Japan and Korea. Currently, this “culturalist”
model, most often intercultural, sometimes multicultural, does not
properly take into account the sociocultural mutations resulting
from globalization. It finds itself challenged once again, since it ends
up fixing cultural identities, or is readily reappropriated by commu-
nitarian ideology; this leads to depoliticization and to a simplified
and globalized vision of culture.
16 P. PAVIS
There is an old metaphor of an hourglass with two bowls, allowing sand

to flow from top to bottom, before it is flipped over, reversing the flow;
but this metaphor no longer adequately represents cultural exchange. This
is because such exchanges have always already begun; the sand is already
mixed up, and there is no point in trying to filter it, or to subject the dif-
ferent layers to testing. Not only are cultural exchanges now difficult to
trace, but also exchange is more horizontal than vertical. Not so much
falling sand, but rather shifting dunes in the cultural desert. The motion
is not falling. Carried by rough winds or a sandstorm, the particles of cul-
tural, social, but also spiritual matter remain suspended in the air, before
settling and forming new dunes. Now and then, the wind drops, but this
doesn’t signal the end of history, it is merely a pause in the slow and
imperceptible march of the dunes. Of course the wind remains the wind of
history, so difficult to grasp, but it never blows at random, even if it never
stops changing direction...
2. One of these turns is towards a new narratology. The question is:

does the narrative turn that is supposed to see the return of narratol-
ogy betray a new tendency for drama after postdrama? The fact
remains that narratology is returning to center-stage, long after its
auspicious period of structuralism in the 1960s and 1970s. Quizzed
on its capacities in the face of the postmodern novel or postdramatic
theater, it is dared to do its best with non-linear, non-figurative sto-
ries, void of characters and of recognizable actions. Ironically, it is at
the moment when cognitive narratology starts to make sense of the
most abstract, “post-post” stories, that dramatic writing reaches a
narrative turn: plays once again become legible, performance
become more figurative, characters are on show. But cognitivism
becomes a valued ally in order to read texts and performances of all
kinds. Cognitivism offers the hypothesis that we are not observers,
readers, interpreters-performers, objective or external researchers,
but rather are closely implicated in what we perceive. Cognitive nar-
ratology encourages us not to analyse isolated phrases and actions,
but to imagine frames or scripts. Monika Fludernik “defines narra-
tivity in terms of human experientiality, that is in terms of cognitive
or ‘natural’ parameters that are based on ‘real-life’ experience, on
our real-life experience, on our embodiedness in the world.”20
Cognitive narratology has a few tools for reading and interpreting
texts, images, and situations with gestures. Fludernik suggests two
key tools: gapping (filling holes) and ending (imagining an end). To

these two tools of cognitive narratology, I propose adding “spacing”
(the Derridean notion of espacement), “staging the seeing” (Maike
Bleeker’s term), “intensifying” (intensification), and “embodying.”
As for “staging the seeing,” we know from the work of Maike
Bleeker, “staging the seeing” is a “particular relation between the
one seeing and what is seen.”21 Thus, in order to “see” this staging,
the spectator must make a judgement from an embodied imagina-
tion, an embodied experience. Intensification is what we feel, with-
out the semiotic or semantic system of the work, when we are
affected by changes, by rhythms, by almost visceral reactions, in
short, following Lyotard’s formula, by anything “that is there unin-
tentionally.”22 As for embodiment, it constitutes the final and global
stage for the reader or spectator when embodied in the theater spec-
tator. Cognitivism claims to describe objectively our mental pro-
cesses, according to structures common to the human species. But
in the end it is always in the concrete and embodied experience of
the spectator, audience grouping23 that all these processes are pres-
ent and are embodied. All of these return us to the question of nar-
ratology and anticipate what I might say about embodiment,
performativity, mise en scène of space and time, and about its recep-
tion by the spectator. Narratology applied to theater is simply mise
en scène. It resides in the linearity of a story, but also in taking on the
space, and it is in the corporality of the actors that mise en scène is
registered, followed by the psychic and physical experience of the
spectator.
Thus, unexpectedly, cognitive narratology leads towards the personal

experience of the reader or of the spectator, towards an “experientiality.”
This experience is not completely subjective or unsayable; it depends upon
the description of narrative and actantial frames, on cognitive principles
within our embodied experience of the world.24 This embodied experi-
ence equally involves the spectator, the next step on the theoretical path,
the next victim of the life-prolonging tenacity of contemporary scholars.
It is first necessary to share a few words on storytelling, on ways of tell-
ing a story. Here, the comparison of different cultural contexts helps us to
understand that one tells stories sharing the same universal rules, but pos-
sessing nuances according to different cultural contexts. This is apparent
in comparing The Tempest and the way in which the director Oh Tai-Sok
18 P. PAVIS
reduces the play to the story of a village in ancient Korea, adding numer-
ous sung and danced interludes. The dramatic structure is close to that
of the original, but the sequence of the scenes and numbers follows the
narrative techniques of Korean popular theater. We are thus very far
from postmodern deconstruction, particularly the end of “grand nar-
ratives,” as diagnosed by Lyotard.25 The return of the narrative often
sets off some alarm bells, and Bernard Stiegler helps us to ask ourselves
how, beyond the end of grand narratives, we might recover the libidinal
economy and not the desublimating drive: “Capitalism must more than
ever be described as a libidinal machine.”26 Stiegler is joined by Claire
Bishop, who is also very critical of the Frankfurt School’s positions
and of the poststructuralism of Deleuze and Guattari. The subject, as
we will see later, comes back, centre-stage, through its sublimation,
its libidinal energy. Bishop draws on Klossowski, who “requires us to
take on board a more complex network of libidinal drives that require
perpetual restaging and renegociation.”27 This “restaging” is that of
aesthetic effects and of affects induced in the spectator.
3. Embodied spectatorship. The spectator is currently receiving a lot of

attention. I can here only sketch the program for a theoretical reto-
talization of the whole theatrical and performative phenomenon by
way of the spectator. Beyond the numerous ways, almost always
metaphorical, of characterizing the spectator’s activity, we can pick
out some recent research, such as that of Rachel Fensham, which
concentrates on the way in which the whole audience, the spectator-
ship, the whole of the spectators, forms a collective body, an embodi-
ment whose feelings and emotions one can attempt to describe. It is
through kinesthetic empathy that the individual spectator identifies
the movement, and individually celebrates it. Hence the temptation
to analyze the affects produced by the performance on the specta-
tors, sometimes privileging this impact, this sense of intensity, this
kinesthetic empathy. This insistence on individual experience at
times becomes almost the only criterion by which to judge the work,
its meaning, and its aesthetic value. Instead of semiologically analyz-
ing the signs producing meaning, or the aesthetic system of mise en
scène or composition, the tendency is to feel affect, intensities, all
that which precedes meaning, with movement and sensation first
and foremost. Such is both the hypothesis proposed and the conclu-
sion drawn by Rachel Fensham: “In this account of affect, the
k inesthetic subtends, precedes, and provokes the aesthetic response

which enables the critical consideration, that inserts the moment of
the tick, the stare, the widening smile, or the fright impulse into
historical time, and thus into politics.”28
It is the case that a theory of affects, or of passions, to bring back a

more ancient and philosophical terminology, is yet to be crafted, at least in
terms of its applicability to the arts, and particularly the performative arts.
Nevertheless, Fensham’s hypothesis groups into a single project the three
roads that concern us here, and that we will attempt to bring together:
(1) The objective path of objective research: we can probably find agree-
ment on a certain universality of kinesthesia, which will form the objective
basis of our shared research; (2) The path of theater: but is this “aesthetic
response,” this staging resulting from aesthetic work, common to all?
Does it come about automatically? There is room for doubt. And (3) the
path of society, the “critical consideration” that inscribes affects in history
and in society? Fensham’s hypothesis seems justified, but it remains to us
to show how these three paths—(1) the technical, (2) the aesthetic, and
(3) the political—actually converge in every performative event. This con-
vergence is not an assimilation, it is the possibility of bringing into contact
different considerations, questions that complement each other, paths that
converge at an unexpected clearing.
4. Applied theater: I have made a great deal of the difference between,

on the one hand, the pragmatic Anglo-American model which, with
its applied theater, and thanks to its performance studies, creates
many ways in which the theatrical and performative mode can be
applied to diverse social contexts and practices and, on the other
hand, the continental model, which retains mise en scène qua auton-
omous aesthetic system, a system that is increasingly refined, but
also more and more decentered at times, as if it were struggling to
adapt to all the new types of performance, beyond a unified theory
of mise en scène. These two universes risk remaining irreconcilable,
without relationship. Indeed, to be honest, they are. But for us here
(a Catalunya), it would be worthwhile to bring together these uni-
verses, and the methodologies, politics, and aesthetics that they
bring to bear. This is, in my opinion, a construction site in our
shared field that requires urgent work: not (for them) to add more
descriptions of new applied theater projects, nor (for us) to describe
20 P. PAVIS
in ever greater detail our complex and refined mises en scène and
rehearsals; precisely the task at hand is to join together applied
research and aesthetic discovery. This field of enquiry already exists,
thankfully, but is very new: dating from the point when globaliza-
tion led to us knowing, almost in real time, everyone’s social and
aesthetic projects. Thus, in a recent article, “imagining Otherwise:
Autism, Neuroaesthetics and Contemporary Performance,” Nicola
Shaughnessy confronts her research project on autistic imagination
and “contemporary theater practice”29 with theoretical books by
Fischer-Lichte and Lehmann, drawing also on artists such as Samuel
Beckett and Robert Wilson. Her scientific enquiry into autism and
the use of dramatic or theatrical techniques is brought into contact
with avant-garde productions and poststructural and postdramatic
theories. The links are undeniable, and this changes our view of
autism as well as of postdramatic aesthetics. Although, as Lehmann
himself notes, the postdramatic is neither a homogeneous aesthetics
nor a systematic poetics, its convergence with the phenomenon of
autism speaks to us. Applied theater thus finds itself, in good exam-
ples like this one, at the junction of our three paths. But such a
miraculous meeting does not happen by itself: you don’t find one on
every street corner, since how can we claim that we, laboratory
researchers, will ever invent for ourselves a technique that puts us in
contact with an art, is applicable to an aspect of social reality, and
contributes to transforming it?
It is often the apparent incompatibility of different fields of our research,

into our cultural traditions, or into theater trends that turns out to be the
most fruitful for the development of our thought. A few examples: British
applied theater would be very useful to German postmodern theater, if
only to help to clarify its socio-political ambitions. Or, another example,
the current British or North American obsession with site-specific perfor-
mance and immersive theater would be very useful to the institutionalized
French theater, which often limits itself to the theater building. Even a
genre that is often neglected, and even mistrusted by serious and learned
scholars, like the Korean musical, would give Europeans a lesson in profes-
sionalism, it would make them realize its importance in the development
of contemporary music or the modernization of classical pansori.30 And
what about K-pop, given its success across the planet?31
Rerouting Theater, or Rerouting the Society

of the Spectacles Theater?
But, for now, let us look at another gap, at another linguistic difference:
do we want to reroute theater, in the positive sense, to redirect it, to send
it in another direction? Or do we secretly intend to reroute society, to
behave towards it in a disruptive/derouting manner, just like society does
to us? We shall see.
But how can theater be rerouted? Is it really our task to redirect it? We
(scholars) do not deal directly with the creative act. Only society influ-
ences creation and artists, along with what Nathalie Heinich calls the
“regime of singularity” which makes of the artist an “exceptional being”
who “practices art through love because animated by internal necessity.”
Thus “The world of art,” Heinich states, always oscillates between a claim
of exceptionality, in the name of singularity, and the reduction of artistic
acts to ordinary work, in the name of equality.”32
The only thing we can do, all of us, scholars, artists, and citizens, is
to change the conditions in which theater, the arts, and cultural perfor-
mances are practiced; to influence cultural politics, which depends on our
ideas about society and the economic situation that props up this cultural
politics. We are not there yet. Let us begin by observing this phenomenon
at the local level of practice considered as an access road to art and theo-
retical research. In different forms and under different headings, the par-
ticipation of spectators is encouraged in theater work (as it is, by the way,
in participant-observation in anthropology). Participation is as present in
theater bearing that name as in its most recent iteration: immersive the-
ater. Participation in the creation of a production often takes the form of
devising. In the university, participation is found in “practice-as-research,”
practice considered as the starting point of a research project.
Globalization
This encounter of the artist and the scholar, who take a stroll side by
side, helps both parties to confront the difficulties resulting from cultural
globalization. Let us recall that it was during the 1980s, specifically in
1987, after the implementation of the Single European Act, that the state
in all European countries was “in retreat – first in Britain, then much of
Western Europe and finally in the former-Communist East. […] Through
mergers, acquisitions and the internationalization of their operations,
22 P. PAVIS
companies and corporations now operated on a world scale. The produc-

tion and distribution of goods was often beyond the control of individual
countries.”33 From that point, businesses relocated their factories to Third
World or emerging countries, then sold their products across the world.
This delocalization of European industrial production, followed by dein-
dustrialization and the impoverishment of Europe, had repercussions for
cultural production. Certainly, the evidence of cultural delocalization is
more difficult to see. In what respect, though, is this mechanism of cul-
tural transmission comparable with economic delocalization?
I have already mentioned the case of dramaturgy and of dramatur-
gical analysis, such as we have known them in central Europe and the
Nordic countries for over a century. How has this savoir-faire reached such
countries as the United States and South Korea? Who was the exporter,
and who the importer? What forms has dramaturgy taken in its new con-
text? For a method and a role like that of the dramaturg, the influence
of Brechtian theater in the United States through translations and stag-
ings progressively helped theater-makers to adapt a very political kind of
analysis into a more thematic, literary, and critical reading of plays. One
can assume that the arrival of dramaturgical method in Korea, particu-
larly in the 1970s and 1990s, and increasing even today, came about via
the teaching model in a few American universities, thanks to professor-
directors who had studied there (rather than in Germany). The current
importance accorded to the work of the dramaturg, assistant director, is
surprising to the European observer, who, over time, had forgotten this
function of dramaturgy. The observer is also surprised at the somewhat
fossilized state of Korean dramaturgical analysis: the dramaturg’s role is
rarely that of a Produktionsdramaturg, directly contributing to stage pro-
duction. Understandably, given the political climate, this dramaturgy is
rarely Marxist or Brechtian. It may be taken seriously, omnipresent, and
diligent, but it is scarcely combative or political.
An example of this non-Brechtian dramaturgical analysis is the mod-
ernized pansori version of Brecht’s Mother Courage and her Children,
directed by Lee Jaram. This opera for one actor-singer closely follows the
plot of Brecht’s play. We see Mother Courage lose, one by one, her chil-
dren in an endless series of wars, as a result of her own thirst for profit. The
play’s dramaturgy ought to demonstrate that her blindness is culpable and
that she learns nothing about her alienated existence. But, in most stag-
ings across the world, the audience ends up identifying with the Mother:
the spectators take pity and Brecht’s critical message is lost. Lee Jaram is
not an exception to this rule. Her figure of Courage, emotionally played,

defines herself as an example of the courage of Korean women, surviving
the miseries of existence and the difficulties of everyday life. The drama-
turgy of this adaptation does not manage to avoid taking a wrong turn-
ing. Generally, dramaturgical analysis, as practiced today in Korea, does
not engage with the reflections of the last 20 years on new dramaturgical
forms; indeed it has no access to those debates, which are limited to the
milieu of European dramaturges.
This example of the tribulations of dramaturgical analysis seems to me
to emerge from the globalization of research and of theater work. It shows
how an idea is adapted to local institutional needs. To exaggerate a little,
one might speak of delocalization, of outsourcing: dramaturgical analy-
sis, a European invention, was exported to the United States, where it
was rapidly institutionalized, but also simplified and made dull, not unlike
what happened with “French Theory.” This remanufactured dramaturgy
would then be exported to other countries, including Korea. In a context
in which Western theater remains new, and where the laws of mise en scène
are hardly known, the input of dramaturgical analysis gives theater the
seriousness and respectability it needs. But the critical and political virtues
of European dramaturgy leave much to be desired.
One observes the same phenomenon for notions or genres like the
postmodern or the postdramatic. They are used everywhere in the world,
especially the notion of the postmodern, which is older and limits itself
to theater in the European sense of the word. Both postdramatic theater
and the theater of deconstruction seem almost straightforward in their
European context, but, once delocalized—turning up in Latin America
or in Korea, through writings or touring productions—lose their detail
and their substance even more in Barcelona. Journalists, professors, and
students clamor for a definition, and especially for answers. Without wait-
ing for the answer, artists of the whole world find inspiration in the post-
dramatic, adopted more as a style than as a method of deconstruction.
Theater and postdramatic mise en scène have frequently been imitated,
even more than they have been delocalized or given a makeover. In Latin
America (particularly Argentina, Chile, Brazil), post-Communist Eastern
European countries (such as Poland, the former Yugoslavia), and also in
Korea, postdramatic mise en scène has become a style, almost a pastiche of
German or French forms. It is the standard by which European produc-
tions visiting the various capital cities—often in place of more original
European productions—are judged. On the one hand, notions of origin,
24 P. PAVIS
of center, of periphery, or of direct influence no longer work. The imita-

tions surpass the originals, and the distinction loses validity. According
to the Argentine director, Rafael Spregelburd “the distinction between
modernity and postmodernity is, for us (Argentinians), a European cat-
egory. Peripheral, postcolonial countries, countries that are not part of
the concert of nations, are countries which, in reality, have not known
modernity. They have never enjoyed its benefits.”34 It is as if postmod-
ern or postdramatic aesthetics have been “appropriated” by the former
colony, repackaged as Argentine, redrafted, effectively “remastered,” and
sold on to the entire world like a delocalized-then-re-localized product,
returned to sender and freed of all ties to the former colonizer or center.
Disconcerting and rerouting, is it not? In the domain of theory, we see a
similar process: Latin American theory moved almost directly to the post-
modern and postdramatic phase, without the intermediate link of critical
modernity, the influence of social sciences, structuralism, or dramaturgi-
cal analysis: this is a poststructuralist approach. Is this still a postcolonial
situation, or is there already a generalized delocalization, or an artistic
and theoretical multi-localization? Hard to say. Nevertheless, one thing is
certain: globalization is a deal-breaker in the domain of our art and our
theoretical and academic work. I will limit myself to summarizing a few of
the consequences of this mutation on theater.
Consequences of Globalization
The theater arts are less exportable than music or cinema. In a globalized
world, where selling comes first, the performing arts, which for a long
time had only been manufactured for an internal market, are aware of
their eventual exportation from the first creative steps: not merely with
the planning of overseas tours, but in seeking to be understood by the
greatest possible number of future spectators. This is especially the case
for Japanese and Korean (especially K-pop) cultural products, increasingly
available to the world, particularly the Asian market.35 For the Korean
performing arts, each genre faces a different situation. TV dramas are very
popular, even ubiquitous, and are exported all over Asia. Korean compa-
nies produce musicals, often high-quality, original works, which are highly
exportable. K-pop singers have millions of fans, and on the Internet some-
times billions. These works do not signify absolute submission to American
content or style: the industrial exploitation methods are perhaps similar,
but the sound, the style, and the dynamics are all Korean; such works are
not, contrary to received wisdom, part of American mainstream enter-

tainment. The creative industry has adapted itself to the intensification of
globalization taking place since the 1990s, moving towards the local and
to more differentiated situations. It nevertheless remains an industry, and
this deserves a few words.
The term “creative industry” has, since the 1990s, replaced the term
“cultural industry,” which is considered too close to the Frankfurt School
of the 1940s and 1950s and figures like Adorno, Horkheimer, and
Marcuse, and no doubt seems too political and radical. The marriage of
industry and of artistic creation is apparently no longer a disconcerting
and derouting oxymoron. The creative industry, also enigmatically called
the “content industry” encompasses live theater, video games, advertising,
cinema, audio-visual media, new media (but notably not the Internet).
The creative industries claim to monitor artistic creation, which they see
as a quantifiable, reproducible, “bottleable” variable. Thanks to processes
of industrial reproduction, they are able to produce and distribute works,
according to the changing rules of the market. From the perspective
of economists and politicians, the creative industries should contribute
to economic growth, social well-being, the skilled labor market, and to
reductions in public subsidy. Governments thus hope to instrumentalize
art, to help relieve social ills, to plug gaps in the welfare state, and to
evaluate the arts quantitatively—to have done with the French illness of
the exception culturelle. Attitudes towards the creative industries vary from
country to country: France and a few other European countries are suspi-
cious, fearing, rightly, that they will be drowned in the influx of cultural
products from the United States, the number one audio-visual power in
the world; Great Britain, which feels protected by its American ally, accepts
and encourages the creative industries; Korea uses them, for example, to
guarantee the success of K-pop, but its cinema industry has suffered in
the wake of a free trade agreement with the United States—the reduced
volume of Korean films appearing on the country’s screens has weakened
national production.36
If the commercial techniques of the creative industries in globalized
production can be observed with relative ease, it is much more tricky to
locate traces of them or their influence on specific works, particularly live
theater works. Certain artists seem able to absorb the shock of globaliza-
tion, or even subvert it for their own ends. And not just in terms of the
organization of a production and touring arrangements. Robert Lepage
has become a master of the staging that thematically revolves around the
26 P. PAVIS
coexistence of cultures, classes, and individual histories: take, for instance,

his last production, Playing Cards 1: Spades, the first part of a tetralogy.
In Korea, it would be difficult to find an equivalent approach to that of
Lepage, perhaps because Korea is in the middle of a process of economic
globalization, and because it lacks North America’s omnipresent coexis-
tence of different, cultures, people, and ways of life. The task would neces-
sitate courageous political analysis and a theatrical transposition metaphor.
The power of Lepage’s theater is that of making visible our world through
humans’ spatial, technological, narrative, sonic, and affective machina-
tions: without hidden symbolism, without psychological depth, without a
moralizing conclusion, but within a global mechanism where everything
is linked, where the economy flows like piles of money and desire moving
across the gaming tables. This is quite a fatalistic and metaphysical vision
of globalization at work, but it gives rise to a stage image that is instantly
expressive and dramatic.
Art and theater are the victims of globalization, but are also uniquely
well placed to describe it, to stage it, waiting for the day when politics will
take on the task. This political idea delights me all the more since it will fall
to education and the university to develop and shape the generations that,
weary of losing savoir-faire and savoir-vivre, will one day dare to attack
the system. Let us therefore walk a while with the students, so that their
university does not remain headed for a dead-end. Let us reroute, divert,
redirect, the politics of the university! There is much to be done.
Rerouting, Diverting, Redirecting, the Politics

of the University? Changing Course? A Few
Conclusions
Can we reroute the politics of the university? And how? By changing course
and rounding a cape, by changing capital and capitalism! But how? How
to face the steamroller of the mercantile university? In the university, as in
the theater and in research plans, two logics are locked in an increasingly
violent confrontation: the commercialization of educational and cultural
goods (with the sale of professors and the purchase of students thrown in)
versus open-minded humanistic encounters and critical instruction. The
commercialization of knowledge will often take the form of training in
acting techniques or professional theater skills, giving students the illu-
sion that they are receiving a useful, vocational training leading to a
ualification. This is the opposite of a humanist education, with theater or

q
performance as a starting point for reflection on the culture and society in
which we live.37
The choice is not between a good or a bad university, but between
a rich, and therefore unaffordable university, and a poor one, deemed
unworthy of consideration, “demoted” by the evaluation processes of
Shanghai or of the British Research Excellence Framework. The classifica-
tion criteria are supposedly based on objective quantitative evaluation, and
so should be countered with a criterion that is even more objective and
quantitative—the cost of tuition: in France, the cost for all degree students
is €184, or €256 for a Master’s, €391 for a PhD. In England, the price is
£9,000, and can reach £20,000 or more for foreign students. In Korea,
the cost ranges from €4,000 at a National University to €8,000 at a private
university.
Redirecting the university is not just about the programme of study,
but, more prosaically, is all about the fees, the politics of the university,
and thus politics full stop. But “politics full stop”—and here are grounds
for hope—itself depends on the state of the social sciences, the arts, and
the creative industries.
Our three paths, more than ever, are linked. Let us now give them their
scientific names:
(1) Research techniques are in search of coherent methods, but they are
dependent on their various objects of research (2) and the social circum-
stances in which they operate (3).
(2) The aesthetics of theater and art seek autonomy, but they remain
within the social. Thus they risk being pledged to social utilitarianism.
They descend into entertainment, the provision of pleasure, “edutain-
ment,” becoming a “pedagogical aesthetics.”38
(3) Ethics and politics are necessarily located within the social, which
embraces them. If they were to cut themselves off from the social and sen-
sible world, they would have no reach, no relevance, no value. So anything
we think, create, or ordain must be subject to an ethics of responsibility
and to a politics of reality.
These three paths converge: they aspire to become a single way. And
so we should not be surprised that each of these ancient paths is now call-
ing upon the two others; each redefines itself, changes course, and revives
itself in relation to the others.
28 P. PAVIS
1. The re-politicization of research: the techniques, methods, theories

that we, scholars, consider neutral and objective all of a sudden seem
watered down by all kinds of bureaucratic and obsessional controls:
the REF, the ranking and quantification of qualitative data, the
financialization of the tools of enquiry, x-year research plans, the
falsification of findings, “evaluations calculable by the dumbing-
down machine.”39 Nothing is neutral anymore—we might be thank-
ful for this, since we certainly had fair warning: we have moved from
the solitary and scholarly arena to a world arena, we have been
warned. We are now free to re-politicize the cultural debate, cultur-
alism, multiculturalism. The hypercultural, supposedly fraternal, and
democratic 1980s and 1990s, the years of minorities and chummi-
ness, sought to avoid political conflict and economic analysis by pro-
moting a culture of consensus. “The de-ideologisation of culture,”
notes Philippe Djan, “has paradoxically allowed it to become
consensual.”40
2. The recentering of aesthetics: tired of reducing every social phe-
nomenon to a cultural performance, to cultural relativism, we schol-
ars and/or artists reposition ourselves as regards the aesthetic,
autonomous, gratuitous dimension of artworks. We agree to evalu-
ate them, to measure the effects they have on the spectators. But this
does not mean we agree to participate in quantitative evaluation as
proposed by the creative industries; on the contrary, a return to the
sensory, affective, visceral, and individual seems justified. At the
same time, grants for research, as for creative projects, are becoming
scarce. Scholars and artists struggle more and more to demand a
regime of singularity in relation to ordinary citizens.41 Hence the
authorities exert a finicky control, quantitative for fear of actually
having to judge the value of intellectual or artistic work. Hence this
new demand for more refined, qualitative, and individual analysis,
open to aesthetic criteria.
3. The redirection of the political debate towards the individual and
towards sublimation: the re-politicization of research and of aesthet-
ics does not rule out a refocusing on the individual; it actually makes
it possible. This is the final paradox. A paradox, but not a contradic-
tion: between the individual—scholar or artist, rational or difficult
to grasp—and the social grouping, there must exist walkways, back-
roads. Was capitalism not described as a libidinal energy by Stiegler,
and before him by Lyotard? According to Bernard Stiegler, “the
capitalist organisation of the libidinal economy, which took shape at

the start of the 20th century, ruined this economy and exhausted
libidinal energy, which in old industrial societies took the form of a
tremendous process of demotivation.”42 The reconstitution of this
lost energy “takes place via a re-evaluation, in the economy in the
usual sense of the word, of what Freud called sublimation: economic
life, investment, the direction of technological developments, indus-
trial politics, etc. must all be re-founded around sublimation as a
social force.”43
This disinvestment, this desublimation of society is also that of the indi-

vidual, hence the importance of starting from the individual in the process
of re-sublimation. Society, culture, and art are not merely abstract enti-
ties, but are embodied in individuals. Hence the importance of seeing the
individual’s culture, one’s culture. Each could then start from the self in
gauging how identity is constructed from fragments of culture, from artis-
tic, moral, and psychological experiences.44 This is in fact what everybody
does anyway, not just scholars and artists, but ordinary human beings,
seeing the world from the perspective of their own accumulated experi-
ences and thoughts. Everyone confronts this structured lived experience
with an external theoretical and hypothetical model they construct bit by
bit. This construction is also a deconstruction of self, and not only in the
Buddhist sense of letting go. We end up, as Christian Ruby pertinently
suggests, conceiving of “culture as emancipation, and first of all in the
form of abandonment of the self. Culture is thus understood as a form of
dis-identification, a process of learning to refuse allocated roles, a train-
ing for dissensus, thanks to which everyone may learn that a problem can
always be worded in multiple ways.”45
This “disidentification” is not a destruction; it is a technique for con-
structing and deconstructing our identity or our identities according to
need. Is this not the very image of rerouting (which, similarly, is not a
rout), of a change of course inside ourselves, a new departure? “From
what state of exhaustion must these young old-Europeans who we are
set off again, re-embark?,”46 asks Derrida in L’autre cap.47 It is our job to
answer him!
If what is proper to the individual is knowing how to detach oneself
from oneself in order to exist, the individual in question resembles the
group, the culture: fragmented, individualized, and dis-individualized.
The individual can be identified as a culture that is never identical to itself;
30 P. PAVIS
it is, Derrida would say, L’autre cap—the other course, the other head-
ing, the other cape: “what characterises a culture is not to be identical to
itself. Not not having an identity, but being unable to identify oneself,
not to be able to say ‘me’ or ‘us’, to be able to take the form of a subject
only within non-identity to itself or, if you prefer, within difference with
itself?”48 Our personal and professional identity resembles what European
identity has become: in pieces, individualistic, too sure of itself and not
confident enough in itself. Those who no longer believe can no longer
move forward; those who believe too much are incapable of changing
identities. Those who think themselves rich want to separate themselves
from the poorest. Those who lock themselves away in overly specialized
research or in an excessively esoteric work of art are just turning in circles;
they are not capable of keeping or changing course.
We are lucky, in this book and in many others, to confront each other
on different planes, on different paths, then to re-embark from nowhere
and head in all directions. If all of us were to analyze the works of art I
am about to interpret, we would probably agree about nothing, but we
do know that we want to improve our work, to understand theater better,
and to reorient a disoriented world.
I will not try to propose a history of Korean aesthetic theory, a task
for which, as a non-Korean and non-Koreanist, I am clearly not qualified.
My examples will not be Korean traditional forms, but practices involving
Euro-American texts, performances, and forms, performed by Korean art-
ists and best explained from their point of view, with their understanding
of interculturalism, of “Koreanization.” Their perspectives are more “vis-
ible” in their practical work than in their interviews or their own intercul-
tural theories. The difficulty—or the advantage?—of this approach is that
these artists, often trained in the US or in Europe, and functioning in a
globalized, Westernized, context, often use the same tools as a Western
scholar. A theory of Korean aesthetic theory might well be the missing
piece, or the blind spot of my book.
I also consciously refrained from proposing as a starting point a general
theory of Western intercultural performance, as I could have done in a
more fragmented essay accounting for the new situation of globalization
and theory today. The three chapters that make up the introduction aim
only to provide basic tools for an initial approach, and which will be tested,
and sometimes deconstructed, in the analyses of the rest of the book.
I am well aware of not being a Korean, or even an Asian scholar and

I do not try to deny my “touristic point of view.” I only hope this view
is not too biased and offers a possible way into the Korean cultural and
artistic world. Let us hope we rediscover what cosmopolitism and cosmo-
politics could be, so that all of us (not just me!) avoid running the risk of
ethnocentrism and cultural prejudice or appropriation.
For us, this is an opportunity to avoid closed personal or cultural iden-
tities, closed specialisms, closed cleverness, and an illusory opposition
between Korea and the rest of the world.
And, yes, it is a chance boldly to set course together towards a Cape of
Good Hope.49
Notes
1. In Spanish: atajo, trocha. In English: road which cuts across; a short cut.
2. ‘Traverse’, Le Grand Robert de la langue française, Vol. 6, p. 1442.
3. This is what Philippe Urfallino suggests with regard to the cultural politics
of Jack Lang: “Faced with the economic crisis, he made of support for the
arts a vector for crisis-resolution. He underlined the links between art and
industry, art and economics, by way of motifs of innovation and creativity”
(La Terrasse, Juillet 2011, p. 63).
4. See Michel Wieviorka’s: ‘Identités culturelles, démocratie et mondialisa-
tion’, Identité(s). L’individu, le groupe, la société. Edited by Catherine
Halpern. Editions Sciences Humaines, 2009, pp. 303–311.
5. To use the terms and analysis of Jean-Loup Amselle in Vers un multicultur-
alisme français. Paris, Aubier-Flammarion, 1996, 2001.
6. Lee, Mee-Won. “Intercultural Interpretations of Hamlet in Korea”,
Hamlet –Korean theatre Forum, Korea Arts management service, 2010,
p. 5.
7. See Theatrical Blends: Art in the Theatre. Theatre in the Arts. Edited by
Jerzy Limon and Agnieszka Zukowska. Published by Slowo/obraz teryto-
ria, Gdansk, 2010.
8. Patrice Pavis. “Dramaturgy and Postdramaturgy”, Forum Modernes
Theater, Band 44, 2012, pp. 14–36.
9. I return to the quotation from Paul Valéry given commentary by Derrida
in L’autre cap: “I end by summing up in two words my personal impres-
sion of France: what characterises us (and sometimes what makes us ridicu-
lous, but often our most beautiful title), is to believe and feel that we are
universal—by which I mean universal men… Note the paradox: to have
the speciality of a sense of the universal.” Quoted by Derrida, Op. cit.,
32 P. PAVIS
p. 73. Valéry’s text, ‘Pensée et art français’ dates from 1939. See Œuvres,
Tome II, Gallimard, Edition de la Pléiade, p. 1058.
10. Jean-Loup Amselle. ‘Les ambiguïtés de la critique postcoloniale’,
Identité(s). L’individu, le groupe, la société. Sciences Humaines Editions,
2009, p. 255. The ethnicization of social relations consists of using ethnic
considerations to explain socio-economic relationships between people or
groups, ignoring political explanations in favour of often essentialist
accounts of the ethnic and racial origins of individuals.
11. See Chaps. 2 and 3.
12. Choi, Sung hee. “Speaking to the Global audience: Korean Theatre
Abroad”, An Overview of Korean Performing Arts. Theatre in Korea,
Korea Arts Management Service, 2010, p. 24.
13. See Chap. 4
14. Jean-Loup Amselle, op. cit., p. 254.
15. Contesting performance. Global sites of Research. Edited by Jon McKenzie,
Heike Roms and C.W.-L. Wee. London, Palgrave, 2010, p. 3.
16. There are certainly exceptions to this, such as the doctoral thesis (New
York University) of Min Byung-Min, From Performing Identity to
Performing Citizenship: The Theatres of Zainichi Korean Subjectivity, 2003.
17. According to Uchino Tadashi: “Performances Studies in Japan”, Contesting
Performance, op. cit., p. 91.
18. According to Thomas Kuhn, the history of the sciences is punctuated by
“scientific revolutions.” The dominant paradigm of a science, when it can
no longer be maintained, is replaced by another, which generates new
theories. Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1962.
19. Doris Bachmann-Medick. Cultural Turns. Neuorientierungen in den
Kulturwissenschaften. Hamburg, Rowohlt, 2006.
20. Jan Albers. “Natural narratology”, The Routledge Encyclopedia of Narrative
Theory. London, 2008. Albers se réfère ici à Monika Fludernik et à son
livre: Towards a Natural Narratology. London, Routledge, 1996.
21. Maike Bleeker. Visuality in the Theatre. The Locus of Looking. London,
Palgrave, 2008, p. 3.
22. Jean-François Lyotard. Des Dispositifs pulsionnels, Paris, U.G.E, 1973,
p. 104.
23. Rachel Fensham, Critical stages, 2012, n° 7.
24. Monika Fludernik. Towards a « Natural » Narratology. London, Routledge,
1996.
25. La Condition postmoderne. Paris, Paris, Editions de Minuit, 1979.
26. Bernard Stiegler. Economie de l’hypermatériel et psychopouvoir. Mille et Une
Nuits, 2007, p. 36.
27. Claire Bishop. Artificial Hells. Participatory art and politics of spectator-
ship. London, Verso, 2012, p. 237.
28. Rachel Fensham. “Watching Besides Others: thoughts on affective specta-
torship”, Forthcoming, manuscript, p. 23.
29. ‘Imagining Otherwise: Autism, Neuroaesthetics and Contemporary
Performance’, Interdisciplinary Science Reviews: Theatre and science 1.
38.4 (December 2013). Eds. Kirsten Shepherd-Barr and Carina Bartleet.
30. I am thinking here of musicals like Moby Dick or The Visitor, very successful
productions in Seoul in 2012.
31. See Chap. 13. French version: ‘La parodie dans le K-pop’, Critical Stages,
n° 6, 2012 (criticalstages.org).
32. Nathalie Heinich. ‘L’artiste sous le régime de la singularité’, La Terrasse,
Juillet 2010.
33. Tony Judt. Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945. London, Heinemann,
2005, p. 736.
34. Buenos Aires, génération théâtre indépendant. Entretiens avec Judith
Martin et Jean-Louis Perrier. Besançon, Les Solitaires Intempestifs, 2010,
p. 86.
35. Frédéric Martel. Mainstream. Enquête sur la guerre globale de la culture et
des médias. Paris, Flammarion, Champs actuel, 2010, p. 328.
36. On these questions on the cultural industries see: Chloé Déchery: « Les
industries créatives en Grande-Bretagne », Théâtre/Public, n° 207 (Théâtre
et néo-libéralisme), January–March 2013.
37. This is the conclusion reached by John Freeman in his analysis of perfor-
mance studies in the universities of Britain and Australia. He urges univer-
sity departments “to retain sight of what it is that performance study might
actually be about, and to recognize that many colleagues and students still
strive for a pedagogy that moves away from skills half-learned towards a
critical engagement with cultures through performance”. John Freeman.
‘Performance studies, actor training and boutique borrowing’, Studies in
Theatre and Performance, Volume 33, Number 1, 2013, pp. 88–89.
38. Claire Bishop, op. cit., p. 274.
39. Bernard Stiegler. ‘Hégémonie culturelle et bêtise systémique’, L’Appel des
appels. Edited by Roland Gori, Barbara Cassin, Christian Laval. Editions
Mille et une nuit, 2009, p. 342.
40. Jean-Michel Djian. ‘Penser ensemble création et civilisation’, La Terrasse,
Juillet 2011, p. 49.
41. Nathalie Heinich: “From the singularity that defines her, the artist escapes
the condition of the ordinary and enjoys ‘privileges’; this is apparent from
the prestige attached to the creator, and translates, for example, into the
public subsidies allocated to her, or into the transgression of moral codes
34 P. PAVIS
or rules, tolerated by society precisely in the name of ‘the aesthetic excep-

tion’.” La Terrasse, July 2011.
42. Bernard Stiegler. Economie de l’hypermatériel et psychopouvoir. Interviews
with Philippe and Vincent Bontems. Paris, Mille et Une Nuits, 2008,
p. 20.
43. Bernard Stiegler, op. cit., pp. 20–21.
44. See on this subject Derrida’s reflections: “The coming of awareness, the
reflection by which, regaining consciousness, one finds one’s sens (mean-
ing, direction) (Selbstbesinnung), the recovery of European cultural iden-
tity as a ‘capital’ discourse, this moment of awakening has always been
deployed, in the tradition of modernity, at the moment and as the very
moment of what was called crisis.” (L’autre cap, pp. 34–35).
45. Christian Ruby, ‘La culture comme trajectoire et exercice’, La Terrasse,
juillet 2011, p. 8.
46. Jacques Derrida. L’autre cap. Paris, Les éditions de minuit, 1991, p. 14.
47. “We today no longer want either Eurocentrism or anti-Eurocentrism.”
(p. 19).
48. Jacques Derrida, op. cit., p. 16.
49. At the end of this research and having read Martin Hirsch’s Secrets de fab-
rications, I chanced upon the last words of the book, that might be an
addendum to my own position: “There are always side roads to be taken,
diversions to follow, hierarchies to be rocked, freedoms to be taken. There
is a need to embark in order to hope.” (Paris, Grasset, 2010, p. 300).
CHAPTER 2
Globalization in a Few Korean Performances
In an age of globalization, any theater might be called globalized theater,1

a result or a source of resistance to this worldwide phenomenon. Does it
not follow, therefore, that all theater is more or less globalized? So how
can “normal” theater differentiate itself? And how can it be differentiated
from its rival brother, intercultural theater of the kind that emerged and
was theorized in the 1970s? Increasingly, since the start of the 1990s, with
the end of communism in Europe, theater production has been strongly
My Korea was very much Seoul.

A megapolis that is both chaotic and ordered, the world capital of pansori and
K-pop, with an appetite for shows from the entire world, Seoul is an open-air
laboratory for economic and cultural globalization.
But, beyond the music industry and cultural industry, beyond cinema and
the media, what about live performances? Do they escape globalization? The
traditional arts of music and dance have carefully protected themselves from
it. The state assists them, organizing international tours. The modernization
of pansori is more difficult to control. And as for stagings of dramatic works,
these are more determined by an internationalization of aesthetics than by the
market forces of globalization. Emerging playwrights, whether aware of it or not,
conform to a Euro-American neo-dramaturgy that is becoming more and more
globalized.
In this textual and performative fabric we need to search for the traces of
globalization. Is it an invasion of stereotypes, a homogenization of themes and of
dramatic techniques? Or is it a meeting of international standards, eased access to
a culture that still maintains its identity and its secrets?

36 P. PAVIS
influenced by the worldwide globalizing tendency. This is what compels a

reflection on the economic as well as the aesthetic impact of globalization
on the world of theater and performance.
Globalization
Historical Overview
Globalized theater (if such a neologism can be allowed) is not in itself a
new genre, but rather signifies a type of dramatic stage production that
bears the traces of the economic and cultural conditions of globalization,
particularly those of the last decade of the last century.
Globalization is linked to the formation of a world society, in terms of
the global dimension of economic, but also cultural, political, and social
phenomena. Nobody would deny the fact that the world economy is glo-
balized, but cultural globalization is open to debate, particularly as regards
its contribution to and its effects on the creation and development of
culture and the arts. In general, I am using Roland Robertson’s definition
of globalization: “the compression of the world and the intensification of
consciousness of the world as a whole.”2 The globalization of commercial
exchange goes back to the sixteenth century, to intercontinental travel and
the progressive emergence of nation states. This intensifies considerably in
the last quarter of the nineteenth century with the growth of international
relations and of colonialism. The following phase, the surge occurring
from 1870 to 1920, coincides in literature and the arts with the modernist
movement and, in European theater, with the establishment of the system
of mise en scène; globalization takes place within an internationalization of
relations and conflicts between states, the development of human rights,
and the implementation of global commercial exchange.3 Since the 1960s
and more rapidly since the start of the new millennium globalization has
penetrated all domains of social and cultural life.
Towards a Unified Culture?

In the domain of culture, the standard theory is that the globalization of
every form of exchange leads to a unified culture in which cultural differ-
ence struggles to survive or only survives with the support of postmodern,
but also consumerist, ideology.
GLOBALIZATION IN A FEW KOREAN PERFORMANCES 37
McLuhan’s global village was still a village, at the time of its conception,
albeit one interconnected within a mediatized society. Globalization, the
“tout-monde” (“all-world”) of Edouard Glissant, the “culture-monde”
(world-culture)4 of Lipovetski, and the “one-world-culture,” are far wider
and more audacious constructions: we are “in a period of globe-wide cul-
tural politics.”5
On the other hand, nevertheless, the flow of culture produces effects
that are varied and contradictory: “in certain contexts, these flows might
change traditional manifestations of national identity in the direction of a
popular culture characterized by sameness; in others they might foster new
expressions of cultural particularism; in still others they might encourage
forms of cultural hybridity.”6 Theater is likely to be subject to these same
contradictory effects: homogenization, and the preserving of differences.
Alongside Michel Wievorka, we might observe in globalization both a
homogenization of culture and its fragmentation. Globalization is thus
variously defined as “cultural homogenization, under American hege-
mony” and as “cultural fragmentation”: “Hence logics of the withdrawal
of community, a narrowing of identity, the folding inwards of nations and
cultures.”7 Taking this into consideration, Wievorka points out that “of
course, there is an extension of American culture, but not a monopoly per
se. There is a fragmentation (one need only cite the growth of national-
isms across the world) but also a circulation of cultural identity, a bottom-
up globalization.”8
What Politics?
The tricky thing is to provide an explanation of globalization that is not
from the outset negative (or positive), but which addresses its possibilities.
One cannot deny the political dimension of globalization, which largely
comes down to economics. The most visible economic factor is the shift
from national economies (as in nation states) to a global economy. In
political terms, this translates as the journey from national sovereignty to
“empire.”9 This empire, controlled by finance and the globalized economy,
is more economic than political (or, if one prefers, its economic power
is soon translated into the political decisions that suit it). There results
a profound change in conceptions of the political and a withdrawal of
politics. This marked withdrawal, observable since the end of the world’s
division into capitalist and socialist systems, specifically in the 1990s, coin-
cides with the promotion of the “tout-culturel” and “cultural democracy”
38 P. PAVIS
(as described by Alain Brossat), which give the cultural an appearance of

power, even as citizens lose their grip on political life. Art withdraws in
the face of the cultural, since everything can be cultural. The status of the
artist loses its luster, as it is subject to cultural activity, which tends to erase
political awareness and power. Schooling, education, and even the univer-
sity are no longer considered sites of knowledge, or as capable of explain-
ing the world and instructing the public. From this point on, political and
economic elites are only interested in art, particularly contemporary art, as
an object for speculation: theater has lost its prestige as a critical art useful
for understanding and transforming the world. Analyzing the ideological
mechanisms of consumption leads to the observation that, more often
than not, a political formulation “transforms itself, from a progressive slo-
gan in a political space, into a pure and simple consumerist slogan.”10
Global Politics of Difference

The consumerist slogan celebrating difference seeks to convince us that
global capitalism and the world market do not necessarily lead to the
homogenization of cultures. Indeed, as Hardt and Negri claim: “market-
ing itself is a practice based on differences, and the more differences that
are given, the more marketing strategies can develop.”11 They state that
“many of the concepts dear to postmodernists and postcolonialists find a
perfect correspondence in the current ideology of corporate capital and
the world market” (p. 2631). The world market is thus based on circula-
tion, mobility, diversity, and hybridity. These are concepts that art criticism
often applies to contemporary visual and stage artworks.
This hypothesis seems to be borne out in globalized theater. From an
economic perspective, globalized theater enjoys moving around the world,
never needing to reconsider its organization and its mise en scène. As a
consequence of this, from the aesthetic point of view, the stage work or
dramatic work offers a certain fluidity; it has neither a center nor a consis-
tency, nor indeed a fixed identity; it is readable, but in a random way, thus
dodging any definitive interpretation. One can perform Oh Tak-sok’s The
Tempest for one night only in an isolated Hungarian village, or on a beach
in Korea, and although the impression given will no doubt be different in
each case, the staging will continue to function with different audiences
and interpretations. Diversity is almost written into very open, or indeed
indecisive, interpretation, serving the story as told, simply adapted to fit
a Korean context, whether in a strange and exotic way for the Hungarian
and international audience, or in a falsely familiar way for Korean holi-

daymakers chancing upon it at Pohang beach in Korea, believing they are
hearing a tale from their popular culture, conforming with their imagina-
tion or, more likely, with what they know of it from historical TV films. If
the references and the materials are not too muddled, or lost as they are
mixed into hybrid objects, the spectator will even have the impression of
enjoying a homogeneous work, attuned to cultural difference. Certainly,
there are successive references to shamanism, to Buddhism, to Confucius,
to pansori singing, but this is more a series of visual allusions than evidence
of a new, hybrid, kind of production.
Intercultural Theater, Globalized Theater
Historical Situation of the Opposition

The key problem in understanding what is new about globalized theater
is that of distinguishing it from intercultural theater, to which it is often
and sometimes inadvertently fused. It is necessary to point out the differ-
ences between the two in order to grasp the new and irreversible changes
ushered in by cultural globalization at the turn of the millennium.
Interculturalism, the productive meeting of two civilizations in litera-
ture and art, has existed in Europe since the eighteenth and nineteenth
centuries. But it is only since the end of the nineteenth century, and up
until the 1930s, that theater really attempts intercultural exchange, partic-
ularly in terms of acting styles and mise en scène (Artaud). Interculturalism
thus participates in post-Baudelairean modernism; it experiments with the
magic of mise en scène, which had only just been “invented” and system-
atized. Whether it likes it or not, interculturalism shares links with exoti-
cism, and even with colonialism. It is criticized for its Eurocentrism, at
least until the theorizations and experiments of Peter Brook or Ariane
Mnouchkine in the 1970s and 1980s. It is accused, and not without a
certain demagogy, of appropriating defenceless cultures.
Globalized theater sweeps aside such criticisms since, far removed from
the “culture of links” of Brook, it starts by defining itself as a “trans-
cultural product for inter-national audiences.”12 Thus there is no longer
any question of Eurocentrism, nor indeed, at least for now, of “sino-
centrism”, or even Asia-centrism! With the emergence of globalized the-
ater, the question of how a culture might encounter another by way of
theater is no longer asked, instead cultures are assessed in terms of their
40 P. PAVIS
ability to cooperate internationally, in terms of the means at their disposal,

in order to be integrated into a world culture in constant development.
Parallel Lines that Meet?

In order to observe how the two, broad, parallel tendencies represented
by the intercultural and the globalized function, they must be described
in contrasting terms.
(a) The intercultural vision still aligns itself with the notion of cultural
authenticity, whether in the case of Brook’s “culture of links” or,
conversely, Bharucha’s “collision of cultures.”13 It then takes as its
key principle the idea that one must always reconstitute a culture in
terms of its unique properties. On the opposite side we find, for
example, Schechner and his “culture of choice”, which challenges
any search for authenticity or for origin. This considers that there
is no pure culture, but only hybrid mixtures of cultural elements.
In the face of the supposed universality of ethical and intellectual
values, the globalized responds with flexibility, free exchange, and
the changeability of the market.
(b) While the notion of intercultural theater as proposed by Artaud,
for example, was still able to pursue a chimera: to “rejuvenate a
European theatre that had lost its roots,”14 the globalized work
abandons any pretence of a return to origins, and any idea of
redemption by way of art, concentrating instead on the transcul-
tural effect of the product, a branded product if possible, that the
audience is invited to consume for pleasure alone. The globalized
work becomes a standardized product, a brand name. It replaces
the original and unique work by way of its style and its artist’s sig-
nature, whether the author or the director.
(c) The intercultural artist’s self still stood in opposition to another
self—that of other artists or spectators. But globalized subjects, be
they artists or spectators, have become beings with multiple and
variable identities: they must ceaselessly be redefined and rede-
signed according to their various affiliations (cultural, ethnic, soci-
ological, political, professional, sexual, etc.).
(d) Between interculturalism and transculturalism there exists a crucial
difference. The intercultural focuses on the exchange between cul-
tures, on the space that separates and distinguishes them. The
transcultural relates to what cultures have in common, to their

“links” (Brook). The global-cultural refers to the non-hierarchical
accumulation of cultural elements, to the hybridity of a genre or a
practice, and to the simplification and homogenization of cultural
characteristics.
(e) The intercultural was linked to modernity at the turn of the nine-
teenth and twentieth centuries: it still functioned according to
modernity’s categories: the opposition between rootedness and
un-rootedness, the familiar and the strange, the close and the far-
away.15 Globalized culture freely circulates within postmodernity.
Sometimes it is even prepared to return to a premodernity still
foreign to classical and modern identities.
(f) This premodernity is sometimes called the intra-cultural:16 artists
or theorists search inside their own culture for elements that today
are erased, but which can be recuperated by way of practical or
theoretical research. Thus Oh Tai-Sok, for his staging of The
Tempest, endeavored to reconstitute particular costumes, popular
forms of dance, body language, and martial arts. This is what Brian
Singleton, commenting on Oh Tai-Sok’s staging of Romeo and
Juliet, noted, distinguishing intercultural and intracultural: “the
moment in the production that is truly intercultural, when the past
and present collide, while the intracultural in dance routines, as
described earlier, also points to a sameness despite cultural differ-
ence and geographical distance. Thus the intercultural collapses
time while the intracultural reinforces the differences culturally
between times.”17
(g) Cultures do not stand in opposition as distinct entities, but are
located within the maze of the cultural, which can only be per-
ceived as fragmentation and as a superimposition of elements. We
can thus observe what the anthropologist Arjun Appadurai calls the
fractal cultural forms and their polythetic overlapping, or, put more
simply: the fragmentation and the superimposition of cultural ele-
ments.18 This method is all the more convincing since global cul-
ture precisely defines itself in terms of its heterogeneity, its hybridity
even, and since it finds it unthinkable to isolate and separate dis-
tinct cultures.
(h) The total work and the global work must be carefully distinguished.
The total work, as in the Wagnerian Gesamtkunstwerk harmonizes
and establishes the different materials and semiotic systems into a
42 P. PAVIS
coherent structure, a lived experience. The global work brings

together cultural elements of different origin, elements with nei-
ther consistency nor fixed identity, fused together in a work that is
intended to be exported everywhere without the need for major
changes, and thus without incurring additional costs.
Without entering into the detail of economic or political globaliza-

tion,19 we will focus on the immediate effects on contemporary textual
and stage outputs.
Globalization in Production and Reception
The Object of Globalization

How can phenomena of globalization in the domain of theater be
observed? A few examples might shed some light on the control that glo-
balization has over theater production.
International co-productions offer the most telling examples of global-
ized theater. Globalized productions most often take the form of a co-
production between several international partners, destined to be shown
at one or more festivals, or to tour the partner institutions and other ven-
ues that offer to host it.
Another example of global production is the musical, or even the
“mega-musical,” initially produced and mounted in a large capital city, it
subsequently tours the entire world or is sold to theaters on condition that
their reconstitutions look exactly like the original, particularly as regards
scenography or staging.20
Leaving aside the phenomenon of globalized and commercialized pro-
duction, which resembles any other international enterprise, we should
instead examine the effects of globalization at all levels of theater activity.
Two examples among many others: dramatic writing and contemporary
mise en scène.
Globalized Textual Production

One might assume that the individual writing of a text is not directly
subject to the sociological conditions of globalization, that it is free
and autonomous. But this would only be half true: styles, fashions, and
thematic choices depend, if only in part, on the conditions of their pro-

duction and their reception, and thus on globalization.
(a) Feeling global: With the help of the media and globalization, we find
ourselves in the era of “feeling global,”21 defined as “the possibility that
feelings can be transmitted globally in unprecedented ways.”22 Despite
differences of language and the lack of knowledge of foreign tongues,
texts are transmitted instantly and circulate at high speed. Extracts from
productions are posted on YouTube, often before a work is finished: in
a few minutes one can get an idea of the acting style, the stage space,
the overall interpretation. Effects, discoveries, and technical or drama-
turgical inventions circulate at the speed of light. The same goes for the
way in which the story is told, how such-and-such a theme is addressed,
how it responds to the current situation. It becomes impossible to find
the origin of any particular innovation.
Unfortunately, this instantaneous dissemination is not intended to put

artists or spectators in contact, but it does contribute to the very rapid
evolution of practical experiments. Other consequences of this “global
feeling,” and of this mode of dissemination are more mundane: promot-
ing a production, giving a short extract, reassuring the audience with
explanations, even justifications, from the director.
(b) Feeling shocked: Authors and directors feel connected, through the
most pressing themes of the time, to theatrical ways of addressing
them. They therefore go from the “particular work” to the “gen-
eral form” (to draw on Raymond Williams’s terms). Thus the style
of writing and acting known as “In-Yer-Face,” a British innovation
(particularly associated with Edward Bond and Mark Ravenhill)
very quickly moved to the German domain, as if this kind of vio-
lence and stage representation had created a global shock apt to
appear and adapt itself to other contexts. Few would doubt that
“In-Yer-Face” dramaturgy would have propagated without high-
speed media, but global interaction was also a determining factor
in its circulation.
In Korea, this particular dramatic writing has not taken to the stage
much, with the exception of a few Sarah Kane productions (and Kane does
not entirely fit into the “In-Yer-Face” category).
44 P. PAVIS
(c) Feeling connected: For better or for worse, authors and theater
practitioners thus feel they are connected to the entire world.
Beyond affinities with a particular author (for example, in many
countries, and particularly in Korea, Chekhov), the connection is
established in an internationalization of dramatic writing: this does
not only play on the famous Chekhovian silences, but on the econ-
omy of speech, on a laconic, enigmatic, violent style, that leads to
the acceleration of the message rather than its development or
accumulation. In writing there is an international tendency of sim-
plification and abstraction in the postmodern or postdramatic spirit,
which incidentally drifts into a sort of “communicational
Esperanto”, global communication, “a communicational action”
(Habermas). It is as if these playwrights anticipated their loss of
identity, as if—no longer anchored by nation, country, region, ter-
ritory—they felt obliged, in order to be read and performed, to
write in a laconic and abstract international style.
This tendency can be observed in Korea in people under forty, who

are comfortable with more abstract dramaturgical forms, and who feel no
need (nor obligation?) to make reference to Korea’s cultural past (notably
Kim Myung-wha, Choi Zin-A, and Park Keun-Hyun).
(d) “Global subjectivity”: sometimes an entire subjectivity, an entire

state of mind finds itself connected and questioned at the global
level. The writing of Unexpected (text and staging by Choi Zin-A)
corresponds to this laconic economy of words. The play tells the
story of a young Korean woman’s journey across Vietnam, her dis-
covery of another culture and the cultural habits of her fellow trav-
elers. The simple displacement of the body into a foreign country
leads to the traveler developing enhanced awareness, and renders
all points of view relative. The return to Seoul seems to constitute
an unbearable step backwards for someone who has experienced
such surprise: the surprise of love, of desire, of curiosity, of forget-
ting. But Vietnam, which has not yet quite joined the globalized
era, and instead offers old-fashioned local tourism, has provided
her with the exact opposite of globalization: disorientation. This
has momentarily destabilized her as she returns to Seoul and its
mobile phones. The structure of the play and the form of the
dialogue correspond to this minimal “international” writing, a

readable, economical, and “globally subjective” dramaturgy.
The Production and Reception of Globalized Staging

(a) Globalized theater equally changes the working methods for the
preparation of a production. The director is now required to be less
of an artist constantly searching and more of a manager facing the
task of production, the organizer of a setup. Reductions in the time
allowed for a show to be developed, and the disappearance of the
role of dramaturg contribute to bringing mise en scène back to what
it was before the advances made at the end of the nineteenth cen-
tury: it is reduced to technical tuning.
(b) What suits the standardized production of a musical does not nec-
essarily suit text-based or experimental theater that operates by way
of nuance and cultural allusion. Experimental mise en scène is
required to devise a local solution, understandable in a single con-
text. It quickly eschews luxurious scenery or a simple and middle-
of-the-road interpretation that is readily decoded. It seeks, rather,
the best way of telling a story, with simple, radiant acting, some-
thing which can never be reduced to a repeatable media formula.
(c) A staging is not repeatable, whereas a globalized production is
adaptable for any context and any medium. The premise of Medea
on Media (by Kim, Hyun-Tak) is to show—in nine different tab-
leaux—the character of Medea confronted with the media as they
exploit her tragedy and pursue the heroine in every possible way.
Anybody can understand this production; one need only know the
destiny of Medea and of her family. With only minor changes (cul-
tural references, songs) it could be shown and understood in very
different contexts. The accumulative and systematic construction
(most of the audio-visual media are scrutinized) sometimes courts
dramaturgical simplification. It quickly embodies a theorem that is
all too well known, a very predictable demonstration of the harm-
ful effects of commercial media. If the spectator does not grasp the
dramaturgical reasoning of the scenes, the order in which they take
place, the specificity of each medium tormenting Medea, there is a
risk of missing the point. The choice is as follows: either the specta-
tor is a presence within a mise en scène possessing its own artistic
logic (which is sometimes difficult to follow), or else a consumer of
46 P. PAVIS
a globalized production (which would certainly show the

repercussions of the media’s aggression, but would give absolutely
no in-depth explanation of their social function). Medea on Media
is more of an exercise in global communication than an interpreta-
tion of the Medea myth in relation to contemporary media. This is
of course the director’s choice. Perhaps we can no longer escape
the global nature of media, we seek to gain a new perspective and
explanation of the world that we see through them. If this is the
case, Medea on Media succeeds in attempting to show our own
alienation in the globalized world that is so quick to condemn
Medea while exploiting her all the way to the grave.
(d) Modernist intercultural mise en scène versus postmodern globalized
production:
It is best to reserve the term “mise en scène” for theater representa-
tion localized in time and space, specially prepared for a local situa-
tion. This was, in any case, the meaning of mise en scène in the
modernist era, at the end of the nineteenth century in Europe: a
closed, local system, destined for an audience in constant renewal,
reframing the entirety of the production according to a specific situ-
ation. Once the intercultural introduced itself to modernism as a
possible variation, or even as its apotheosis, mise en scène was
required to adapt itself to the source- and target-cultures—it
attempted to make the two communicate. And this is where the
trouble started, since neither of the two cultures allowed itself to be
encompassed (seized or englobed) by the other, nor was either pre-
pared to admit that it is not terribly interested in the global har-
mony of cultures and intercultural understanding between peoples.
The troubles increase—or on the contrary disappear altogether—
when globalized theater imposes its norms of averaged and univer-
sal readability, proposes signs adaptable to other contexts, and
organizes the performance (one can no longer call it a mise en scène)
in a systematic, mechanical, malleable way. The globalized work
seems to express itself in a very generalized manner, using a kind of
aesthetic and philosophical Esperanto that can be adapted to any
possible context.
A mise en scène is always also a mise en jeu local to the theater: it is
linked to particular circumstances and it does not obey any general
principles, be they universal or supranational. It thus has trouble
transforming itself into a globalized, reproducible, and applicable
practice for the whole world, unless it is deliberately reduced into

a form of production, a purely technical, effective, reproducible
procedure. Globalization is always a challenge for the spectator. It
requires distinguishing between what is achieved through aesthetic
concerns and what is organized around economic necessity. Mise
en scène must take into account the fact that everyone in the audi-
ence has seen the same television series, recognizes the same media
references, etc.
(a) A new order? It remains to be pointed out what forms globalized

productions take in contemporary theater. It is conceivable that
globalization is so perfected and discreet that it almost goes unno-
ticed. Or that any artists, philosophers, and politicians limit their
responses to unspectacular and almost invisible ones, expressing
themselves only reluctantly, or even refusing outright to do so. As
Dan Rebellato observes, “Globalization requires a theatrical
response that is different in kind from the political topics of earlier
generations.”23 After the fall of the Berlin Wall (1989), the slogan
of the North American President referred to a New World Order.
This slogan invited people to celebrate the end of history, to leave
aside conflicts, territorial squabbles, the division of the world into
opposing blocs, and thus to drop politics, the better to devote
themselves to neoliberal economics, which was granted every right
and every power. This new reality did not take long, in every con-
text (whether ex-communist or long-standing capitalist), to give
rise to a privatized theater deprived of public subsidy, turned over
to the laws of the market and freed from all responsibility towards
tackling the problems of alienation.
(b) Neoliberalism and postmodernism: According to Marxist philoso-
phers like Tony Negri and Michael Hardt, postmodernism equates
to neoliberalism and globalized capitalism.24 But where is global-
ized theater in all this? In order to transmit clearly, and to the
greatest number, the standardized globalized theater proposes
easily accessible and readily dramatized texts, often classics, and
staging limits itself to confirming a normal and untroubling read-
ing, suitable for any audience. Most of the time, the marketing
strategy consists of not imposing too new a reading, while also
giving the impression that the renovation of the performance is
itself already a proof of its being up-to-date. Cultural references are
48 P. PAVIS
inadvisable unless readily translatable, and strategically placed to

give an inoffensive whiff of the exotic, allowing each spectator the
impression of having identified some of the references. This some-
times brings to mind the Tower of Babel.
Theater, if it seeks to exit the purely commercial and private sphere,

cannot do without subsidy. Only the state, at least in democratic countries,
guarantees artists a certain independence that is not available in the private
sector. Certainly, no state will countenance violent criticism or attacks, but
the funding it supplies still offsets effects of liberalism and globalization.
(c) Numerous genres and meanings going in all directions: such is the
impression emanating from globalized performances. This does
not necessarily mean, however, that the arts, theaters, and litera-
tures of different cultures are on their way to becoming uniform.
Rather, there is an observable resistance in literature and theater to
the processes resulting from globalization. National traditions con-
tinue to weigh on each of these genres, and they do not merge in
any mainstream form, as is the case with world literature or world
music.
(d) The model of North American cinema production is not reproduc-
ible as such in the theater. For a simple reason: in the theater there
is no equivalent of the mainstream or blockbuster product that can
be exported everywhere, enjoying the same success by using the
same recipe.25 Cinema’s mechanical apparatus of reproduction can-
not be transferred as-is to the theater setup: stage action is live, and
the system of enunciation is utterly different. Every new staging
from a film or a “master” staging, once exported, must appropriate
its own space, acting style, as well as taking into account nuances of
connotation in word and gesture. Despite this incompatibility,
some producers have tried to transpose musicals or works that have
been hugely successful in a given language or cultural context. As
Mark Ravenhill suggests, giving the example of producer Cameron
Macintosh, “the theatre before had always had an element of
‘craft’, it was now being reimagined as a Fordist industrial enter-
prise. This allowed its product to be globally recreated and
franchised on a McTheatre model.”26 “Mackintosh’s new model
dispensed with the star system and created performances that were
strictly choreographed, heavily electronically amplified and used
computerised and mechanised scenic spectacle.”27 Fixed in terms of

choreography, sound, lighting, and scenography, musicals like Les
Misérables, Cats, and Phantom of the Opera, could be exported and
franchised using their “original” staging. Successful productions
like An Inspector Calls, directed by Stephen Daldry, or adaptations
of novels such as Michael Morpurgo’s War Horse, can be repro-
duced and delivered complete to other theaters across the entire
world.28 The simple, even simplistic, but also very profitable idea
consists of transposing everything, not just the scenographic, musi-
cal, sound infrastructure but also the acting, the blocking and
movement, the emotion and the effects. We are thus in an aesthetic
system perfectly adapted to the laws of the global theater market,
using the same devices and with minimal local differences.
One should nevertheless differentiate the different mixtures, if only to

understand what is at stake in this “differentiated globalization.”
Glocalization
The Appearance of the Glocal

Many of the changes in contemporary theater can to a large extent be
explained by the grip globalization has on our lives, by the “compres-
sion of the world and the intensification of consciousness of the world as
a whole.”29 And yet, theater work cannot be reduced to, or condensed
into, such global homogenization. A great deal of its time and energy is
even spent on counterbalancing this effect of standardization on social
and artistic life. But, here too, in this desire to return to local conditions,
it is not always artists who play the decisive role, but rather marketing
experts. Since the 1980s, such experts have understood that the value of
a product goes up if it is adapted to the local market. Hence the Japanese
neologism—or should we say the “globally Japanese neologism”?—
“glocalization”: a mixture of the global and the local. “Many critics
argue that globalization cannot be understood as a simple process of
homogenization in which everything becomes the same (whether that
means Westernized or Americanized or, perhaps, Japan-ized). Instead,
globalization has to be seen as more of a process of negotiation, hybrid-
ization, or glocalization.”30 Does the same apply to the theater in Korea?
50 P. PAVIS
Theater Glocalization?
This phenomenon of glocalization is equally relevant to theater: far from
being a corrective to globalization, it constitutes a new strain. What is
a glocal production? A show conceived (rather than constructed) in the
Disney Studios might be adapted and mounted in different countries:
USA, Europe, China, Japan.31 Thus is created a global mainstream cul-
ture. Each country receives an appropriate version. This theatrical glocal-
ization consists essentially of taking into account the local needs of the
audience: what kind of story do they need at this point in their history?
What do they understand of its context? What details of costume or music
will help them in situating the action? After the abstraction and stylization
of writing or of a postmodern or postdramatic staging, there is a return to
a situation more anchored in a reality known by the audience, no doubt
helping them to find themselves in what is recounted, which might other-
wise go over their heads.
Theater has been local for a very long time: played in one place, one
language, one human grouping. Dramatic action would back then still be
able to retain a certain abstraction—in the case of tragedy, it sought to be
universal. There was a certain balance between the particular and the uni-
versal. In Europe, it was only in the mid-eighteenth century that theater
started to be rooted in the bourgeois social milieu, to take an interest in
the economic world, to become more global. With the development of
worldwide commercial exchange, the world progressively opened up, but
it was not until the last decade of the nineteenth century, in Europe, that
directors started to integrate acting techniques and non-European tradi-
tions, and made timid attempts at intercultural experimentation. It was
not until the last third of the twentieth century that theater became aware
of the globalized world and recruited, for better or for worse, a few tech-
niques of global communication. Increasingly, actors must also be dra-
maturgs or directors; they are called upon to work in different contexts,
and thus to adapt rapidly to another way of making theater, of commu-
nicating with their colleagues in an effective manner, however simplified.
They must know how to go from the elitist avant-garde to the globalized
mainstream.
At the economic level, that of world administration and government,
but also of universal theater, glocalization is seen as the last-chance, mir-
acle solution. And, at one level, why not? Since what does local, global,
glocal, matter, provided we can escape “bowl-call,” the fish bowl, that is,
closure, a lack of oxygen. But how can we escape the suffocating world of
the fish bowl? Why not try theater?
What Are the Solutions?

(a) Globalization ratifies the split between, on the one hand, a mass,
commercial theater seeking profit and subject to market pressures
and, on the other, an experimental theater that cannot survive with-
out public or private subsidy and which enjoys what Nathalie Heinich
calls a “regime of singularity.” This regime is “the idea that the avant-
garde or innovative art is necessarily better than art that settles for
working ‘in involution’ and not by way of an ‘evolution.’”32 Theater
traditionally seems characterized by a regime of authenticity, as in
that of an artwork preceding “the age of its technological reproduc-
ibility” (Benjamin). By necessitating a director, and thus an autono-
mous and free creating subject, this pre- or anti-globalization theater
goes against the current of postmodern ideology, which instead
advocates the disappearance of the creating subject, the freedom of
choice of the spectator, and the mediatization of the stage event.
There results a divorce between authentic, “auratic” art (in Benjamin’s

terms), centered on mise en scène, and postmodern or postdramatic pro-
duction, which is performative and plays the game of the media and glo-
balization, and takes no more interest in the art of mise en scène, but only
in the apparatus, and particularly the media apparatus. This does not mean
that theater should be seen as a shield against globalization and against
mass culture. Theater, too, is always caught up, to some degree, in the
process of globalization. The more theater is turned towards financial
viability and commercialization, the more it will be subject to the rules of
productivity: to produce the show as economically as possible, addressing
a maximum number of spectators who can purchase tickets according to
their means.
(b) For the State or for sponsors, it is cheaper to subsidize art that is
globalized and supported by the culture industry than to support
a few individuals engaged in productions seen by very few, artists
working precariously as intermittents du spectacle. The crisis
around the intermittents du spectacle in France has, according to
52 P. PAVIS
Marie-José Mondzain, been “the decisive symptom in order that

the world of arts and creation reach awareness of the fact that the
collapse of politics could first of all mean the death of culture;
and, conversely, that if culture let itself be devoured from within
its own ministry, the Ministry of Culture would become the pri-
mary mechanism for the collapse of the political.”33 This collapse
of the political at the heart of the Ministry of Culture (which can
be observed all over the world, particularly with right-wing gov-
ernments as in the case of Korea) is to some extent confirmed by
the collapse of culture within globalization, which precisely
inhabits the ruins of national and political states, since at this
global level, there is no political authority that can regulate total
liberalism. We are also witnessing a collapse of the political result-
ing from the nationalist support of states for an official culture,
turned towards the past, as patrimonial, kept alive by a kind of
artificial respiration.
(c) Globalization is not only a cultural industry (even when this is
renamed “creative industry”) that controls the funding of culture
for profit alone, it also, in the ideological and aesthetic terms, pro-
motes a global middlebrow, and petit-bourgeois taste. Indeed, the
neoliberal economy that drives globalized theater swears by the
laws of the market alone, and retains a petit-bourgeois taste for an
average art that pleases the greatest number. This “popular” art,
what is more, takes on the task of bringing down elitist art: the
theater of art of yesteryear or the experimental theater of today.
There is no true globalized aesthetics, but only characteristics
linked to the efficiency of the economic exploitation of the work.
Such middle-brow art would be represented in France, for example, by

boulevard theater, and in Korea by the musical. It is of course a political
choice to decide what gets priority support: an elite sector in difficulty, or
the mass market of commercial shows. Deregulation and the end of subsidy
for the troubled sector entirely correspond to the liberal ideology, which
wants the market to determine all value, including artistic value. Thus
globalized theater often plays the role of the gravedigger of experimental
theater and of the system of remunerating artists. It need only invoke the
inevitable laws of the economy in order to produce middle-brow culture,
art that pleases everybody, shocks nobody, and looks democratic.
(d) Cultural tourism is exploding in all developed countries, creating

museums of anything and nothing, including standardized stagings
of great classics in national or official theaters, national ballet the-
aters. Theater does not escape this museumification of culture,
which seeks to offer all kinds of performances, to conserve, replay,
and complement them with new works.
Every region, every cultural tradition creates its own notion of the
museum: Korea is looking for its classics: not texts, as in Europe, but
musical, choreographic, folkloric traditions going back to the time, some-
what mythical today, of traditional rural Korea. Thanks to a few coura-
geous and tenacious artists and intellectuals, the treasures of this culture
of dance, song, martial arts, and popular farces have resisted the mod-
ernization that took place from the 1960s to the 1980s, but not without
some damage being done, from a lack of maintenance and a general lack
of public interest. Forty years after the near-liquidation of this cultural
heritage, the Korean government has become aware of its vital importance
for the nation. The Ministry of Culture and local organizations support
traditional arts and seem to appreciate, and even privilege, directors who
incorporate in their creations elements from traditional Korean culture.
The European classics, particularly Shakespeare, Chekhov, and Ibsen, are
often Koreanized in this manner: not so much transported into a Korean
setting (which would be tricky in terms of the dramaturgy), but evoked
through dance, combat, gait, music. Thanks to excellent actors, these
European plays achieve an atmosphere, a lightness, a virtuosity, and an
elegance that never fails to seduce foreign audiences. The diversity of the
traditional arts in play, the talent of the actors, the art of using such ele-
ments without overdoing it and at the right moment all contribute to the
creation of beautiful performances. These Koreanized stagings are in no
way standardized, which should prompt the critic to analyze with more
care what kind of Koreanization is taking place in each specific case.
The Koreanization of Shakespeare and Chekhov, of course, has no dra-
maturgical justification; it is not supported by the text. But it has much
to do with the state of globalization. Indeed, it is a technique for making
the European classics even more universal and international, since they
also function very well within a Korean setting, and it is also a way of
rendering them more attractive and thus more saleable. This, more than
the strengths of the Korean productions themselves, perhaps explains their
success at overseas festivals, although they court the risk of paternalistic
54 P. PAVIS
misunderstanding. Without even taking the trouble to evaluate the propo-

sitions of the staging, Western spectators and critics find these Koreanized
versions of Shakespeare charming, since they originate from artists from
outside British culture.
The export of Korean productions remains limited. It is, however,
encouraged by the Korean Ministry, for the sake of prestige more than
for financial reasons. Be that as it may, Korea is certainly wise to invest
in quality products of this kind, to mark its territory, assert its iden-
tity, and confirm its international standing.34 This also represents an
attempt by the Korean state to control the global art and performance
market, leaving aesthetic judgement and political analysis dependent
on the international market—this unfortunately does not foster critical
evaluation.
The internal market remains just as tightly controlled. The Ministry
of Culture not only supports traditional arts and productions, but
encourages, subsidizes, and commissions (via a system of orders placed
with authors and directors), promoting plays and productions address-
ing Korean history. Thus, in 2012, the National Theatre Company of
Korea asked young authors and directors for performances concerning
the historical theme of the Three Kingdoms. What results from this, of
course, depends on the artists themselves. It remains to be seen whether
this stylistic and historiographical exercise, the re-localization of theater
in a Korean framework, will help authors and directors to do what they
really want to do, or will instead prevent them from opting for the
critical themes or pioneering styles they might prefer. There is in any
case a risk that the Korean state’s obsession with its history and culture
will sterilize young artists by forcing them to deliver an idealized and
complacent vision of Korean history, instead of allowing them to tackle
the burning questions of Korean society. It thus becomes clear that the
transposition of works into the Korean context is far from a safeguard
of artistic freedom, and that it might on the contrary lead to an overall
simplification of the society and its past.
The example of Korea is not an isolated one. It is valid for all states that
attempt to halt globalization’s destruction of their cultural heritage. The
response certainly varies from one country or political regime to another.
There would be no point in the openness of globalization being replaced
by cultural totalitarianism or narrow nationalism.
Notes
1. This English term is preferable to the French “mondialization”, which is
more about geography than about overall structure, and seems a better
representation of the global vision.
2. Quoted in Manfred Steger. Globalization, Oxford University Press, 2009,
p. 13. See also Roland Robertson. “Social Theory, Cultural Relativity and
the Problem of Globality”, Culture, Globalization and the World-System.
Contemporary conditions for the representation of identity. Edited by
Anthony D. King, University of Minnesota Press, 1997, p. 75.
3. Roland Robertson. Globalization. Sage, 1992, p. 59.
4. Gilles Lipovetski. La Culture-monde. Réponse à une société désorientée.
Paris; O. Jacob, 2008. And: L’Occident mondialisé. Controverse sur la cul-
ture planétaire. Paris, Grasset, 2010.
5. Robertson, Ibid., p. 5
6. M. Steger, op. cit., p. 77.
7. Michel Wievorka. “Identités culturelles, démocratie et mondialisation”,
Identité(s). Sciences humaines éditions, 2009, p. 307.
8. Michel Wievorka. “Identités culturelles, démocratie et mondialisation”,
Identité(s). Sciences humaines éditions, 2009, p. 307.
9. Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt. Empire, Harvard University Press,
2000.
10. Alain Brossat. Le grand dégoût culturel. Paris, Seuil, 2008, p. 171.
11. Michael Hardt, Antonio Negri. Empire. Harvard University Press, 2000.
Reproduced in The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism. Norton,
2010, p. 2632.
12. To use the terms of the director Oh Tai-Sok, as quoted by Brian Singleton
in “Intercultural Shakespeare from Intracultural Sources: two Korean
Performances”, Glocalizing Shakespeare in Korea and Beyond. Dongin
Publishing, 2009, p. 183.
13. Rustom Bharucha. Theatre and the World. Performance and the Politics of
Culture, London, Routledge, 1993.
14. Singleton, op. cit., p. 182.
15. Erika Fischer-Lichte. The Dramatic touch of Difference: Theatre, Own and
Foreign, Tübingen, Narr Verlag, 1990.
16. Patrice Pavis. Theatre at the Crossroads of Culture. London, Routledge,
1992.
17. Brian Singleton, op. cit., p. 189. See Chap. 3 on the staging of Oh Tai-Sok,
where the difference between the inter- and the intra-cultural is discussed.
By “Intracultural,” I mean the search within one and the same culture,
generally but not necessarily one’s own culture, for practices and docu-
ments from the past and present. For instance the search for “authentic”
56 P. PAVIS
Korean cultural performances in productions of Shakespeare, whereby the

target audience is in a position to relate to them, thanks to its knowledge of
Korean culture. I am not referring to cultural elements cut off from other
cultures as the “authentic” source of a mysterious Koreanness, nor as that
which would be preserved from the arrival and intercultural mixing with
other cultures, something which would only infiltrate and spoil the “real”
Korean culture. Thus the notion of a pre-civilized, atemporal, pre-colonial
and aboriginal culture, Brian Singleton’s definition of the “intracultural,”
must be questioned.
Singleton nevertheless offers an interesting distinction between the
intercultural and the intracultural as regards the conception of time: “the
intercultural collapses time while the intracultural reinforces the differ-
ences culturally between times” (p. 189). We might add the followings
remarks: (1) The intercultural thinks in terms of different cultural geo-
graphical spaces which are connected in the intercultural work of art, while
intraculturalism believes that one can immerse oneself in the historical evo-
lution of one single culture and compare different moments within the
same cultural area. (2) Nevertheless, these distinctions can also be con-
tested: the intercultural is also submitted to historical, temporal variations;
and the intracultural is never cut off from other cultural influences. In
other words, the cleavage between inter and intra- must also be ques-
tioned. In a comparable way, we can sometimes see the local and the global
converge into the “glocal.”
It would be relevant here to reconsider this inter-/intra-cultural dichot-
omy with regard to the way in which globalization has also been described
as “the shortening of time and shrinking of space (sometimes called time-
space compression) or as the annihilation of space by time (Marx’s descrip-
tion of capitalism)” (Grossberg, op. cit., p. 150). Applied to the practice of
theatre, we could say that all kind of spaces, including the spectator’s own
space and the relationship to the performance, in whatever form, have
been used, assembled, and tried out, and that the theatrical and performa-
tive experience is often defined today as a moment of truth, of illumina-
tion, which can only be described as the rhythmical, temporal, durational
experience of the spectator.
18. Arjun Appadurai. Modernity at Large. Cultural dimensions of Globalization.
University of Minnesota Press, 1996. “Thus we need to combine a fractal
metaphor for the shape of cultures (in the plural) with a polythetic account
of their overlaps and resemblances. Without this latter step, we shall remain
mired in comparative work that relies on the clear separation of the entities
to be compared before serious comparison can begin” (p. 46).
19. We should recall that this phenomenon of economic globalization has
already been perfectly analyzed by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels as a
stage of capitalism: “The need of a constantly expanding market for its

products chases the bourgeoisie over the whole surface of the globe. It
must nestle everywhere, settle everywhere, establish connections every-
where. […] In place of the old local and national seclusion and self-suffi-
ciency, we have intercourse in every direction, universal interdependence
of nations. And as in material, so in intellectual production. The intellec-
tual creations of individual nations become common property” in
Grossberg, art. cit., p. 147. (OR) Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The
Communist Manifesto, London, Pluto Press, 2008, pp. 38–39.
20. This phenomenon has been extensively studied in terms of “McTheatre”
and “Megatheatre” by Dan Rebellato in Theatre and Globalization,
London, Palgrave, 2009, pp. 39–49.
21. Bruce Robbins. Feeling Global: Internationalism in Distress. New York
University Press, 1999.
22. Jon McKenzie. “Global Feeling: (Almost) All You Need is Love”, A
Performance cosmology. Judie Christie, Richard Gouph, Daniel Watt, eds.,
Routledge, 2006, pp. 97–102.
23. Dan Rebellato, op. cit., p. 85.
24. “Postmodernism is indeed the logic by which global capital operates.
Marketing has perhaps the clearest relation to postmodernist theories, and
one could even say that the capitalist marketing strategies have long been
modernist avant la lettre” (op. cit., p. 2632).
25. Frédéric Martel. Mainstream. Paris, Flammarion, champs actuels, 2012.
26. Mark Ravenhill, “Funding,” Alphabet: a Lexikon of Theatre and
Performance. Contemporary Theatre Review, volume 23, issue 1, 2013,
p. 23. This special edition is dedicated to the memory of David Bradby.
27. Op. cit., p. 23.
28. These are the examples Ravenhill gives, op. cit., p. 23.
29. Robertson, quoted in Steger, op. cit., p. 13.
30. Lawrence Grossberg. “Globalization,” New Keywords, op. cit., p. 149.
31. Frédéric Martel. Mainstream. Enquête sur la guerre globale de la culture et
des médias. Paris, Flammarion, Champs actuel, 2012, pp. 66–70.
32. Nathalie Heinich. “La singularité à tout prix,” Area Revues. N° 14, 2007
(“Art. Artistes. Etat”).
33. Marie-José Mondzain. “Malaise dans le partage du visible,” Area revues
(Art, artistes, état), n° 14, Mars 2007, p. 23.
34. Moreover, the question of the ever-possible slippage of traditional art into
the perilous zone of the musical must be addressed.
CHAPTER 3
Mise en Scène Made in Korea
Even after two years of teaching contemporary mise en scène in Korea, I am

still unsure whether my students, my colleagues and myself were talking
about the same thing. It could well be that the term “mise en scène,” and
the practice it implies, have not only very different meanings, but are also
relative in their importance. May I therefore be so bold as to share or test
a few ideas and hypotheses on mise en scène, in the hope of finding out two
things: (1) Can mise en scène be imported, but also exported from here in
Korea, to other parts of the world? (2) Is the European notion of mise en
scène of any use in order to understand theater practice in Korea, or should
it be replaced, and, if so, by what?
The occasion was an international conference, organized at the Korean National

University of Arts by Lee Mee-Won, with input from Western authorities on
dramatic and postdramatic theory. I had to address both my former colleagues,
who had come from very far away, and my new colleagues and students, from the
building next door.
Global, local, glocal—and always stressful.
Shakespeare’s The Tempest proposed itself as a globalizing/globalized object
of the first order. A production by Oh Tai-Sok, one of the most famous Korean
authors and directors, emerged as the ideal subject and as a perfect bone of
contention. His staging was like a textbook, posing all the theoretical questions
that would torment me over the following years.
Mise en scène “made in Korea”: is there a specifically Korean way of working with
plays and stages?

60 P. PAVIS
A note of warning: students and colleagues alike kept asking me whether

such-and-such a performance is or is not postdramatic, and what examples
I might give. Again, let me try to clear up this charming misunderstanding
by saying a few words about staging, or mise en scène.
Hypothesis on Mise en Scène

1. In France, “mise en scène” is a term used frequently, not only in the
theater world, but also daily in the sense of arrangement, disposi-
tion, structure. To a French or even European ear, the term “mise en
scène” sounds like the organization of a performance or the final
organized result. In the heyday of semiotics, mise en scène was seen
as a closed sign system, which could be described and analyzed if
one understood the strategy and intention of the director. Obviously
these intentions would differ considerably from one cultural and
performative context to the next. Here in Korea this is even more
the case, because the other, alternative, concepts are indeed com-
pletely different! And then there is a popular hair shampoo here in
Korea called “mise en scène”!—a difficult start…
2. My observation, and working hypothesis, is that it is sometimes
impossible, in Korea, seeing how theater is made, to make a clear
distinction between the distinct activities of staging (mettre en scène),
writing, rewriting, adapting, and translating. Or, in personal terms,
I was often confused as to what exactly I was watching: the staging
of an intangible text, a classic text, and in translation, for instance; or
a play paraphrased in language written anew (e.g. Oh Tai-Sok’s The
Tempest); or the staging of an original new text (Medea on Media,
composed by Kim, Hyun-tak); or a performance on the theme of a
known play (e.g. Yang, Jung-ung’s Midsummer Night Dream). I
suspect, however, that people in the West might have to rethink
their cookie-cutter distinctions. Which, in turn, has to do with a
very different view of intellectual ownership and artistic
“author-ity”.
3. Mise en scène in Europe, from France to England or Russia, is under-
stood in different ways: in Paris, it refers to the actualized version of
a text, its interpretation by means of performance; in London, it
often signifies (just as it did on the Continent in the nineteenth cen-
tury) the scenery, or at best the scenography, and nowadays it is
frequently used in contrast to performance, a notion used today
MISE EN SCÈNE MADE IN KOREA 61
everywhere and for everything. In Moscow, the term is limited to

the visual elements. In Korea, it seems that the Euro-American con-
ception of mise en scène as performing a certain meaning through
the whole theater apparatus has become the dominant view. The
Korean word for “performance,” gong-yeon, does not seem to work
in the sense of any “cultural performance,” as opposed to the term
“mise en scène”, which is used in the aesthetic sense. Apparently,
Western staging practice has been adopted in Korea, and so one
might feel entitled to transfer the hermeneutic technology as well.
This, however, would be simply misleading, because the frequent
recourse of authors and directors to historical material and to oral
traditions makes it normal to tell the same story in different ways:
retelling, rewriting, readapting, retranslating and restaging seem
normal enough practices. When Kim Kwang-Lim narrates the story
of Wuturi (in four different versions so far) or the Kazakh version of
Batyr Mamaï (two versions), he rewrites, or sometimes has his assis-
tants rewrite, a different storyboard(?) and thus a different play. The
Western idea of an intangible classical text, which cannot be changed,
but only be re-staged, is thus obsolete.
4. The same ambiguity applies for the distinction between translation
and adaptation. While the literary translators of all countries would
stick to a necessary distinction, Korean theater-makers seem to
accept the practice of rewriting a text, even if done by assistants, of
changing endings, adding scenes, simplifying the plot (Yang) or the
final message (for instance, the ending of The Tempest, by Oh Tai-
Sok). What the adaptor/rewriter can do has no limit, and so it is
sometimes difficult for the spectator to tell if she is still “confronted”
with the original play announced in the program, or rather is faced
with a new play.
We may consider adaptation the most general and most funda-
mental process of all, because it includes everything else: translating,
staging and transferring cultural content from different contexts. All
these operations are particular cases of the general process of adapt-
ing, of modifying the object for a changing audience. The adaptor’s
cogito might thus be: I adapt my Self, therefore I am.1
5. Hence my second hypothesis about the constant “Koreanization” of
Western classics: Koreanization is not only a statement on the relo-
cation of the action; it is a method for managing the different func-
tions of this masquerade, and therefore definitely a staging device.
62 P. PAVIS
Could it be, then, that “Koreanization” is the Korean word for

“mise en scène”? After all, mise en scène always adapts various materi-
als; it carries the burden of the text and its cultural implications for
a specific foreign audience.
Koreanization: Examples and Strategies
What Is Koreanization?
Transforming a foreign text or cultural context into the audience’s cul-
ture is by no means a new phenomenon invented by interculturalism; it
is in fact the general rule if one wants the foreign work of art to be well
received and understood by the audience. But, in the case of a foreign
text being transformed into a Korean setting or cultural background, one
must question the many reasons for the explicit and more or less readable
choice.
One should reserve the term “Koreanization” (or “Koreanizing”) for
cases where the allusions of the play do not require that the play is set in
Korea. It is enough that the audience, even if it does not know the chosen
cultural references, recognizes the allusions. The performance should, in
other words, look or feel Korean, even if the reconstruction is not really
convincing. It might, as we shall see, be an illusion to believe that one will
be able—and entitled—to recognize Korean cultural artifacts or atmo-
spheres. Korean is not what real Korean citizens would immediately rec-
ognize as such, but what will be identified as such by any audience with
some knowledge of the world. Paul Veyne’s well-known book on Greek
mythology, Les Grecs ont-ils cru à leurs mythes?2 (Did the Greeks believe in
their myths?), could prompt us to ask: are the Koreans really able to rec-
ognize and distinguish Korean culture from other cultures? Or, as their
descendants might ask 2,500 years from now: did the Koreans believe in
Koreanness and Koreanization?
The Object of Koreanization

The translation of the text is the first, and most radical, intervention. A
translation into Korean is obviously already a Koreanization. It is never
neutral, even if one only wants the audience to understand the foreign
text, and by convention to have access to the original text. But there are all
kinds of translations: a translation can be philologically correct but sound
very heavy and awkward. It can be inaccurate, but rhythmically attuned to

the Korean hearing habits. In such a case, one can consider the adaptation
more or less Korean, more or less satisfactory for the specific situation.
The original language will have become target-oriented, reinvented for
the contemporary audience.
This usually goes along with the choice to adapt the circumstances of
the foreign play to a Korean context.3
The Koreanization need not be ethnologically accurate. It can concen-
trate on the reproduction of cultural aesthetic forms such as a particular
type of dance, a martial art, a traditional way of walking and speaking
typical of a popular farce, as seen in Wuturi. The Koreanization quotes
and reconstructs cultural artifacts; it is never an imitation of “real” Korean
elements. But if it only looks for “signs of Korea,”4 these signs quickly
become Korean stereotypes and commonplaces.
As we will see with the example of Oh Tai-Sok, every aspect of the
production can be reshaped into another cultural context. The acting style
can, for instance, be changed from “Shakespearian,” classical “rhetorical”
delivery to farcical acting. Costumes are the first thing the spectators will
notice, and will help them identify the milieu and country where the play
takes place. Music and even the same melody can be performed with dif-
ferent kinds of instrument according to the habits of the chosen context.
The quality of light, the location, time and atmosphere it suggests can
also, in a subtle way, be recreated. Behavior, manners, “techniques of the
body” (Marcel Mauss), or representations of emotions and affects will be
very different in another context, even if globalization and mass media
tend to homogenize the apparent look and behavior of people world-
wide. A few signs, often stereotypical or at least predictable, will indi-
cate a change of time, historicity, or period. They will suggest a historical,
accurate and definite time period or an abstract, utopian, “eternal” and
cyclical time. These factors are all too obvious, visible, and controllable.
The most important ones might be less visible, even if theater’s mission is
to reveal them and have them embodied by actors. For instance, the pro-
portion of visual and textual signs will vary between a classical rendering
of Shakespeare in Stratford and a concentrated visual experience on the
beach of Pohan. The way of suggesting human motivations and cultural
attitudes will vary from one context to the next. The director’s role is
also locally specific and open to debate. Thus, the mise en scène’s implied
general interpretation and orientation will be understood differently in
each new type of performance. Koreanizing, therefore, means adapting
64 P. PAVIS
the play to the special needs of a new audience, as this is anticipated by

the director (and all that s/he represents and feels compelled to express).
It means staging the play with an acute awareness of the audience’s needs
and expectations. A new adaptation means immediately entering the spec-
tator’s world, perhaps losing the subtleties of the original, but with easy
access provided by way of the contemporary Korean language.
Functions of Koreanization
It is important to assess the functions of Koreanization, rather than to
look systematically for the elements Koreanized and to judge if they have
all been successfully transposed.
Some ten years ago, Koreanization and any kind of cultural transposi-
tion, was still considered an appropriation, one that could lead to what
critics called a “perversion” of the author (frequently Shakespeare) and a
“miscommunication” with foreign audiences. We have moved away from
such fears, sometimes moving in the opposite direction, thinking that only
a relocalization will make the foreign text and culture understandable.5
In most recent examples of Koreanization, the use of a Korean backdrop
is not motivated by a desire to seduce the foreign audience with cheap,
exotic objects. Sometimes it seems that the use of martial arts by perform-
ers, dancers, and sportsmen more than actors, replaces any thoughtful
interpretation of the play, as in the case with the endless and mindless
fights in Killbeth, Koh, Sung-Woong’s production of Macbeth.6
The most frequent reproach made by foreign spectators as well as by
native Koreans watching a Koreanized performance is that it is too exotic.
And indeed, a production based only on exoticism reveals a lack of respect
for the spectator, who is implicitly seen as unfamiliar with the foreign
culture and only interested in a cheap and superficial of it. Through glo-
balization, however, audiences are becoming more and more “culture–lit-
erate”: they no longer expect to be seduced cheaply, and they are ready to
follow the strategy of delocalizing a classical play, provided the staging has
made the transposition effective, exciting, and playful, at least aesthetically.
When the Koreanization is done mainly for the benefit of a domestic
Korean audience, its function is usually to reconnect it with its past cul-
ture: a search for authenticity and tradition. This seems to be Oh Tai-Sok’s
main intention: to “bring the tradition closer to the young audiences.”7
The function of Koreanization is far from being optional: it is in fact
a necessary process, making a foreign and distant culture accessible to a
new audience, at “home” and abroad. This has become the most frequent
approach to staging a classic today: distance and foreignness allow us to
rethink texts that we still tended to see as unchangeable and eternal only
a few decades ago. It would seem important at this point to compare the
way Korean theater represents its own culture through the numerous new
plays that deal with Korea’s past and history. We might discover that their
styles and methods of showing Koreanness do not differ radically from the
Koreanization of a foreign play, which undoubtedly results from an ideal-
ized and stereotypical view of the past, and from a self- and state-induced
way of staging accessible and exportable texts and performances. Here
again the hermeneutical and the economic-political processes can hardly
be separated.
There is no claim here of (and indeed no sense in) establishing any
essence of Korean culture that would be common to all cultures. The
implied position of Oh Tai-Sok would rather be that we should look for
forms and movements thought to be faithfully Korean, with all the misun-
derstandings that such a search entails.
Representation of One’s Own Culture:

From Inter to Global
To understand the rise of intercultural and Koreanized theater in the last
20 or 25 years, it is imperative to resituate this phenomenon in the national
and international context of Korea. Only then will we be able to follow
the evolution of the function and functioning of theater in this country.
Since I am more familiar with the European history of mise en scène and of
interculturalism, I hope I will be allowed to periodize, to divide the his-
tory of the new genre of intercultural and/or globalized theater into the
following phases:
1890–1930: Interculturalism coincides with the consolidation of colo-
nialism imposed by the Western world. In the arts and the performing
arts, this took place in parallel with political conquest, and there was a
related need for, and fascination with, non-European civilizations. This
was hardly a sign of exoticism; indeed, the artist was often radically critical
of colonialism. Even if Artaud insisted that Balinese performative culture
was necessary to renew the West’s weakened and psychological theater
and culture, he was in fact isolated in seeking to renew oneself at the cost
of others. Brecht, Meyerhold and Craig were certainly not drawing on
66 P. PAVIS
these Eastern cultures, as is often assumed today.8 Interculturalism (not

yet known under this name) was exploiting them, however, and indeed
was extracting aesthetic, cultural and universal principles that could then
be accommodated by, and integrated into Western théâtre d’art and the
functionalist system of mise en scène.
1945–1960: in the phase of decolonization, the guilty conscience of
Europe, or at least of a few European artists, made recourse to the cultures
of former colonies. The East–West conflict was between the Soviet bloc
and the Western states. There was a generalized emphasis on ideological
issues, not on cultural identities. This was the Brechtian era, when every-
thing had to be examined in the light of class struggle, not in terms of
ethnic minorities. The dominant model of theater was political theater and
political readings of plays, with the help of a Marxist mode of dramaturgi-
cal analysis.
1970–1989: the second wave of intercultural theater took place mainly
in the 1970s and 1980s in Europe, a period which coincided in Korea with
the beginning of the Koreanization of Western masterpieces. In Europe,
it was under the influence of directors such as Brook and Mnouchkine
that intercultural theater arose as a way of staging, rather than a new way
of writing. This theater soon came under attack from intellectuals who
felt their home culture was being exploited or despoiled, but who unfor-
tunately did not always provide sound arguments or convincing proof of
this spoliation. The immediate—even simultaneous—response in Korea
was to use the same technique but to choose another culture for the
original text: the home culture of the artists and not the one required by
the play. The difference was that a Western director was still in command
of a production’s entire mise en scène, and could arrange the cultural
fragments the way he or she wanted them, whereas a director respon-
sible for a production’s Koreanization felt confident with the choice of
Korean details, but not with the mise en scène overall. Classical Western
masterpieces lent themselves to all kinds of adaptations and interpola-
tions, particularly at a time when “the death of the author” allowed for
a whole range of readings. In both cases, Eastern and Western, the pro-
duction remained within the limits of a modernist conception of mise en
scène. Both argued for the authenticity of the cultural allusions. The new
understanding of “culture” as an anthropological category and not, or
not exclusively, as signifying high culture and education (Bildung), gave
both sides arguments for an extension of the work of art to cover other
cultural performances and practices.
1990–2001: after the end of the illusion of societies without conflict

and of a New World Order, there was a moment of suspension, where
the debate around cultural identities could have developed in a peaceful
way, but this was not what transpired, far from it. Terrorist attacks did not
stop globalization; they only reinforced a suspicion of foreign religions
and ways. Suddenly in the West the discourse on US cultural imperialism
and contrition with respect to colonialism was no longer believable or
desirable. On the positive side, this suggested a more genuine and open
way of treating foreign and domestic cultures, considering them as equals.
The key phenomenon since the turn of the twenty-first century is the
rapid growth of a globalized economy and the rise of formerly colonized
or exploited countries such as India, China, and Korea. Because of their
economic successes, and in spite of a very relative democratization, these
countries no longer have the kinds of anxieties or guilt that the West used
to have towards them.9 Koreanization, Japanization10 or sinization11 are a
kind of revenge, as the cultural transfer is now going from West to East, on
these importing countries’ terms, in their own style and with no feelings of
remorse or any intimidation. This, incidentally, happens at the same time
as the West is delocalizing parts of its industrial infrastructure. We also
witness a kind of delocalization of Western postmodern or postdramatic
performance into developing nations, or those with strong economies.
Since 2001, most Korean artists seem to have been simultaneously
heading in two apparently opposite and contradictory directions: towards
a globalized profitable theater, and towards an intracultural milieu. This
intracultural move might be a reaction against the interculturalism of the
1980s and 1990s, as well as demonstrating a fear of a globalized culture.
This appears at the same time as the Other of the inter- and global-cultural.
The intracultural, as a way of looking into one’s culture, might be a form
of Koreanization, an attempt to deepen one’s culture, so as to make it vis-
ible and accessible to an audience. But, we might ask: is this still possible?
Interestingly, the intracultural move is a kind of anti-avant-garde. It does
not claim to go forward like a militant or artistic avant-garde, but back-
wards to a supposed cultural source: it is an arrière-garde—a rear-guard—
but also an “après-garde,” an after-guard, post-whatnot, which can no
longer be defined, but feels it is coming afterwards, too late, like a “lost
generation.” It corresponds to what Nathalie Heinich calls the “régime
de singularité,” “regime of singularity,”12 the principle that a work of art
should be different, singular, new; a belief that “avant-garde or innovative
art is necessarily better than art that would be happy to work ‘backwards,’
68 P. PAVIS
‘involving’ not ‘evolving.’” Oh Tai-Sok chooses to go against this dogma

of singularity, and insists on going backwards, inwards to where he imag-
ines reside the roots of Korean culture.
Examples of Koreanization: Oh Tai-Sok’s Tempest

1. Adaptation: Oh Tai-Sok’s Tempest is a classic case of Koreanization.
The director is credited with inventing and promoting this method
of staging universal classics using all sorts of Korean references. It
would seem that he also systematized in Korea the ability to move
freely between staging, adapting, translating, and rewriting and
writing his own texts.
The production poster for The Tempest reads: “Adapted and directed by
Oh Tai-Sok.” This double function applies therefore for the written adap-
tation of Shakespeare’s play into a new script, which is at the same time
published in Korean and “retranslated,” for foreign audiences, by both an
English and a Korean translator.13 We do not know if the production used
this adaptation as a basis for the staging, or if it is the result of workshop
and rehearsal work using a previous version.
We can only guess that Oh Tai-Sok is not prepared to join the interna-
tional festival circuit at all costs, and particularly not at the cost of neglect-
ing his own Korean audience. His work is never glocalized to the demands
of a world market, where the artistic product can easily be adapted to local
needs and recipes. His staging style retains a certain purity, if I may use
this essentialist word; no cynical, greedy attitude, only the obsession with
producing a well-crafted work adapted to a new location and audience.
Some locations (the beach) seem to suit him better than others (a robustly
frontal theater building). No wonder, then, that Oh Tai-Sok’s craftsman-
ship is occasionally met with difficulties in the West, compared to the
mega-productions of Ninagawa Yukio, Robert Wilson, or Robert Lepage,
all tailored for a global and glocal market.
But what exactly has been adapted? Even the term “adaptation” might
not be the right one here, and itself needs to be adapted to this new
context. Oh not only sets the play in a historical Korean context; he also
creates new episodes, thus creating a new dramatic text, albeit one that
follows the general storyline of Shakespeare’s original. We can admittedly
recognize a few quotes from the original play, which contrast with the
newly written story. Sometimes there is a direct paraphrase, and the English
retranslation sounds very shallow and direct, far from the Bard’s complex
rhetoric and unusual imagery. A comparison of Shakespeare’s and Oh’s
texts gives the impression that Oh’s is “classic light,” that is, a simplified
text, where the arguments are summarized, simplified, or paraphrased.14
Nevertheless, it would be fairer to compare two productions of the same
play. Some original scenes from the original play seem never-ending, and
indeed ought to be shortened. Oh Tai-Sok very aptly “translated” some
of the rather boring dialogues between King Jabi (Alonso)’s entourage
into dances, ceremonies, or rituals, where they take on a new performative
function and captivate the audience. And it does not matter—pace Oh Tai-
Sok!—that these recreated cultural performances be declared “authentic”
(as Oh would say) or eclectic, as more skeptical minds might imagine.
The adapted story remains the same, except that it is set in tenth-century
Korea, when King Jilji has been exiled by his brother to a distant province.
If one needed an explanation for Koreanization, this story would be the
most obvious example, but not the real or important one.
Oh Tai-Sok’s adaptation keeps the same constellation of characters as in
The Tempest, only adding a few masked actors playing all sorts of animals,
as well as spirits, chuibari, [animal names] and a shaman, Ariel, performed
by a female pansori singer. The dialogue has been simplified, often cut or
abridged, made more fluid, lighter; it is written in contemporary Korean,
but always in the sustained and poetic style enjoyed by the Korean audi-
ence. All puns and references have disappeared: the impression is one of
watching a danced and sung performance, and secondarily of listening
to a literary text. Oh Tai-Sok’s text lends itself very well to staging. But
when it is only read on the page, it does feel a little thin.15 Obviously Oh’s
adaptation goes beyond the written text; it begs for a new use of the stage
as well as a new style of acting.
Intracultural Staging
It is not always easy to judge whether a performance should be seen as
inter- or intra-cultural. This obviously largely depends on the identity of
the audience. If it is a local one—in this case Korean—then the production
will seem to be an intracultural16 deepening of Korean cultural allusions
and artifacts; and if the English classical play is also set in the historical
Silla Kingdom, it will almost appear to be a purely local product. And
rightly so! Because Shakespeare does not represent England or its past civ-
ilization—he is a universal writer and storyteller—the narrative structures
70 P. PAVIS
within which he writes are not limited to England or Europe. Oh Tai-Sok

is not acting interculturally, he is not trying to make the play more acces-
sible and cross-cultural by mixing English and Korean cultural signs. Nor
is he completely rewriting the English text using a Korean legend bet-
ter known to his domestic audience. And he does not alter or adapt the
dancing and singing of his performers into a classical European, rhetorical
style of delivery. His search is intracultural, because he hopes to have his
Korean and foreign audiences alike appreciate a possible world where the
play, or its adaptation, will make immediate, physical sense. The idea is
not to deepen or to modify our understanding of an English classic, or
what remains of it, or to propose a new reading of it; the idea is rather
to reconnect the audience with its past culture through its own perfor-
mance traditions. (Whether or not this is at all possible is another ques-
tion, which we will address in due course). References to the Silla Dynasty
or to a Korean setting are just there to enable a smoother entrance into
the fictional world of Shakespeare by recruiting one’s own cultural refer-
ences. The idea is to dig up one’s past in order to reconstruct through
the various artistic means that have not yet been destroyed in the univer-
salizing processes of homogenization and globalization. Intraculturalism
lends itself to a return to artistic forms of the past. It is preoccupied with
the revitalization of Korea’s cultural roots, not unlike Artaud’s project,
except that it is an intracultural search which is supposed, according to Oh
Tai-Sok, to revitalize the Korean present. This search is in fact comparable
to the Japanese search for an “old cultural stratum” in the 1960s (Nagata,
p. 302). Oh Tai-Sok does not try, like interculturalism does, to establish
exchanges between states, nations, cultures, or cultural entities: with the
advent of globalization, these no longer exist anyway. He does not try to
oppose Europe and Asia, as would Artaud, and, later, Mnouchkine. He
holds to his intracultural position. Whether he should instead be searching
for an Asian culture and an Asian intraculturalism, as Japanese theater-
makers seem to be doing (Nagata, for example), is debatable. Indeed, my
question would be: why would Asia-centrism be any better than Euro-
centrism? We have seen where we ended up with the latter.
Dramaturgy and Mise en Scène

Oh Tai-Sok does not simply use culture and cultural identity as an instru-
ment or barometer with which to approach Shakespeare and European
dramaturgy. He is in fact testing and trying to invent his own kind of

Korean dramaturgy and mise en scène.
If the performance style clearly only uses Korean elements, and thus
operates within an intracultural Koreanization of the play, the dramaturgy
and the mise en scène of Oh Tai-Sok remain dependent on Western nar-
rative and staging structures. This dramaturgy and this mise en scène are
fairly classical, and also are typical of Western theater, but they also tend
to have a “Korean touch” that makes them more intercultural, globalized,
and postmodern.
The dramaturgy, that is, the dramaturgical analysis Oh Tai-Sok applies
to Shakespeare’s version and his own rewrite, retain the five-act structure,
each act ending on the announcement of the action to come, exactly as
in the original play.17 However, Oh tends to link the five acts, and the
marking of changes of temporality or location is always discreet. He is not
really interested in the political plot, but seems to allocate by turns the
role of driving force or bearer of the play’s action between the three main
characters: Prospero (Jilji), Ariel (Jaeyoong), and Miranda (Aji). Acting-
wise, none of the three seems to dominate: in Oh Tai-Sok’s latest version,
Prospero is more of an angry nobleman and an elderly gentleman than a
wise scholar; Ariel is mainly “present” when s/he sings; Miranda’s fresh-
ness “does wonders,” and her energy suggests a country girl rather than
an exiled Princess, but she remains under the authority and in the shadow
of her father.
There might be too many “Koreanisms” in this short performance (85
minutes): samulori percussion, shamanic rite, Buddhist ritual, village farce,
wedding ceremony, pansori songs, and so on. It is as if each genre had
not had time to develop, was not granted the proper time and timing for
the ear, the eye, or our attention to become at/tuned. The acting might
seem quantitatively insufficient from a Western, “mimetic” point of view,
because there is almost no time for any build-up, with the constant scene-
changes and shifts in the representation of culture. There is no time, but
also no demand, for characterization; this is more of a—but who could
complain?—“Korea-nization”, resulting in an ensemble of cultural entities
within a dance and song performance, not a mise en scène within a rigid
structural framework.
The acting evidently depends on the dramaturgy, and shares its ambi-
guities: Prospero is not clearly identified as a magician, reader and scholar,
or as a frustrated and aging politician. Ariel remains a structural problem:
not because she is played by a middle-aged woman, but because the voice
72 P. PAVIS
of a pansori singer is coarse and deep, as for a lowly, peasant character.

This, however, at least for a Westerner, does not go with her angelic light-
ness, immateriality and spirit-like ephemerality. Fortunately, Oh Tai-Sok’s
invention of a double, a “Siamese twin” for Caliban brings a schizophrenic
aspect into play—managing to be both psychologically and politically rel-
evant, as we shall see. This choice renews and also clarifies the dramaturgy.
There is, however, a second, parallel, dramaturgical level: a visual and
musical one, which gives the performance its Korean flair and imbues the
mise en scène with a kinesthetic Koreanization. The visual-musical drama-
turgy can best be experienced in the rhythmic pattern of the performance.
There is an ever-changing succession of short scenes, which correspond to
different moments of the plot. These moments are identified and limited
by the use of a specific type of dance, song, or movement. The mise en
scène does not progress only according to a predetermined Western narra-
tive structuring of the story or a closed system of scenes and signs; it also
progresses according to a gradual, rhythmical principle of composition, a
production, unit by unit, of fragments which will eventually cohere and
make the pulsation of moments rhythmically and physically perceptible and
enjoyable. This happens thanks to a series of constantly renewed impulses,
pulsations, from one moment and level of intensity to the next. This was
already apparent in the first scenes: the shipwreck; the three monkeys, the
monkey and the duck, the arrival of Two-heads [photo 7524]; the first
appearances of Prospero and of Miranda; the pansori singer. The con-
stant emergence of new themes and new Korean performing styles makes
one thing clear: rhythmical patterns are more important than meaning. In
other words, we perceive physically and understand intellectually, but not
the same elements, and not at the same time or with the same rhythms.
We tend to react to stimuli: movements, kinesthesia, people’s physical atti-
tudes, or spatial figures. Thus the brooms, held in different directions:
these do not merely punctuate the dialogue for comic effect; they also
influence our kinesthetic engagement with the stage, and our pleasure and
relief at perceiving regular spatial and rhythmic patterns in a chaotic world.
We are particularly sensitive to the spacing, to the formal rhythmical struc-
tures, as well as to the rhetoric of the sentence, the rhythmic difference
between dialogue in prose and in the poetic moments of the text. The
same sort of physicality is present in the masks of the different animals:
their shape is grotesque, their texture stylized, a mixture of rough and
formal figurations. Their bodies, and the bodies of the main characters,
are received kinesthetically: we sense danger in division and dislocation.
There are quite a few violent actions performed on these bodies, literally
or textually.18 Much of the Koreanization thus happens on a level that is
unconscious or not directly culturally bound; it is a matter of borrowing
materials and patterns from Korean sources but shaping them kinestheti-
cally and aesthetically to enhance their impact, including the impact of
appearing Korean, and reshaping the audience’s dwindling identity.
The performance depends on the rhythms of the different episodes,
which happen in rapid succession. Because the text has been considerably
reduced in length, any slowing down kills our concentration. Sometimes
the dynamics seem too slow, and the short scenes do not have time to
“take off”; they have hardly finished when along comes yet another new
arrival or cultural reference. The cruel Brookian law of speed and conti-
nuity applies here: if the actors slow down and reduce intensity, the play,
seeming thin in comparison to the Shakespeare version, collapses, and the
actors seem unable to follow the necessary changes in the rhythm of the
action. Maybe the “Koreanisms” are too numerous and too varied, or
there is just not enough time for an autonomous, compact performance
beyond the different “numbers” which coincide with, but also sometimes
replace, the dramatic episodes. The spectator might be unable to absorb
so many “Koreanisms.” Thus, here too, the Koreanization sometimes
remains a style, a framework, a pleasant backdrop. It does not become
or cannot replace the mise en scène, its organicity, its dynamism, its politi-
cal dimension. Or could it be that Koreanization today can no longer
produce a structured mise en scène, that we are already in some kind of
postdramatic, autonomous construction, lacking center and organicity?
My students would be delighted if this were the case!
We begin to realize that Oh Tai-Sok’s Koreanization of Shakespeare
is not only textual (almost dissolving the Bard’s play in the process), but
reconceives the whole stage as a living space and a breathing human body.
All of these processes are experienced in a general movement of kines-
thetic empathy. The figure of Caliban embodies these best, seen in the
double body of Siamese twins, upper head and lower head, who seek lib-
eration through severance and separation. The playful theatrical treatment
of cutting and sawing do not eliminate a sense of pain at their being first
forced together, then torn apart, and finally condemned to keep fighting
together while resuming the same dirty job in Prospero’s cave.19
This physical pain can also be understood as an implicit political reading
of the play and of its transposition to today’s Korea. Thus, Oh Tai-Sok’s
Caliban is not, as in almost all contemporary interpretations of the play, a
74 P. PAVIS
poor victim of colonialism, held prisoner by his master, Prospero; he is a

divided subject, who cannot liberate himself because he is not able to unite
his internal forces in order to fight the exterior exploiter. Such a powerful
image of division can be read in different ways, among them the politi-
cal context of a divided Korea: a nation unable to overcome the political
control of two different systems. This implicit political discourse is all the
more powerful as it is not an a posteriori hypothetical construction, but
the result of the audience’s kinesthetic experience of watching this double-
headed body and the political division it might embody. Hence, follow-
ing the same logic, the division or reunification of the Korean body and
peninsula would not be an effective solution, not if the two parts were to
keep fighting each other, instead of uniting their forces against the same
exterior and interior enemies: economic exploitation and neocolonialism.
This political reading and this physical experience of Oh Tai-Sok’s rewrit-
ing lead us far indeed from a charming, intracultural, and intranational
rêverie poétique on Korea’s past. We are back on an intercultural track, but
now with a deeper level of reflection on today’s globalized society.
But, we might ask, where is this island or peninsula of Korea, where
everybody seems to dance from morning to evening as in the olden days?
Should we look for a nation with a fixed identity that can be saved by
its culture and its cultural politics? And what is a nation? What holds it
together? We can still go back to Ernest Renan’s famous definition, from
the nineteenth century: a nation is “the fact of sharing, in the past, a glori-
ous heritage and regrets, and of having, in the future, a shared program to
put into effect.” The existence of a nation is thus “a daily plebiscite.”20 Oh
Tai-Sok’s artistic representation of such a “glorious heritage” of different
performance practices and his ability to recreate them within a foreign text
where they make, so to speak, “double sense,” can be credited as a tribute
to his nation. But this Korean nation might also be seen as an “imagined
community,” because we can imagine that each Korean has a different
image of this shared identity of the nation. This “imagined community,”
to use Benedict Anderson’s21 notion, consists in the common membership
of a group which seeks to define itself with a few simple criteria, on which
it would nevertheless be hard to agree. Surely it takes more than the com-
mon language, the grueling school system, the tax office, and the wed-
ding halls to define the Korean nation! How do art and culture, past and
present, fit into the conception of identity and nation? We can still view
Oh Tai-Sok’s reconstruction of Korea and Koreanness as an imaginary,
aesthetic and functional tool for a particular time and task.
Oh Tai-Sok is a playwright whose language and poetry are indeed a

national treasure to be handled with care, both by himself as a director and
by his own actors. His responsibility as an author and master of language
is undoubtedly to secure the future of Korean theater. But, here again, we
are tempted to peer over the fence of cultural and artistic heritage, even if
it is state-protected by a system of national treasures, living or “passed.”
We might wonder if Renan’s view of the nation as a unique, distinctive
grouping of people held together by ties of blood, language, and religion
still applies, even in the case of a nation as homogeneous, despite being
cut in two, as Korea. Caliban comes immediately to mind, with Oh Tai-
Sok’s seminal idea of showing him as a split person and personality, as a
stranger on his own island. We can also see in him a migrant worker on his
own land, colonized and freed only to be sent back to work in the house.22
Are we allowed here to see an allusion in Oh’s “Prospero-US” hero to
Korea’s migrant population, confined to subaltern tasks and expected to
feel only happy and grateful for it?23 While losing his magical and intellec-
tual powers, Prospero regains his political power of yesteryear. Should he
feel happy? He does not really look it, in either Shakespeare or in Oh. Back
in power, but away from his books: is this really a step up?24
Whatever the decision of the main character, we are drifting away from
any purely intracultural Koreanization that would bracket out any political
issues of today. These issues—a sort of return of the repressed—might lead
us back to some sensitive use of intercultural and international material,
or even force us to consider the effect of globalization on cultural identity,
even on Korea’s traditional arts and their contemporary viewers.
An intracultural immersion in Korean folklore, literature or performing
arts is certainly possible, but is always frustrating if one is looking for the
real thing and seeking a “faithful,” “authentic” reconstruction of the past.
But will such a cultural immersion in low or high art ultimately lead us
back to a contemporary Korea, to comparisons with its current political
situation? This will certainly take us back to an interculturalism that got a
bad press, but which increasingly suits the situation in which any audience
in the world finds itself. If we are careful to take into account the global-
ization and glocalization of the last 20 years, we can hope to show how
the traditional Korean cultural and artistic practices are informed by this
intercultural globalization and how the audience will see its own nation
and culture in other cultural contexts.
If we accept this obvious fact, we may then ask how Koreanization
contributes to the staging of a non-Korean work, and how the audience,
76 P. PAVIS
particularly a foreign one, receives and appreciates it? We as spectators

should not be blinded by the beauty and originality of the Korean ele-
ments offered for our enjoyment. We have to understand their function,
that is, their “mise en scène” as a system of meaning within the whole
performance. We, as critical spectators, have to approach a Korean show
with critical suspicion and ask ourselves a few basic questions: why is the
reference Korean, and not Irish, for instance? How does it illuminate
Shakespeare’s and Oh’s plays? What kinds of traditional Korean perfor-
mances are brought into play and why at this or that moment? We are still
in a functionalist, structuralist frame of mind where an element only makes
sense when seen in its global context; we are still within mise en scène. But
at the same time we should question the limits of any representation of a
culture. We should also ask how new productions of Shakespeare and of
Oh Tai-Sok might go beyond the narrow limits of a national culture and
connect with a global and globalized world. Or should they instead con-
nect with the new framework of Asia and Asia-centrism? But to what end?
What Kind of Mise en Scène?

Before tentatively answering these questions, I would like in fine to take
one example of Oh Tai-Sok’s method of staging, thus concentrating on the
aesthetic aspect of the production: how it creates meaning or affects us. Mise
en scène, as a system of meaning helps us relativize cultural Koreanization
and thus go back to theater as an aesthetic object that has patiently to be
pieced together. We could take almost any scene from Oh’s production
and observe how the director mixes the actor’s raw materials and progres-
sively formalizes through the use of cultural references. Thus, the very first
images show the sailors and passengers shaking white linen sheets, while
shouting in panic during the shipwreck. Immediately afterwards, “we hear
sounds and screams all over the stage, they seem to form an odd kind of
music.”25 Within a few seconds, the collective rhythmical use of red fans
becomes a precise choreography, a return to a certain order that coincides
with arrival on the island. Ariel’s song, which comes immediately after-
wards, also seems to emerge from chaos: the melody and the coarse voice
obey the same rules of chaos and order. Mise en scène functions here as a
melting pot, a system of gradual integration of diverse elements, particu-
larly the mixture of Shakespearean motives rewritten by a poet and deep
cultural elements of gesture, attitude, gait, costume, and so on. Sometimes,
however, the scene is so short, the actors so slow and cerebral, and the
cultural allusions so fleeting that the montage of the different sequences

remains too visible, has no time to “melt” and fuse into an organic mise en
scène—or at least not into the kind we might expect within European aes-
thetics. On the macro level of the mise en scène as a whole, one might make
the same observation: the progression of the scenes and the specific “cul-
tural performances,” often going hand in hand, do not always merge into
the global, integrated, organic whole that Europeans would probably call
a mise en scène. The consequence is that the effect (i.e. the construction)
of authenticity is more cultural or anthropological than aesthetic and dra-
maturgical. No doubt Oh Tai-Sok’s message is more implicit and deeper
than Prospero’s final, simple message26: Oh does not want to privilege one
reading over all others. In spite of this clear message, Prospero remains, as
usual, an enigmatic figure. It is hard to tell why he is still so torn and angry.
It is not clear whether our reading can be extended so far only on the basis
of our interpretation of Caliban’s “split personality.” It is likely that the
production is more an open performance than a closed mise en scène, at
least from a Western perspective. One thing seems sure; the éblouissement,27
the dazzling, of the spectator—the Korean as well as the Western one—
always runs the risk of anesthetizing the production’s critical, political, and
even hermeneutical content. When form makes content disappear, we are
in the realm of distraction, or even of the exotic. It is certainly difficult to
know if this is the case here. Obviously, it all depends on the spectator’s
expectations and conception of a theatrical experience.
A Few Tentative Final Conclusions

Koreanization is, so to speak, a universal phenomenon, not just a Korean
pastime! We are all Koreanizers! Every country, every nation and every
performative work experiences Koreanization, if we understand it as a
means of questioning what seems to be the obvious identity of one’s past.
Theater and the arts can look to the past to meet present needs.
Koreanization never remains an obvious and neutral notion. It can
become an idealized, self-indulgent representation of one’s past, an aes-
theticized image for cultural tourists, a neutral statement with no real point
for indifferent spectators. But it can also be a disguise, a parable, a moral
or political statement. We have seen how the double-headed Caliban can
play this subversive role. It is now up to us to perform a dramaturgi-
cal reading of Oh Tai-Sok’s seemingly innocent but complex reading and
staging of his play.
78 P. PAVIS
This image of a divided Caliban helps us break down the border

between up and down, high and low, man and woman, human and ani-
mal. We also feel prompted to question the clear-cut distinction between
intra- and inter-culturalism, to insist on the relativity of each oppositional
element, of this dialectical loop and hermeneutic circle.
We can best assess this Koreanization if we analyze it as a “myth”
(Barthes), as an “imagined community” (Anderson), and as a recon-
structed semiotic secondary system (Lotman). The Koreanization of all
these dances and ceremonies is in fact already globalized, that is, involved
in a globalized system which no artist can master now. Sometimes, it feels
as if Oh Tai-Sok did not want to acknowledge this, or was simply look-
ing for the traditional artistic means necessary to stop globalization, or
at least to slow it down. I have suggested that Oh Tai-Sok also has a
political agenda, which surfaces when kinesthetic empathy and physical
experience—a “movement’s contagion” and the “kinesthetic impact of
performance” (as Susan Foster28 would put it)—occur and reconnect
us with politics and a political reading of the world. Maybe this political
agenda is more important than a new, somewhat idealized Asian identity,
and more important than mythical counter-cultural connections with the
Korea or Japan or America of the 1960s, which are so distant and have
been so misrepresented by the globalization process.
Thus intracultural Koreanization need not be a reactionary move back
to an “imagined community,” an idealized and imaginary past, an authentic
culture. It might very well be a phase necessary for the recovery of Korean
culture or identity. We are still, here in Korea, in a phase of (miraculous)
recovery and (welcome) conservation of traditional Korean performative
culture, which has been successfully preserved thanks only to courageous
artists and intellectuals such as Oh Tai-Sok and many others. But we can
ask for more, and in fact we are already getting more, as this Tempest dem-
onstrates. When we focus on Caliban and insist on his symbolic political
function, we are already taking, or demanding, the next step: a move out
of intraculturalism into an open cultural field, intercultural and thus much
more globalized. In Korea, this next move is already happening, as dem-
onstrated by, for example, Yang Jung-ung’s productions of Twelfth Night
and of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. The next step need not be a jump
from the aesthetics and politics of mise en scène towards postmodern or
postdramatic artistic practices.
On the other hand, globalization cannot be ignored. One of its conse-
quences for theory is the radical questioning of mise en scène as a centered,
“author-ized” phenomenon. We must work towards a new theoretical

model of culture: neither 1930s–1960s interculturalism nor mindless glo-
balization, but something, but something in between, something still to
be created by artists, intellectuals, and politicians.
Thus, we, Koreans and we, citizens of the world, should not only “look
back in anger,” but also look forward in hope. The only question is: for
what?
Note This paper was presented in Seoul on October 19, 2012, for the
international conference “Where does Theater go after the Post Avant-
Garde?” at the Korea National University of Arts. I wish to thank the
conference organizer, Professor Lee, Mee-Won, for her invitation. Many
thanks to Lisa Renaud Tyler for her help in editing this text.
Notes
1. According to European standards, Oh’s work is neither a translation, even
a free one, nor an adaptation, nor a totally original creation. Europeans
seem to operate with different criteria and categories. Even after the so-
called “death of the author,” the West is attached to and obsessed by liter-
ary property and cultural identity; it insists on acknowledging the sources
of what we are reading or creating. It wants traceability.
2. Paris, Seuil, 1992.
3. Lee, Sang-Woo chooses, for instance, to set the Irish play The Weir, by
Conor McPherson, originally set in a small village in the most Western part
of Ireland, in the same time period in a remote coastal location, in one of
the provinces of Korea. The rest follows: Korean beer (sponsoring the
event…) instead of whisky; Korean way of greeting instead of handshakes,
etc.
4. “The ‘Koreanizing’ of Shakespeare was carried out by the most outstand-
ing directors in Korea – such as Kim, Jung-ok, Oh Tae-sok, Lee Hyun-
taek, all of whom have tried to unite the modern form of Western plays
with various elements of traditional Korean theatre. These directors, cater-
ing to the Shakespeare expansion, tried to express Shakespeare with the
cultural and theatrical signs of Korea.” (Lee Hyon-U, Glocalizing 31–32.)
5. “Overlocalization could pervert Shakespeare, resulting in another work
regardless of Shakespeare, and cause miscommunication or misunder-
standing with foreign audiences which are not accustomed to that local
culture.” (Ibid., p. 4)
80 P. PAVIS
6. This production won first prize in the PAMS competition (Performing

Arts Market Seoul) in 2011: an official sign that the production should be
encouraged to travel abroad.
7. Interview, quoted by Maria Shevstova, in Glocalizing …, op. cit., p. 168:
“I believe the job of the theatre is to bring the tradition closer to the young
audiences so that they will not say, ‘Oh that is so old-fashioned’, but will
rediscover their tradition, saying ‘Oh, I didn’t realise it was as beautiful as
this, and it feels so much closer to me.’”
8. For instance by Brian Singleton, in Glocalizing Shakespeare, op. cit., p. 182:
“It was a tradition (“oriental theatre”) that went right to the roots of the
modern high cultural project, searching in surviving traditions for forms
that might rejuvenate a European theatre that had lost its roots.”
9. See for instance the exploitation of children’s labour under extremely
severe conditions in the factories of Samsung in China. (Le Monde, August,
10, 2012. Article by Laure Beaulieu).
10. See on Japanization: Yasushi Nagata: “The Japanization of Chekhov:
Contemporary Adaptations of Three Sisters,” in Adapting Chekhov: The
Text and is Mutations. Edited by J. Douglas Clayton and Yana Meerzon.
London, Routledge, 2013, pp. 261–273.
11. To use William Sun’s term for the transformation of Western performances
into Chinese Opera. See his recent production of Shakespeare and of
Brecht’s Good Person of Sichuan (God and the Good Woman: Deconstructing
Brecht’s Good Person of Sichuan).
12. Nathalie Heinich. “La singularité à tout prix,” Area-revues, n° 14, 2007,
p. 35.
13. Paul Matthews and Song, He-Sook.
14. See for instance Prospero’s epilogue: “I hope the magic I have made with
this fan has given you happiness. Did you enjoy my tale? (He gives the fan
to a member of the audience.) Now my magic is in your hands. As you from
crimes would pardon’d be, let your indulgence set me free” (p. 98).
15. A study of the poetic quality of Oh’s text remains to be done—of the
poetic passages, newly written, as well as of the songs that Ariel or the
group are singing. See also of the amazing list of animals (act IV, p. 75).
16. By “Intracultural,” I mean the search within one and the same culture,
generally but not necessarily one’s own culture, for practices and docu-
ments from the past and present: for instance, the search for “authentic”
Korean cultural performances within the production of Shakespeare, so
that the target audience is in a position to relate to them, thanks to its
knowledge of Korean culture. I mean neither cultural elements cut off
from other cultures as the “authentic” source of a mysterious Korean-ness,
nor what would be preserved from the arrival of, and intercultural mixing
with, other cultures, which would only infiltrate and spoil the “real”
Korean culture. Thus the notion of a pre-civilized, atemporal, pre-colonial
and aboriginal culture—as Brian Singleton defines the “intracultural,”

must be questioned.
Singleton nevertheless offers an interesting distinction between the
intercultural and the intracultural with respect to the conception of time:
“the intercultural collapses time while the intracultural reinforces the dif-
ferences culturally between times” (p. 189). Might we add the followings
remarks: (1) The intercultural thinks in terms of different cultural geo-
graphical spaces which are connected in the intercultural work of art, while
intraculturalism believes that one can immerse oneself in the historical evo-
lution of a single culture and compare different moments within the same
cultural area. (2) However these distinctions can also be contested: the
intercultural is also submitted to historical, temporal variations; the intra-
cultural is never cut off from other cultural influences. In other terms, the
cleavage between inter- and intra- must also be questioned. In a compa-
rable manner, we can see the local and the global sometimes converging
into the “glocal.”
It would be relevant here to reconsider this inter-/intra-cultural dichot-
omy with the way globalization has also been described, as “the shortening
of time and shrinking of space (sometimes called time-space compression)
or as the annihilation of space by time (Marx’s description of capitalism)”
(Grossberg, op. cit., p. 150). Applied to the practice of theater, we could
say that all kinds of spaces, including the spectator’s own space and the
relationship to the performance, in whatever form, have been used, assem-
bled, tried out, and that the theatrical and performative experience is often
defined today as a moment of truth, of illumination, which can only be
described as the rhythmical, temporal, durational experience of the
spectator.
17. I: “Seek and you shall find your prince” (p. 35); II: “I’ll take revenge for
my mother’s death;” (p. 56); III: “I will take his place when he comes
back” (p. 63); IV: “Go and free the King and his entourage” (p. 79); V:
“Let your indulgence set me free” (p. 98).
18. The spirits are beheaded (p. 70); Caliban is sawed into two pieces (p. 95);
the ship is split in two (p. 96). All kinds of images of the shipwreck run
through Shakespeare’s text and even more so through Oh’s.
19. “We have important guests today, so I will forgive you. Go clean the cave
and take these tools with you” (p. 92).
20. Ernest Renan. “What is a nation?” (1882). G. Eley and R. G. Suny (eds.).
Becoming National: a Reader. Oxford and New York, Oxford University
Press, 1996, p. 53. Quoted in New Keywords. A Revised Vocabulary of
Culture and Society. Edited by Tony Bennett, Lawrence Grossberg,
Meaghan Morris. Blackwell Publishing, 2008, p. 233.
21. Benedict Anderson. Imagined Communities: reflections on the Origin and
Spread of Nationalism. London, Verso, 1983.
82 P. PAVIS
22. Oh Tai-Sok follows Shakespeare here: “Go, sirrah, to my cell; take with
you your companions. As you look to have my pardon, trim it handsomely”
(V, 1, p. 348). Oh’s Caliban also brings other (“guilty”) workers with him
to work:” We have important guests today, so I will forgive you. Go clean
the cave and take these fools with you” (p. 92). We only learn from a stage
direction (p. 9) that Caliban is the son of a shaman, “the original mistress
of the island” (p. 9). He claims that Prospero promised Caliban could
marry his daughter (p. 10). Oh Tai-Sok does not seem to insist, as does
Shakespeare, that Caliban was robbed of his island: “This island’s mine by
Sycorax my mother, which you tak’st from me (p. 132).
23. At first glance, this might not seem to be Oh’s problem in this production.
But this is also an implicit thought he might have about Caliban’s future.
His double-headed status shows that the “social problem” cannot be
solved just by severing the ties between upper (thinking) head and lower
(working) head. In offering Caliban freedom, Prospero acknowledges his
hard work: “You have worked hard for me. This is your payment” (p. 94).
He also gives himself a satisfecit through the mouth of his faithful Ariel:
“That was well done. You have acted fairly” (p. 96).
24. Shakespeare’s Prospero is certainly aware of his loss (books, daughter, spir-
itual powers), and does not hide his “despair”: “And my ending is despair/
Unless I be relieved by prayer…” (p. 352). Oh’s Jilji does not give the key
to his own ending, but he alludes, in a Brechtian way, that the public now
has the magical ability to act: “Did you enjoy my tale? Now my magic is in
your hands” (p. 98). A Korean audience will almost always answer “yes” to
the actor’s, and the character’s, question. Contrary to Shakespeare, Oh
does not reveal Jilji’s plans for the future. He might decide to stay on the
island, hoping for the colonial system to continue, still sustained by docile
manpower. The loss of his magician’s tricks could, however, point to dif-
ficult times.
25. P. 11.
26. Prospero to Ariel: “You must promise me one thing. The wind, the rain
and the dew will teach you to be a better person. When life is hard, wait.
There will soon be a breeze” (p. 39).
27. Here, I am using the term Roland Barthes used when he analyzed the
productions of the Berliner Ensemble he saw in Paris in the 1950s.
28. Susan Leigh Foster. “Movement’s contagion: the kinesthetic impact of
performance,” The Cambridge Companion to Performance Studies. Edited
by Tracy Davies. Cambridge University Press, 2008, pp. 46–59.
PART 2
On a Few Theatre Productions

CHAPTER 4
A Few Contemporary French and Korean

Playwrights: A Comparison
It was very pleasant to be back at the Namsan Drama Center, where I had
seen so many magnificent productions. But I was anxious at finding myself
onstage to speak about French contemporary playwrights. And, it was in
Often, well-meaning friends would ask me to compare Korean and European

theater. My response was always evasive: how can one compare the incomparable?
One day, the artistic director of the Namsan Drama Center, a space for the
creation of new writing like our Royal Court or our Théâtre Ouvert, invited
me to a conference on contemporary French dramatic writing—something that
already felt distant! I would have preferred to give my, very fresh, impressions
of all the Korean plays I had seen on Namsan’s stage. “It would be better to
compare Korean and French plays in order to help the audience orient itself,” I
dared to suggest.
And, in fact, often having access to the English translations of these new plays,
I could follow what was happening, and did not feel too disoriented in terms of
themes, narrative structure, dramatic techniques, not to mention the convinced
and emphatic acting style. As if by magic, this convergence of the two theaters
was not the obvious result of globalization’s sanding down of any nationally
specific bumps, rather, it was evidence of a humanistic cosmopolitanism.
It showed a will, more or less conscious, to dodge or to circumvent the
postdramatic (in the case of Korea) or to move beyond it (for the French
playwrights), a will either to stick or return to the values of the dramatic.
After the discussion that followed my lecture, I was fortunate enough to meet
some of the Korean playwrights I had used as examples. Everything I said to
them that evening I could have said to their French counterparts, had there been
the opportunity to meet them with the same ease and amenity.

86 P. PAVIS
order to ward off my anxiety that I wanted them to be accompanied by a

few of their Korean colleagues, since it is through confrontation (rather
than comparison) that we might hope to understand better the dramatic
writing that is underway, here, in Korea, and, far away, in France.
My choice of authors—it is unnecessary even to say this—cannot be jus-
tified with recourse to objective or relevant criteria. Aside from the intrinsic
quality of the plays, everything hinges on what I was able to see or to read,
in Korea or in France. My intuition tells me that dramatic writing (usu-
ally as it appears in stage productions) has, for the last five or ten years,
experienced a significant shift that is more worldwide and globalized than
local and localized, not located in a single country. I would thus like to
tell you about this journey in stages, showing a few recent moments, a
few trends in this dramatic writing in search of its own identity, as is more
than ever the case today. This will be rooted in French categories, thus in a
European approach, rather than an Asian or Korean one: categorizing and
describing the contemporary writing and its evolution. Within these cate
gories and trends, I will prioritize examples that the Korean audience has
perhaps already encountered through the productions I had been invited
to see in Seoul over the last couple of years (2011–2012).
Intimacy
A dramaturgy of the intimate: this category, which is often—and
wrongly—contrasted with political theater, is nothing new in France. It
goes back as far as the “théâtre du moi” (“theater of the self”) of the late
nineteenth century. This has, nevertheless, been subject to a renewal, as
if filling the gap left by a resolutely political and “committed” theater.
The French moralist and psychological tradition of the seventeenth and
eighteenth centuries continues in the confessions and the monologues (or
fake dialogues) of authors like Pascal Rambert and Falk Richter (My Secret
Garden). In Clôture de l’amour, Rambert juxtaposes two monologues,
one by a man and one by a woman. Both characters name and analyse
the reasons for their break-up. This current in writing, that was previ-
ously named “the epic of the intimate” (Roland Fichet) or “the saga of
the intimate” (Philippe Minyana), “compound” a subject’s intimate words
about a universal theme: breaking up. The man adopts a very wordy and
narcissistic discourse on the reasons behind his desire to break up the rela-
tionship and his imminent departure, and meanwhile we see the woman
in profile as she reacts to these specious and cruel arguments. To resume:
A FEW CONTEMPORARY FRENCH AND KOREAN PLAYWRIGHTS: A COMPARISON 87
he does not desire her any more, but needs an hour to list his grievances.
The woman’s response, in the second hour, takes on and refutes the man’s
arguments, opposes them to her own, and this grants the double mono-
logue a great deal of dramatic power. The French literary and rhetorical
tradition makes itself felt here, with the rigor of the arguments, their preci-
sion, which keeps the text from falling into the pathetic or the sentimental,
into psychodrama or hysteria. The actors never lose control of their emo-
tions, they dominate the dynamics and the flow of their words: they are
“tenants of the words,” occupying them without owning them. Rambert
here produces one of the first stage “autofictions,”1 a genre that has long
been limited to contemporary novels, from the work of André Gide and
Serge Doubrovsky to that of Camille Laurent.
There is no real Korean equivalent to this tortured writing, centered
on self-analysis, but dominated by rhetoric and syntax. The closest Korean
example that I know would be something like the (textless) performance
piece by Oh Minjung, in Joo Jung Min’s choreography entitled Synesthesia
Dialog. But in that piece, we see a woman using various household objects
and taking apart her domestic interior, rather than revealing her “heart laid
bare” (Baudelaire). Even if there is no audible text, aside from some words
of gibberish and “yavoseho” (hello?), we do witness the same desire to com-
municate an intimate personal experience through synesthesia, simultane-
ous perceptions by different senses. This communication takes place via
the body of the performer, thanks to her work with colors and shapes of
objects, but also via the transmission of emotions, feelings, and impres-
sions. The transmission takes place through synesthesia, but also through
kinesthesia (muscular and bodily perception of movement). Even if com-
munication without words is less precise than verbal confession, it does call
on physical domains that (French) literary autofiction cannot reach. This is
further proof of the need for kinesthetic Franco-Korean communication.
In terms of literature, we find similar examples in Korea, although they
are different in terms of their aims and their styles. They bear witness to
the same will to show intimate lives, even if they do so in very different
dramatic forms. I will take the example of Kim Myung-Wha and Choi
Zin-A. These two female authors, unlike their French equivalents, reveal
people’s intimate lives more through what they do not say than through
what is explicitly expressed, resulting in something stronger and more
impressive.
In Dol-Nal (First Birthday), Kim Myung-Wha sketches a vitriolic por-
trait of the family life of a couple with the first birthday of their child
88 P. PAVIS
and the Dol-nal ceremony, a kind of christening where the family tries
to imagine the future of the baby. At the end of the evening, when all
the masks have slipped, domestic violence and individual frustration reach
their peak. But rather than opening his eyes, the man only wants to end
it all, as if there were no way out of domestic violence, as if the end of
Korean patriarchy for Korean men would mean castration (generally sym-
bolic, but almost literal here), as if suicide (even imagined or aborted)
would be preferable to challenging the patriarchal order. This “well-made
play” places the intimacy of human relations under a harsh light, but one
entering from outside, like a well-governed microcosm that explodes on
the day of Dol-nal, the first birthday. Intimate and inexpressible things
are one by one introduced into the domestic and the stage space. A final
revelation, as found in Ibsen, concludes the play, taking the form of a dra-
matic explosion that also confirms a state of affairs.
The structure of the play is that of a family drama: each scene leads to
the next, with a continuous mounting of tension, even if rapid moments
and long pauses are alternated. We imperceptibly but inevitably move
towards a brutal confrontation between the husband and the wife and
between all the characters of a past that has never really been accepted.
The play’s naturalistic structure effectively explodes at the end, as if to say
that the realistic representation of this familial and social situation, still
contained and latent, patiently introduced according to the patriarchal
laws of naturalism, is itself exploding before our very eyes. Nevertheless,
this is not a piece of “In-Yer-Face” theater in the style of Sarah Kane or
Mark Ravenhill, neither in terms of the crude language nor the situations
of intolerable violence presented. The revolt is contained for a long time,
and the ending is thus all the more understandable.
Few plays have so clearly illuminated the question of relations between
men and women, the exploitation of the latter by the former. Like a thesis
drama, the work systematically dismantles the wheels of power within the
family unit, and points out implications for the whole of Korean society,
highlighting its ills: the domestic enslavement of women, generalized cor-
ruption, the violence of social and sexual relations, the absence of prospects
for young people, the rejection of motherhood for economic reasons, and
so on. The writing might sometimes seem a bit too explanatory, with a will
to expose systematically and in depth all of the machinations of exploita-
tion, particularly those of patriarchy. But the verbal expression of these ills,
via a long exposition through conversations between women, also plays
host to a conflict that is more and more tense, physically palpable to the
spectator with the crescendo of violence, that of the couple but also that
of a fixed Korean society splintering before our eyes.
In Unexpected, Choi Zin-A begins in a less directly realist manner. She
reconstructs the journey and inner transformation of her lead character: a
young Korean woman travels to Vietnam to forget the suicide of a friend,
and there discovers another way of thinking and of loving; returning to
Seoul, she goes back to her starting point. But the experience of cul-
tural and psychological otherness has changed her forever. The mere dis-
placement of bodies to a foreign country provokes new awareness in the
traveler and affords her some perspective. The young woman has actually
been led to work on herself, and towards the other, proceeding without
knowing exactly where she is heading. For Choi Zin-A, the intimacy of
beings is better measured in terms of authenticity, in terms of the refusal
to wear a suffocating social mask, rather than in a descent to the depths of
the unconscious and towards guilt. Love and sex help to get rid of social
and individual masks.
The dramatic strength of this play is that it centers the plot on the
young Korean woman, letting the spectator discover the cultural differ-
ences at every level. The gaze she directs onto herself becomes ours, on
her and on us. Through the acting, the text articulates and brings together
different kinds of discourse: lyrical moments (the prologue, for example),
“poetic” narrative elements or stage directions, dialogue, thinking “out
loud.” Each discourse can be conceived of (and thus performed) as a
poem: cuts between the different discourses quickly scarify and close over.
This results in a homogeneous text, a dramatic poem equally mastering
lyrical complaint, a sense for dialogism, and the epic flow of a narrative. In
general, it is in novels, particularly in the Bildungsroman, that we face the
task of analyzing the slow transformation of a being in search of the self;
here, exceptionally, theater shows its maturity, while telling a rather clas-
sical tale of a change of scene, one that unfortunately ends with the scene
changing back with the sad return to the country of departure, Korea in
this case. Unexpected is about that which unexpectedly touches us, it is a
dramatized ballad on the experience of otherness before and after separa-
tion. The spectator watches in real time, with the stage as laboratory, this
encounter with the other: the other culture, the other love, the other lan-
guage: “This is the only moment we can share. / No one asks. Who you
are. / It’s still good though I don’t see your face. I just recall the heat on
my lips and cheeks from your skin” (p. 2).
90 P. PAVIS
This writing of the self appears on the pages of a theater of intimacy,

with the unexpected marrying of lyrical narrative and dramatic action.
This very personal play is focused on the question of the honesty involved
in daring to show ourselves as we are: “People seldom show themselves,
but not during the sex. They become honest exchanging their personal
faces” (p. 36). The journey is the discovery of the unknown, or rather of
the unexpected. As in The Surprise of Love (Marivaux), the dramatic form
here proceeds by little strokes: a series of unsaids, linguistic misunder-
standings, sweet nothings, fleeting impressions, which end up touching
on the other within oneself.
But let us return to the question of identity: the shared ground of these
three authors is now more obvious: the will to go to the heart of their
characters and of themselves, while maintaining the forms: purely liter-
ary and rhetorical forms in the case of Rambert, forms of social decency
in Homo-koreanus, or rather in Mulier-koreana for Kim Myung-Wha and
Choi Zin-A. There is, with these three artists, no drift towards the reality
show, no shameless unpacking of the passions, no mixture of the public
and the private as nowadays served up by almost all politicians, no “In-yer-
face” dramaturgy à la Sarah Kane or Mark Ravenhill. In a timely way, we
are spared the effects of this overly direct and simply provocative genre.
Generalizing somewhat hastily, one might say that intimacy, as the search
for one’s authentic self, is something rather European, while the search for
a true face, despite the fear of losing it, is a more Korean preoccupation.
The face and the “I” remain to be properly distinguished, but this might
take us off-track.
Politics
Throughout the 1970s, 1980s, and a large chunk of the 1990s, politics was
gradually evacuated from the European stage, at least in the form of major
“Brechtian” historical plays or militant provocations. Since 2001 and that
year’s terrorist attacks, since 2008 and the world financial crisis and the sub-
sequent powerlessness of governments, politics has come back to Europe, in
terms of public discourse as well as in the arts. This usually served to displace
the culturalist phase of the 1980s and 1990s, the inter- and multi-cultural
years in which every social activity was deemed cultural. In Korea, the time-
line almost goes the other way: the dictatorship of the 1970s and 1980s
paradoxically allowed the emergence of performances that were militant,
critical, and directly political. Europe and Korea came together at the end
of the 1980s with the suspension of this critical spirit and political attitude.
It is thus only recently, within a globalized economy that is more and more
delocalized, that our two countries have converged. But once again the
responses and the solutions are distinct in each case. In Korea, directly polit-
ical and militant plays, at least in the mimetic, critical, or Brechtian mode,
remain quite rare today. Politics, as will be apparent, seems diluted, or even
drowned, in the idealized historical representation of events, events that are
more fictitious or mythical than genuinely historical and political.
It was therefore a very nice surprise to discover, in Baek Ha Ryong’s
Biography of Jeon Myung Chool, a political, amusing, cutting, and almost
Brechtian dramaturgy. The staging, by Park Keun Hyun (an author whose
writing inspires many young playwrights, including Baek himself) is perfectly
suited to the epic structure of Baek’s play. The play and its staging dramatize
different episodes in the life of a builder and crook, up until his accidental
death (or suicide?). Beyond the peripeteia of the rise and fall of an enterpris-
ing but unscrupulous young man, the play tells of the “at-all-costs” economic
burgeoning of Korea, and of the collapse that remains possible and even immi-
nent. This writing, which recalls the parabolic structure of a Brechtian play
or, to take a local example, the writing of Park Keun Hyun himself, gathers
and unifies three necessary components: a perfectly structured fabula, rapid
and virtuoso acting, interspersed with commentaries from a female narrator,
a staging that constantly summons analogies with events from the Korea of
the last 40 years. And so this historical fresco is never abstract, it rests on an
individual story that always serves as a counterpoint to Korean history and
maintains throughout a human and private dimension. The play ends, in fact,
on an evocation of Chool, during his burial. His widow recollects her most
precious memory of the very young man he was then: very poor as he was,
he bought the young girl an ice cream that had melted before it could be
eaten. This personal metaphor gives this future crook a human dimension.
The still young, “radiant, dazzling” Chool disappears, he “melts” just like his
ice cream. This episode nevertheless remains, for the widow, “The most beau-
tiful period of his life, an unforgettable memory.” This image of the melting
ice cream perfectly illustrates the symbolic, personal, and political meaning of
the play: we reside, as Marx said, “in the icy water of egotistical calculation.”
So too, Baek seems to suggest, the ice of a world of “fair’s fair” melts when
we approach the other, with love or with humanity, it liquefies us, makes us
disappear. Love and kindness perhaps come at this price.
In France, we have somewhat lost confidence in this kind of Brechtian
political dramaturgy. We fear that heavy didacticism might bore the
92 P. PAVIS
s pectator. We might want to continue to talk politics, but employing dif-

ferent forms, less direct or explicit ones, forms that are no longer always
purely dramatic, or about stagecraft or aesthetics, forms that are closer to
direct, militant intervention, performance art or installations. Text is not
systematically excluded, but it is not central, published or available to be
read either. Writing has changed radically: it is now a collective enterprise,
without a hierarchy of participants, lacking the centralized control of a
dramaturg or a director. This is the approach of “Le Raoul Collectif,”
whose last work, Le Signal du promeneur, “questions the model of our
neoliberal society, its obvious injunctions (consumption, profit, productiv-
ity, hyperactivity, money, performance...), its concealed conditioning, all
of its capacity for anaesthetising—fear, boredom, conformism or addic-
tion—essential vitality, creative impulses and the individual’s desire for
freedom.”2 This political writing might lead to the “old fashioned” death
of the author, of an author cut off from stage practice and writing in
solitude. These plays in our archive belong to “neo-dramatic theater,” a
trend in writing following on from the postdramatic. It is a “theatre where
a text, characters, and a fiction remain the basis of the stage-work, and
remain as such even if the text is de-structured and the characters dislo-
cated, the fiction plunged into doubt.”3
We could cite other examples of this new use of politics, where an origi-
nal and forceful form has been found: the group SODA (Soyons Oublieux
des Désirs d’Autrui—“May we forget the desires of others”) offers an
eleven-hour theater saga, made up of eight relatively autonomous episodes
with fourteen actors and four musicians playing twenty or so characters.4
A montage of invented dialogues, newspaper articles, and extracts from
blogs is presented. It tells of the precarious lives of young people today,
in a form that is always lively, containing good doses of inventiveness, sto-
rytelling, and dramatic and accessible language. These young people are
aware that one can no longer wait for the “great night” of the revolution,
and must defend themselves right now with the means at hand.5
Such events exist in Korea, but they remain private, or are even secret,
operating almost against the law. For example, the video artist Cha Ji-rang
addresses the social issue of young people’s housing.6 He draws together
a few acquaintances or spectators at Incheon art platform to show them
a documentary that he made by interviewing young people about their
memories of their childhood homes. The group then goes to one of the
many estates with empty apartment units. They each search for paper
cranes hidden, like a treasure hunt. In the end, the group spends the night
in a house lying on these paper cranes, as if in search of a touch of human

warmth. This performative and militant action does not originate in a text,
but it follows a quite precise script, even if it is not actually written down.
The most important thing, here, is the durational aspect of the perfor-
mance as a shared experience. And so the temporality of reading, of fabula,
and of writing is replaced by that of a durational temporal event, which is
meant to bring awareness of the lack of private space and of shared time
existing beyond the performance. Indeed, there is a tendency, particularly
in Korea, of doing away with the text, the better to focus on the event, on
duration, and on space.
History
This difficult rebirth of the political play, at least in its traditional form,
can perhaps be explained by the misunderstandings and the failures of
the historical play. The status and the importance of historical plays var-
ies considerably according to country. In France, the historical play has
practically disappeared from the contemporary theater repertoire; it per-
sists on television in a more fictionalized form, but playwrights do not
contribute to this kind of television work. In Korea, Korean history is
omnipresent in TV dramas, and their historical reconstructions all look
alike. This mass-market aesthetic sometimes finds its way, intact, onto the
Korean stage, when even talented directors and authors are invited by
theaters to create a story connected with a Korean historical period.7 The
National Theatre Company of Korea commissioned five Korean directors
to choose an author to write a story whose action would take place in the
Three Kingdoms period. The result certainly differed depending on the
team, but the historical representation followed the usual aesthetic prin-
ciples copied from the visual and psychological stereotypes of TV dramas.
Neither deconstruction nor parody intervened to disrupt the stereotyped
representation of History and of Korean identity, as if these were objects
of a consensus.
If I dared, however, I would put forward the hypothesis that there is in
Korea an attempt to escape into an idealized national history, orchestrated
by the theatrical establishment, the theaters, the Ministry of Culture, and
the organizations providing grants, and indeed sometimes by the authors
themselves. This escape away from a troubling and depressing present
towards a mythical, idealized, magnified but also deformed past takes
place—or risks to take place—at the expense of a devitalizing of dramatic
94 P. PAVIS
writing. This was observable in the The Three Kingdoms cycle organized
by the National Theatre Company of Korea in 2012. More so than in
the case of the staging of any other kind of text, historical plays tend to
be smothered by a staging employing too faithfully the visual clichés of
Korean history (thematically and in the acting style). Only Kim Myung-
Wha managed in part to dodge the requirements of Korean history, by
proposing a story about novelist Lee Kwang-Soo, himself writing a novel
on the two monks Cho-Shin and Pyeong-Mok, thus centering her aims
on the modern period and on the figure of the writer, profoundly hurt by
the hatred of her former admirers, a persistent hatred that followed her
everywhere because of her supposed collaboration with the Japanese dur-
ing the country’s occupation. Kim Myung-Wha plays her cards right with
this subterfuge, placing the author at the center of the play. The work thus
attains the nagging force of her own writing, of her interrogation of desire
and of its usual social and psychological failures. When Jo-Shin, the monk,
and Wol-Rae, his beloved, decide to escape, the statue of Bodhisattva, the
deity of mercy, starts to sparkle and dance, like a ring of light. The dancer
that mimes this movement casts her deity in a very different light: more
Eros and desire than Buddhist mercy (unless we consider that Buddhist
mercy would precisely consist of accepting Eros, but this reading is not self-
evident!). This detail of the staging, described with precision in the play’s
stage directions, bestows on the staging a psychological and unconscious
dimension, which keeps it from falling into pure historical reconstruction.
The play plunges the often repressed relationship between history and
sexuality into crisis, it places this relationship at the center of the parallel
actions of the play: the couple of the two monks and their sexual frustra-
tion, the couple of lovers on the run, then the nuclear family that cannot
avoid exploding in the face of ostracism, with the parallel story of the
collaborator-writer and his work, Dream, about the two monks. This mise
en abyme of the novel-like story of the two monks and the historical real-
ity of the life of the writer Lee Kwang-Soo is also a mise en abyme of the
historical play itself by an author, Kim Myung-Wha, who mostly wants to
speak of her times and to broach the taboo of Japanese colonialism.
Most of the other plays in the Three Kingdoms cycle barely leave the
universe of historical representation, so get nowhere near the contempo-
rary universe of their audiences. Thus Lee Yoon Taek, both author and
director of his own play Kung Lee,8 certainly produces images of great
formal beauty, especially with gestural chorus work, but often falls into
idealization/simplification of the story and into a very banal narrative, like
illustrations in a children’s book: King Sejong (him again!) has suffered

an accident in his carriage; the carriage-maker (an absent-minded scholar,
more astronomer than mechanic) is thrown in prison by the noblemen.
But the king saw none of this, and anyway was in the countryside get-
ting his very weak eyes treated, and so on. The narrative, too, is rather
weak, with all the usual clichés from this glorious period. The acting and
the heroic tone, the decorative sets, the costumes, the gestural language
reconstituting the same idealized, glorified history, offers none of the per-
spective nor the critical framing that it would need in order to speak of our
times and to historicize the past, in the Brechtian manner.
There is not really any current equivalent of this kind of historical
drama in contemporary French theater, which makes any evaluation of
this kind of play tricky. Few dramas are today devoted to the History of
France, a France that, it is true, does not stem from three kingdoms, but
from just one.
The closest thing to these Korean historical dramas is perhaps the the-
ater of Québec-based Wajdi Mouawad, even if his is a political, rather than
a historical theater. Although probably (nothing actually points to this)
situated in a Middle Eastern or Québécois context, this theater is careful to
remove all geographic or temporal references. Fires, which could be seen
in a staging by Kim Doong-Hyung from Choe Jun-Ho’s translation, tells
the story of twins, Simon and Jeanne, searching for a father and a brother.
This quest leads them to various undetermined places, as if to reconstitute
the puzzle of their existence. A unique voice in contemporary French dra-
maturgy, Mouawad has the skill of telling stories of the past with great dra-
matic and lyrical power, in an epic flow of narratives that are dramatized
on the spot, the succession and interlocking of which ends up giving the
illusion of a mythic universe that reconstitutes the great tragic passions.
This theater offers a strange grafting of the epic art of a storyteller and a
neo-tragedy in the Greek classical style. It is very difficult to stage a text
that is both dense and wordy, where everything is said and repeated ad
infinitum. A simple and pared-down staging, like that of Stanislas Nordey,
sought to reduce the reality effects that, at first sight, might seem to hold
the play together. Most other stagings take on these effects in a redundant
and heavy-handed way; they situate the play in an Arabic context, with a
scenography made up of ruins and signs of civil war. Centering his play on
a return to the origin, seeking to reconstitute the end of the mother’s life,
the moment where she gives birth to a lovechild, and the moment when
a country tears itself apart and murders itself, Mouawad revives the myth
96 P. PAVIS
of Oedipus—the third son, the one being sought, has raped his mother.
Oedipus is the ultimate origin myth. It is also the myth behind the desire to
witness and to tell what happened and what must be transmitted, despite
the horror of the narrative, in order to continue to live and to hope.
Here, unexpectedly, Mouawad’s “universal” and a-historical drama-
turgy reveals a certain affinity with Korean fake historical dramas. For these
dramas are also imaginary constructions with numerous predictable real-
ity effects, with scenery and costumes that would best be removed or, at
least, might be considered only as a starting point for speaking of the pres-
ent. For the past risks smothering the contemporary audience, as well as
Korean society, under an avalanche of theatrical effects. What can be done
to avoid this interment under the snows of yesteryear? Perhaps employing
a different way of telling, returning to a primary mode of simple narration,
that of a storyteller, or inventing a mode in which telling and acting merge
into a narrative-action, a tellacting destined for a bright future in France
as in Korea. But there is room for hope, the trace of this resurgence, in
two recent examples, from France and from Korea: the theater of Joël
Pommerat and Lee Young Seok’s staging of Coming up for air.9
Narrative and Storytelling

French dramatic writing from the last ten years is mainly characterized
(Mouawad is one example) by the return of narration and an appetite
for storytelling, for inventing and hearing stories. With postmodernism
and the postdramatic, the linear fabula of a figurative narrative had almost
disappeared, or was limited to the theater of entertainment, far from dra-
maturgical experimentation. The return to plays that are apparently more
readable as narrative is not, however, the restoration of the old order or
the well-made play. Rather, it is a will no longer to posit as mutually exclu-
sive the pleasure of story and the fascination of representation. Searching
for the fabula while telling stories and enjoying the process of narration
seems to be the name of the game today.
In his rewriting of Cinderella, Joël Pommerat bends the tale in a subtle
but radical way: Cinderella (Sandra) has misunderstood the last words of her
dying mother: she murmurs, or so Sandra believes, that her daughter should
never stop thinking of her, since “for as long as you think of me all the time
without forgetting me... I will in some way stay alive.”10 The conduct of the
“very young girl” will thus be governed by this impossibility of mourning,
by guilt and masochism. Cinderella will gladly accept the most abject
household chores; she finds the Prince more pleasant than charming, and
she receives his slipper and not the reverse; and as for the fairy tale, she has
no supernatural powers and her magic tricks fail miserably. The ironic twists
of the tale make adults smile and children laugh. The rigorous distortion
of the narrative of the tale is always poetic, as it subverts expectations, takes
surprising turns, and is amusing in its paradoxes. The reader or spectator
understands the story differently, without seeking any plausible explanation
for the rereading. Thus we might speak of a return to hermeneutics, where
understanding (verstehen) is more important than explaining (erklären).
The writing reflects this change by proposing alternating passages employ-
ing the narrator’s voice-off and dialogues that are “reversed” in terms of
the expectations of spectators who all, whatever their age, already know
the story. These two kinds of discourse, the narrative and the dramatic, are
clearly separated but are distinct. They help each other along, refer to one
another, and are themselves caught up in the overall energy of the story. A
new way of telling and of acting invents itself before our eyes. The stage
is no longer conceived as the illustration and representation of language.
Nor is this a “stage writing,” an image that dispenses with words. Rather,
it is, according to Pommerat, a way of writing using what is told and what
is exhibited: “The art of the stage is a collective affair. The sensory and per-
ceptual elements of a performance do not come and add themselves to the
written form, but immediately form an integral part of the writing. Noise
and music, body and gesture, intangible events feed, along with the writing,
a creative process that can only take place through multiple voices.”11 What
brings together and subsumes these sensory elements and this text—and
what Pommerat calls “its writing”—is, from a more technical point of view,
the narrative, the narration; and it is also the confrontation and the merging
of the telling and the acting. Let us risk the neologism tellacting to desig-
nate that which can no longer be split into narrative and action, which seeks
to create a doubt for the spectators between what they think they see and
what they imagine they are being told.12 Narratives with all kinds of narra-
tors or storytellers increasingly make their way into the domain of theatrical
mimesis, to the extent that they are reinventing dramatic art by making it
less sure of its capacity to represent reality objectively. Narratives keep action
at a distance by way of speech.
The consequences for the practice of creating performances, Pommerat’s
as well as others’, are instant, but they are slow in establishing themselves as
a working method. The notion, common in Great Britain, of “devising”:
inventing, conceiving, writing as a group, is a good example of this new
98 P. PAVIS
process. Devising is practiced by alternative and experimental groups, but

rarely by traditional companies. It suggests a democratization of the means
and a challenging of the usual division of labour between playwright, dra-
maturg, actor, scenographer, costume designer, director, and actor. This
working method is less common in Korea, and Lee Young-Seok is one of
the few directors trying it out. And yet, the hierarchical division of labour
no longer corresponds to the demands of artistic experimentation. As seen
with the commissioning of directors for productions inspired by the Three
Kingdoms tales, the authors readily give in to the stage ambitions of their
directors and patrons. Plays by these authors are quickly drowned in the
flow of images, of shock-scenes, of allusions to ancient Korean traditions;
their writing becomes warped, as if submerged by the stage.
A few Korean directors, however, resist this mode of production: for
instance Lee Young-Seok and his group Shinjakro, and other artists who
should all be mentioned here, are perhaps in the process of inventing a new
way of making theater, but also a new way of performing/narrating, that
could be called tellacting. This method implies that they speak, and before
that, read, Orwell’s novel, as a malleable material, open to a reading that
immediately translates into acting, and to the irony that distances and thus
comments and narrates in its own way the text of the novel. Tellacting is
an inextricable mixture of narrative and acting, the actor-performer tells
and represents at the same time. Tellacting represents a trend that remains
quite new in dramatic writing. Tellacting takes place when it is no longer
possible to separate what is shown-played from what is recounted-told.
Like his unconscious partner Joël Pommerat, Lee Young-Seok and his
two virtuoso actors perform perfectly on both levels, they juggle with the
lightness of the narrative and the pleasure of imitation. Everything is about
distance, irony, shifting attitudes of enunciation: the distance, the mimicry
game, physical attitudes and moves allow for constant change. This tellacting
takes its rightful place in the Korean tradition of the storyteller b
erating and
provoking the audience, making it participate, sometimes bringing a specta-
tor onstage. The strength of Lee Young-Seok and his two actors is that they
make of tellacting a method simultaneously of reading, writing or rewriting,
of acting, of directing, and, at the other extreme, of swift and distantiated
reception for the spectator. Lee Young-Seok instigates a new kind of story-
telling: no longer is there any need to go into the audience at some point to
wake people up or provoke them, but instead an address is constantly being
enacted for the audience, never giving the key to the relationship that is
constructed insistently between two anonymous characters and an audience.
Conclusions
In this comparison, I have only given isolated examples, hoping never-
theless to reveal a few key elements in contemporary dramatic writing.
But it is sometimes difficult to isolate the text within a mise en scène, an
experience, or an event, all of which greatly exceed it. It would no doubt
have been better to compare stage practices, rather than textual and liter-
ary traces. But I wanted precisely to stress the importance of writing and
reading of dramatic texts, of what we used to call—the term seems almost
archaic in Europe—“dramas.” I wanted as far as possible to avoid national
categories as distinct and airtight phenomena with specific characteristics.
I hope to have shown, with this Franco-Korean family excursion, that
national frameworks are exploding before the spellbound eyes of post-
modern and postdramatic spectators.
Nevertheless, it seemed justified for me to study and to compare the
texts, their dramaturgical structures, and their themes. Globalization accel-
erates the convergence and leveling of aesthetics and dramaturgies. Shifts
in writing often progress in comparable ways in each national context,
albeit at different speeds. Dramatic writing is becoming international, but
the Western model is changing course, it incorporates phenomena com-
ing from elsewhere (beyond Europe or America). We are moving towards
an international model, with dramatic (Aristotelian) origins, an adapt-
able, pragmatic, and globalized model that is characterized by a somewhat
abstract, “functional” dramaturgy, without local color: the dramaturgy is
from an Aristotelian origin, speaking in English, flanked by a German dra-
maturg, advised by a French director, and analyzed by a swarm of Korean
critics.
In Korea, in France, and in the contemporary theater world, writing is
always in a position of weakness in relation to mise en scène, which deter-
mines the life or the death of the text: it is very easy to destroy texts, if
only by not reading them, not performing them, subverting them by way
of acting, or, even more radically, by having them disappear with a shower
of extralinguistic signs.13
Writing is to be spoken but also read: this is something we often forget
both in France and in Korea. Theater discovered mise en scène, but must
not be allowed to cover the text in a morass of historical, folkloric, or
anecdotal details. Reacting against this interment of words in a flood of
images or stage business, one can observe, in France as in Korea, a ten-
dency towards increased simplicity. As if it was a case of letting the text be
100 P. PAVIS
heard and understood, and of seeing and appreciating the dramatic text
on paper. In Korea as in France or in Europe, dramatic writing and theater
practice are rapidly evolving. Overall, convergence is certain to happen,
but with differing rhythms and priorities. Overseas, any theater tradition
is experienced as more or less literary: everything depends on the point
of view. French acting, seen from Korea or Britain, is criticized for being
too poetic, artificial, philosophical, obscure, hermetic, and literary. From a
French perspective, Korean acting seems too insistent, too psychological,
and insufficient in its vocal nuances, crushing the delicate architecture of
the texts. Nevertheless, the tricky thing is to avoid generalization, and to
prevent the fostering of clichés.
Our two theaters are like quarrelling lovers who, even from a distance,
cannot help fighting, coming together and then moving apart, seducing
then rejecting each other, imitating one another, or each going a different
way. That’s life, and a good thing too.
Notes
1. The neologism “autofiction”, devised by Serge Doubrovsky in 1977 for
his novel Fils, refers to an autobiographical narrative (where the author,
narrator, and character are one), a narrative that uses the narrative and lit-
erary techniques of fictional writing. This is hardly common in the theater,
but we might point out Falk Richter’s My Secret Garden, or La Place du
Singe by Christine Angot and Mathilde Monnier, who perform their own
choreography.
2. Press-pack for the show Le Signal du promeneur, November 2012. Théâtre
de la Bastille.
3. Anne Monfort. “Après le postdramatique: narration et fiction entre écri-
ture de plateau et théâtre néo-dramatique” Trajectoires, n° 3, online:
http://trajectoires.revue.org/392
4. SODA: Saga théâtrale en huit épisodes by Nicolas Kerszenbaum, Dennis
Baronnet, and Ismaël Jude.
5. “Though the forest burns/and the world catches fire/It is but the very
beginning/of something better!/No point in trembling/Or of fearing the
dark…/So raise your eyes and see/the stars of the great night!” “Bien sûr la
forêt brûle//et le monde prend feu// Mais c’est le grand début//de
quelque chose de mieux !//Inutile de trembler// Ou d’avoir peur du noir…
//Lève donc les yeux pour voir// les étoiles du grand soir !” (pp. 631–632).
6. See interview with Kanghee Tson in Contour, Vol., N° 4, Autumn 2012,

pp. 40–44.
7. The well-known directors were: Choi Yong Hun, for a play by Kim Myung-
Wha; Park Jung Hee, for a play by Hong Won Ki; Lee Seong Yul, for a play
by Choi Chi Eon; Park Sang Hyun, for a play by Kim Tae Hyung; Yang
Jeong Oong, for a play by Cha Geun Ho.
8. This play was a commission from the Theatre Company, but was not part
of the Three Kingdoms cycle.
9. See Chap. 8 for a study of this work.
10. Joël Pommerat. Cendrillon. Paris, Actes Sud-Papiers, 2012, p. 10. (“tant
que tu penseras à moi tout le temps sans m’oublier…je resterai en vie
quelque part”).
11. Joël Pommerat. Dossier de Presse de Pinocchio. Théâtre de Nîmes, 2010.
12. See Chap. 8.
13. The heights of this power were demonstrated in the Three Kingdoms proj-
ect, in which directors were commissioned to choose authors: a way of
stating that the text is clearly subject to the director. An unmistakeable
sign: in the programme for Dream (p. 36), there is a large portrait of the
director, Choi Young Hun, then a much smaller one of the author, Kim
Myung Wha, demoted to the same level as the scenographer, the com-
poser, and all the technical team. The same is true for the director, Park
Jung-Hee and the author, Hong Won Ki, mentioned after all the actors’
headshots for the production This is the Flower (p. 38).
CHAPTER 5
Questions to the Past: The Puppet Play

Batyr Mamaï by Kim Kwang-Lim
How do you write about a little-known, perhaps even imaginary, Asian

country, from the perspective of a country like Korea, one having recently
entered hypermodernity? Such is the tricky wager made by Kim Kwang-
Lim, currently a big name in Korean playwriting, with his play A Batyr
Mamaï, which premiered on October 9, 2011 at the Arko theater in Seoul,
directed by Yoon Jeong-Seop, one of the great Korean scenographers.1
These notes are written a few days before the premiere, and based solely
on the English translation of the play. It seems to me, as a matter of fact,
Often a staging is revisited, and thus deeply modified; but it will not necessarily
improve.
Is this not the very spirit of theater?
But I was still somewhat surprised by a working session a few weeks after the
performances of Batyr Mamaï, which brought together representatives from
the Ministry of Culture and key artists from the production. The Ministry had
commissioned the artists, a playwright and director/scenographer/puppeteer,
both very famous, to create the play and production. The whole artistic team had
been summoned to determine whether the production would be revived, and
how, with the input of a few critics and officials, it might be improved.
It was as if the politicians, the advisors, the spectators were all transformed into
German Dramaturgen, milling around in an attempt to bring the patient back to
life! The artists received congratulations, but were also urged to make the staging
a bit clearer and more legible.
The first version would have suited me. Fortunately, they kept the puppets,
which helped me see the artists and politicians in a new light.

104 P. PAVIS
that this new text, whatever the result of its future stagings, is deserving
of our attention, as it brings together many questions about the identity
of a country, a time, a society, but also of an author, since it is—let us not
forget—a fiction. This fiction hinges as much on personal myth as it does
on the mythology of the land of Kazakhstan, seen as exotic, even when
viewed from Korea.
This fiction is itself the object of a very real “command,” a commission
from the office of the Korean Ministry of Culture: the “2011 Asian Arts
Theatre Residency Gwangjiu.” By choosing the Kazakh legend, circulat-
ing in summarized form in Korean and Russian, Kim Kwang-Lim main-
tained the freedom to write about his own time and about the Korean
socio-economic context. He accomplishes the feat by taking the Kazakh
legend as a starting point for each episode, while mapping onto that story
the framing device of another story, about a businessman, Jung, travel-
ing to faraway Kazakhstan on the high-speed Orient Express (linking
Seoul and Istanbul, through North Korea, China, and all the countries
en route before reaching Almati, the capital of Kazakhstan). Accompanied
by his “secretary” (note the quotation marks) and the poet KIM, and
himself invited by the warrior Moussa Mamaï, Jung hopes to finalize a
juicy contract securing the old warrior’s petroleum for a period of 20 years
(enough time to empty the tanks and fill the coffers). But things do not
go as expected. Mamaï’s father had in the past offended Jezternakh, a half
monster-half woman with long, sharp nails. Upon his entering her terri-
tory, she killed him (Scene III). Mamaï decides to take his revenge. In the
presence of his three guests, he kills the extraordinarily beautiful woman
who has come to attack him (Scene IV). Alas, her widower in turn seeks
to make Mamaï pay for the murder and is killed by Mamaï’s daughter,
Bikeshi, who becomes in her father’s eyes a true heroine, as brave as a
son (Scene V). Mamaï seems rejuvenated by the young women who sur-
round him so energetically, but he nevertheless does not manage to meet
the challenge imposed by Princess Perry, the Queen of the Heavens and a
young beauty in her twenties: to stay awake for an entire night. Under fire,
in fact, his age catches up with him, as does his old man’s face. The prin-
cess thus refuses to marry him. Mamaï wonders if this might all be a dream
(Scene VI). On the way home, the enterprising entrepreneur Mr Jung
succumbs to the same erotic fantasies as Mamaï: he, too, thinks it was all a
dream. He notices at any rate that his briefcase stuffed with dollars is still
in fact with the warrior Mamaï, without their negotiations having been
concluded. Was this a ruse by Mamaï, or Jung’s subconscious act in the
QUESTIONS TO THE PAST: THE PUPPET PLAY BATYR MAMAÏ BY KIM KWANG... 105
face of Kazakhstan’s savage beauty? Just at this moment, with the visitors
on the train headed back to Seoul, a tsunami hits and a petroleum-wave
causes an earthquake. In the distance, Mamaï and the secretary vanish
on horseback, waving to the broken-backed businessman and the happy-
hearted poet, both left at the side of the road (Scene VII).
The artistry of Kim Kwang-Lim as a storyteller consists of skillfully
intermingling ancestral legend and the story of a business trip. The legend
is of course only a pretext to speak about our time and its commercial
mores in the age of rogue capitalism and a globalized world. The play-
wright also adds another, marginal and parallel, story: about the boy and
Natasha (in Scenes II, III, V). These brief parentheses, an unsophisticated
counterpoint, are an allusion to the folly of the telephone. A young man,
whose mother has no choice but to go and work in Seoul, complains of
not having the latest mobile phone. Thwarted in his love for Natasha, he
stabs Natasha. This time, too, a woman seduces a man and is then mur-
dered by him. These stories operate in parallel and have similarities (that of
Mamaï’s and the young man, and, from a symbolic perspective, that of the
poet and the businessman); they reveal a troubled and troubling relation-
ship between men and women. On every occasion, the same conclusion:
women, who combine absolute beauty and unspeakable cruelty, are seduc-
tresses “by nature” and are thus dangerous and need to be eliminated,
physically or symbolically. This is certainly the recurring storyline, and is
the unconscious structure that emerges when the four conflicts (Mamaï,
Boy, the poet Kim, Jung)2 are mapped onto one another. The unconscious
fantasy is the same: the beautiful and seductive woman is killed, an act of
family vengeance or the result of a lover’s bitterness, a response to fear or
to the inability to seduce.
The story, in any case, is clear, almost too clear; allusions to the eco-
nomic situation are transparent. Only the human relations remain hidden.
The mise en scène should complicate things, and grant them the ambiguity
of the stage and the acting. This is not the time to clarify or name the eco-
nomic conditions at play, present only in a general and allusive form in the
text: which capital? Which specific companies are involved in exploiting
the riches in fellow Asian countries? Who profits from the theft? Is Chinese
expansionism any different from any other? Which regime pulls the strings
in the current Kazakh economy? Is there a landed gentry, a local mafia?
How are agreements reached with foreign investors? These questions
would probably seem somewhat pointless or misplaced in relation to an
innocent tale like this, but perhaps the modern transposition of the play
106 P. PAVIS
might make them justified? The moment the Korean stock exchange, and
trading in figures, are evoked, we demand similarly to understand the situ-
ation in the foreign country, to avoid making of it a mythic land, as it is in
the source-legend.
The central conflict, around which the play is constructed, concerns the
cultural and existential difference between the Kazakh warrior, savage and
indomitable, and the Korean entrepreneur, pusillanimous and mediocre.
Despite the obvious differences between these two figures, the story sug-
gests (enlisting the help of the poet-commentator KIM) that the two men
share a thirst for domination, the domination of ancestral lands and young
girls in the first case, the domination of oilfields and young secretaries in
the second.
The fabula is embodied in the ironic and disillusioned figure of the
poet KIM. The poet—here true to an eternal literary theme—is powerless
to change the world. What use are poets in a society based only on profit?
To serve as a guide negotiating cultures? To explain to us, in their rather
crude way, the world’s customs, poetry, and beauty? To forewarn of the
coming catastrophic tsunami, even after it has hit? The poet in the theater
is most often merely a comic or parodic figure, quite ridiculous and some-
times also sarcastic and cruel.
And yet, this is precisely one of the key concerns of the play and of
the intercultural commission. Is there a common Asian identity in the
countries of this zone? This seems to be the implicit, and rather touchy,
question, and the reply depends to some extent on who is doing the ask-
ing. The cultural identity of these different nation-states is not in doubt,
or at least was not until recently, until globalization. But is there a global
Asian identity? Are there not two Asias: the Asia of famine, and the Asia of
technological and economic success? The play posits an intercultural kin-
ship between Korea and Kazakhstan, but this is just a facade: what unites
the two countries is above all Korea’s economic interests, its sourcing of
raw materials from poor Asian countries. Other similarities between the
peoples might instead involve the characters: the men and the women are
alike, from one country or one time to another; they possess an identity, a
common essence: such an essentialist reading is at least debatable.
Under the guise of poetry, obeying the rules of the “inter-Asian”
commission from which it originated, the play asks disruptive questions
about Korean society; it sees the funny side of the constraints that soci-
ety places on artists: the intercultural commission can be obeyed, but to
what end? To facilitate understanding between different peoples? Or the
better to export works already globalized in their very design? The play
regurgitates, without always seeming to do so, the stereotypes of Korean
society, starting with casting doubt on Korean cultural identity, mocking
the clichés of its managerial culture: the only discernible identity is in fact
socio-economic.
So, is there one Asian identity? Or is this purely imaginary, imposed
by current cultural politics, politics indexed to the economic situation?
Is it all a question of using culture to counterbalance economic levelling?
Or perhaps, in the spirit of politicians, is it all about placing Korea at the
center of this particular grouping of Asian cultures? One can hope that
cultural politics will not remain so naïve and might settle instead for help-
ing Asian artists to work in peace.
Even though differences between Asian countries exist and will be pre-
served in a laudable effort to avoid globalization’s levelling effects, we
can bet that without political intervention, post-, or rather neocolonial
conquest-capitalism, will flatten them or sweep them away like a tsunami.
One need only observe the way in which countries like China are exploit-
ing, in shameless fashion, the riches of poor African countries, ransacking
their natural resources, imposing inequitable contracts, and pushing into
ruin countries that accept such arrangements in the hope of meager eco-
nomic benefit. What about the Korea of Jung and Kim?
Even before seeing how the text will be transformed, reworked even, by
the staging, we too might dream for a moment of possible interpretations.
Will this staging be capable of demonstrating the intertwining of personal
(fantastical) concerns and political, economic, and philosophical realities?
The role of the staging will be a very tricky one: to mask or to unmask? To
illustrate or to create? To aestheticize or to condemn?
Before submitting this play to the test of a staging, a few words should
be said about the extremely accomplished way in which it is written. Its
dramaturgy is rather classical, Aristotelian, and dramatic. There is tension
between the protagonists, characters representing ideas or well-defined
orientations, visible conflicts, clear oppositions. The different narrative
strands come together in the end. The action of the dramatic fall is quite
clear: Mamaï, being the more cunning, has won: he keeps the money with-
out signing the contract and, as a bonus, gets the girl: bravo! But conse-
quences, in the form of the petroleum’s revenge, will not be far behind,
striking the Koreans before they even get back to Seoul. The catastrophe
impacts upon Korea, as if a punishment for having contravened the laws
of another culture. Was it all a dream, as in Calderón’s Life is a Dream
108 P. PAVIS
or Corneille’s The Theatrical Illusion? It doesn’t matter. The final image

shows the victory of the warrior Mamaï; he abducts Jung and KIM’s sec-
retary, heading for his homeland where bulging coffers await his return.
Does the old foreign warrior get to keep the girl, the spoils, his land,
and his traditions? It seems hard to believe, but this is, after all, a legend,
where desires are taken for realities. This ironic and disillusioned conclu-
sion marks the end of a dream, the end of a charming legend in which
the hero is punished for being too greedy and too capitalistic. Astutely,
the dramaturgy refuses to make a judgment. It limits itself to distributing
rewards and punishments: Jung’s loins are broken (an image of financial
ruin) while KIM applauds the departure of the triumphant couple (had he
seen this coming?). The plots, the styles, the experiences, and the conclu-
sions end up coinciding. Is this intercultural synthesis?
We cannot be certain! At first sight, yes—all the ingredients of an inter-
cultural work seem to be combined here: fantastical legend, exoticism,
light and rapid cultural allusions, metaphors from unspoilt nature—for-
ests, mountain-tops, prairies, plenty of virgins, infinite distances, insur-
mountable obstacles. The intercultural form and atmosphere are thus
summoned, but this is mere window-dressing—a form suited to the phil-
osophical tales of the likes of Voltaire or Montesquieu, used to transmit
political ideas that might seem threatening to the powers that be. The play
is more globalized than intercultural. Its interculturality is more “folkloric”
than political. Among many Korean artists there exists a certain mistrust,
or even a slight skepticism towards intercultural exchange. Whenever a
staging or adaptation Koreanizes a non-Korean work, it is not executed
in accordance with the 1970s and 1980s European idea of a universalized
creation, or of cooperation with a view to mutual enrichment. The artistic
work of Kim Kwang-Lim, Yoon Yeong-Seop, and the puppeteers remains
firmly in the domain of art; it takes no interest in the question of identity
or in cultural relativism, issues promoted by many European artists and
intellectuals since the 1970s.
KIM Kwang-Lim uses the intercultural mode and the pan-Asian com-
mission with the malicious intention of rerouting customary discourses on
the wisdom of nations and of friendship between peoples. Regrettably, he
stops short of opting for a militant political form, scarcely going beyond
observing that developing countries are being exploited. On the other
hand, however, it is undeniable that this tale, watched from the vantage
point of Korea, requires the audience to rethink its relationship with its
own country’s culture, one that is itself disappearing thanks to the zealous
exploitation of natural resources by other Asian countries.
Such were the main points emerging from my reading the play.
I was very surprised when I observed that the staging of Yoon Yeong-
Seop’s text employed visual projections and used puppets, operated by
five to six people in full view. Yoon employs two types: string puppets for
the beginning, middle, and end sequences focusing on the three Koreans;
but much larger puppets, similar to the Japanese Bunraku are used for
Mamaï’s story. On both sides of the stage, two screens host projections
of drawings and animated paintings. To one side, a small orchestra (flute,
drums, electronic piano, harmonica) harmoniously takes care of the scene
changes, or discreetly suggests a Kazakh or “oriental” atmosphere. There
must have been significant work beforehand, with the composer and musi-
cians having to absorb traditional Kazakh music, borrowing from it and
perhaps slightly adapting it, and mastering traditional Kazakh instruments
to produce accompanying melodies for the onstage action.
One can speak of a mise en scène of these centers of meaning, in that
the scenes process, one after another, moving from one place, one atmo-
sphere, one type of acting to another, with all the subtlety of a theater
staging with living actors. The setup is as much physical-concrete as
symbolic-abstract. It takes care of the dramatic enunciation of the text,
while imposing its own visual and sonic logic. It controls the various levels
of narration, while subordinating them to the mise en scène’s overall narra-
tion: the story of a return trip to Kazakhstan. The different sub-spaces are
also maps operating by way of depth and laterality: shifts from one to the
other give the performance its rhythm and clarify the story. This story is
close to Kim Kwang-Lim’s dramatic text, but it rightly allows itself a few
simplifications: certain scenes (the white virgins, or the stage-directions for
the tsunami) are conveyed through animated images with an accompany-
ing soundtrack: while quite heavy-handed in the script, the evocation of
virgins keeping watch over the resting Warrior Mamaï or the enterpris-
ing Jung is magnificently and poetically rendered with animated shadows
appearing to the chirping of baby birds (the only point where human
voices have been altered in the audio-mix).
Overall, the puppets are very well suited to KIM Kwang-Lim’s play.
They transcend the oversimplifications of the dramatic text, retroactively
justifying it as a basic scenario enabling the evocation of a strange world
and the construction of a performance. They necessarily proffer a certain
interpretation, if only in figuring the various characters, assigning them
110 P. PAVIS
characteristics that are meaningful because of their frozen and stylized

nature. One might regret that the end of the story seems a bit evasive:
the Princess Perry episode, not crucial to the principal plot, does not sur-
vive being reduced to a visual and sonic representation, and the last scene
seems a bit hasty and simplistic; the tsunami, the earthquake, and espe-
cially the final image of the floored Koreans are neither performed nor
offered in a drawn form. The storytelling suffers somewhat when abruptly
halted, without the summarizing image proposed in the play’s extensive
final stage direction. Aside from this detail, KIM Kwang-Lim’s own way of
telling lends itself well to puppets and to animation. The order of scenes,
and the content of each scene, is respected. The voice-off, present at the
start and at the end, serves as commentary; it sums up and focuses the
durational actions that form the historical basis of this legend and of its
contemporary Korean telling.
The puppets support the simplicity of the tale: they provide a strong
sculptural image of the events that make up the legend. The characters are
frozen into caricatures for the entire performance: the poet is a fat little
bespectacled alcoholic; the boss is an elegant, “silver-fox” type, and a bit
of a leech; the secretary is smiley, sexy, and stereotyped.
Puppeteers, in general and even more so here, “smooth out” the
psychological and linguistic subtleties and ambiguities of the text. They
cannot convey, for example, the ambivalence of some sentiments (the
love-hate relationship the male characters have with the female ones). All
the surface details of characters in a play performed by actors fade or con-
geal in a puppet, devoid of nuance and subtlety. When psychology morphs
into sculpture, a reduction necessarily takes place, or, at the least, there is
a change of scale. The spectator’s memorization and emotional approach
becomes quite different. The archetypes and personal myths detected in
the text and its storyline are thus even more concealed and inaccessible,
in that they are not significantly emphasized by the puppets’ acting. The
stylization of faces and gestures, and the exaggeration of appearance trans-
forms psychology and identification into formal values whose emotional
impact is very distinct. As in Bunraku, the operators are visible, but here
they work with their faces uncovered, granting us the additional pleasure
of following their physical movements and their facial expressions. Some
of the operators’ facial expressions seem to “imitate” and reproduce those
of the puppets. The actor is thus reintroduced, even while the puppet
comes to free us from the actor.3 The puppet spares us poor emotional
and physical control. The puppet engenders what Barthes, describing
Bunraku, described as “sensuous abstraction”: “it is not the simulation of

the body that it seeks but, so to speak, its sensuous abstraction.”4
This “sensuous abstraction,” this Artaudian notion that theater “must
become a sort of experimental demonstration of the profound unity of
the concrete and the abstract,”5 is illustrated at every point in Yoon’s pro-
duction and Moon Jae-Hee’s work with puppets. The abstraction of the
figures does not preclude vocal realism in the spoken words. Twice, actor-
dancers appear, as if to give us another taste of flesh. In profile and quite
distant, the leopard-woman is mired, it would seem, in oil, stripped now
of her aura of invincibility; but very close, the actor stripped bare, perhaps
her husband or the body of the husband, is a human body defying the
inert bodies of the puppeteers. Abstract figures of very human flesh are
diametrically opposed to the always figurative and functional gestures of
the puppets.
One might have hoped that the pre-recorded voices might equally be
subject to sensuous abstraction. But here, the marriage of the abstract
and the sensuous works less well: the voices, very dramatic and perfectly
recorded, bear too much similarity with voices from a cartoon, a realist
film, or even radio reportage. They are too naturalistic and psychological;
they have not been stylized and reworked by the actor-speaker, or been
modified by electro-acoustic technology in a way that might correspond
to the abstract and sculptural bodies of the puppets. While the music has
been superbly adapted and gauged to the dramatic needs at hand, the
recorded dialogues are too perfect in their “legibility”/audibility, hamper-
ing the artistic possibilities of the sculptural stylized figures. This conces-
sion to spoken theater, to voices, to the psychology of the drama does
little to undermine the dominance, in this performance, of visual arts and
puppetry.6 The visual arts always tend, by way of their expressive power
and their non-verbal nature, to mask historicity, politics, and history. The
puppets created by Lim Eun-Jo and directed by Moon Jaehee, along with
the spatial work by Yoon Jeong-Seop drag the play into the realm of the
marvelous, the world of childhood, leading Kim Kwang-Lim’s play to
emerge as a show suitable for any audience. It acquires no political dimen-
sion that is not already present in its textual form. Its new visual and musi-
cal dimension helps the spectators to enjoy a direct, sensory experience of
this culture and of travel. It gives body to a play that is too simplistic and
reflective, a play even reflecting on itself. The recorded and live music, the
warm colors, and the images animated and activated by the accompanying
music help to suggest, rather than to reconstitute, Kazakh culture. The
112 P. PAVIS
other, in the form of Mamaï or Jezternakh, is shown to be savage and

terrifying, unknown and untameable. Mamaï’s horses create the impres-
sion of hair, the hair of the Gorgon Medusa. Is this a very exotic and ori-
entialist way of figuring the other? The other is always unknown, a strange
stranger whom we do not recognize from back home (Heim), and who
thus remains unheimlich (Freud)—a being with a worrying strangeness.
In contrast, the three Koreans are just like archetypal Western tourists:
a threesome from a bourgeois comedy! Adding a dash of irony, the play
reproduces the orientalist ideological framework of yesteryear. But with a
key difference: previously, the West was represented as an aggressive man,
while the Orient was a beautiful and submissive woman, summarily raped
or killed if she ever tried to resist the conquest. Here, it is the Koreans who
occupy the role of Westerners (or should that be of capitalists?): they quest
for new markets, like the Europeans of the nineteenth century.
Be that as it may, the old West vs East opposition, or the more recent one
of America/Europe vs Asia, no longer makes much sense. Late capitalism
has sought to trouble it. Just as the unconscious fantasy of being seduced
then abandoned and threatened by a beautiful and wild woman—the beau-
tiful foreigner—has never stopped appealing to us, the politics of intrusion
into the lives and livelihoods of Asian countries by Korean and international
capital is plain to see, even behind the mask of puppetry. Such is perhaps the
implicit message of this rewriting for the stage of a Kazakh legend.
***
One year later, there was another iteration of Batyr Mamaï, an adapta-
tion by Park Choon-Keun and Go Jeag-Wi.
It strikes a European as strange that two assistants would be asked to adapt
the author’s original text! They acquired the right to transform the author’s
work, not just by cutting the text, but rewriting whole scenes. From a Western
perspective, the author, Kim Kwang-Lim thus lost control of the text and the
production. This is, in part, an application of the cinematic model of screen-
writing and the practice of script-doctoring, and led to mixed results.
Why adapt the previous version? Not really because the artists had devel-
oped ideas and proposed improvements, but in fact because the customer,
the financier, the Ministry of Culture, had kept track of the product’s
evolution and thought (who, exactly, did the thinking we cannot know)
that some things had not been comprehensible in the first presentation,
and that it would thus be necessary to make things clearer. A long after-
noon, chaired by a representative of the ministry (and which I was able
to attend), was devoted to reviewing the previous version: the director,

author, and assistants were—actually quite courteously—questioned, and
were given notes by a group of professors and professional critics, the
reward being the continuity of significant funding for the project. Seoul is
well worth a mass.
The new adaptation is both superficial and radical: superficial because
the story has not fundamentally changed: it still tells of a journey taken
by a company director called Jung and poet called Kim. But Kim is not
accompanied by his secretary this time, but by a journalist (for that mat-
ter a paid one, as the boss insists from the start that she accept a check).
This is radical in that the new version seems more explicit and explanatory
as regards what motivates the characters: their points of view are system-
atized, and the explanations are given through the characters’ conclusions.
It is thus both the same text and a different one. It is not a restaging,
nor a new interpretation of a text, but an adaptation-correction.
One thing did change, however, although this would be difficult to
measure: the dynamics of the fabula. The story now seemed stuck, rather
than merely slowed down. Despite the explanations, the causal connection
between the different episodes was stronger than before. The spectator no
longer needed to seek out the relationships between them as they were
now obvious, and the conclusions predictable in terms of economic argu-
ments, ecological preaching, or the question of dream vs contemporary
reality.
The adaptation was reorientated to place much more stress on the
sexual problems of the entrepreneur, the poet, and the old warrior. They
all feel too old to go back to their old ways, and too frustrated to build
any relationship with women not predicated on conquest, violence, and
frustration. The formula of this frustration is the same for the Koreans as
for the old Kazakh: Mamaï’s waning sexual prowess prevents him from
fathering a son with the queen of the Heavens; his posterity thus no lon-
ger guaranteed, he leaves his land to the foreigners who have come to put
down roots and extract oil; he can only hope that the colonizers will leave
his history intact and share his poetic dream. For the Koreans, this dream
is a sexual fantasy, for the Kazakh, it is a legend to be perpetuated.
At every turn, the adaptation and the new staging fall back into the
same repressed psychic structures that eliminate politics and the possibil-
ity of seeing problems in political terms (so as not to say “in postcolonial
terms”). Korean corporations are given free rein to dig their oil wells.
114 P. PAVIS
In spite of all this, the technical structure of what is presented retains

high standards: the string puppetry remains excellent. And this time, the
puppeteers also give voice to their creatures. Thus the speech no longer
has the somewhat sterile perfection of a recorded voice emanating from
the loudspeakers, sounding like something from a cartoon. The live voices
are synchronized with the artificial movements. Any problems have noth-
ing to do with a lack of technique, but with the gap between dialogues,
delivered in somewhat slangy contemporary Korean, and movements that
inevitably seem artificial and stylized. This is a problem of writing and of
staging that has yet to be resolved. Should the puppetry adapt itself to Kim
Kwang-Lim’s rather crude text? Or, on the contrary, should the writing
adopt the style and register of Moon Jae-Hee’s puppeteers?
The question must be asked: was it worthwhile to perform a second
version? And was this another staging of the same work, or a new work
with its own staging?
What exactly do we expect from a Korean mise en scène, beyond tech-
nique and coordination? The production of meaning, no doubt. But must
this meaning be centered and situated at the source of the hierarchy of
signs? Did Korea skip that stage of modernity, moving directly into post-
modernism at the start of the 2000s, and into the postdramatic now? And
is this cause for celebration?
Notes
1. I would like to thank Lee In-Soo for her help with the English translation
of Kim Kwang-Lim’s text. Performance surtitled in English.
2. According to Charles Mauron. Des Métaphores obsédantes au mythe person-
nel. Introduction à la psychocritique. Paris, Corti, 1963.
3. “Bunraku, however, does not sign the actor, it gets rid of him for us.”
(Roland Barthes. Empire of Signs, New York: Hill and Wang, 1982, p. 58).
4. Ibid., p. 60.
5. Antonin Artaud. The Theatre and its Double. New York: Grove Press, 1958,
p. 108.
6. This would have been interesting if the voices had come from another
source than the speakers: from the puppets, for example, if not from actors.
Or perhaps from visible or masked actors speaking the text live, according
to a precise vocal staging.
CHAPTER 6
I, Na Hyeseok, the Undesirable: A Stage

Requiem by Kim Minseung
The play and the performance recount the life of Na Hyeseok—the

troubled and tragic life of a painter who ended up on the street, aban-
doned by all, dragged through the mud by the polite society of her time.
The author of the play, Kim Minseung, was able to avoid teary melo-
drama, easy sentimentality, and the pity that normally accompanies
this kind of evocation (think of the many stage adaptations of the life
What immediately touched me in Na Hye-Seok’s dramatization was the homage

to a little known, rejected figure of early twentieth-century Korean literature and
feminism.
Na Hye-Seok: “Na” is also the word for “me”; Hye-Seok is the “undesired”.
She reminded me of a certain “little girl”. She became a victim of machismo, of
male violence, of the cowardice of the self-righteous: a true figure of our times.
I loved this little girl because, through the historical figure, I could feel the
fragility of Korean society, the uncertain position of women despite their
exterior visibility, the inevitable worship of their appearance, and their fanatical
“K-pop-isation.”
Beyond the figure of the unloved, I perceived in this performance the figure
of the dissident, embodied in the equally translucent actress; I saw in her a
counter-relief portrait of Korea, and specifically of the Korean woman, always—
despite appearances—a victim of prejudice seeking emancipation.
Beyond the “little girl”, I appreciated the “little forms” of this dramaturgy:
plays written in a simple fashion, staged with limited means but with rigour, the
stage conceived as a laboratory, a testing ground for free citizens.

116 P. PAVIS
of Camille Claudel, for example; she too was abandoned by all, even by
her brother the famous author and diplomat Paul Claudel). The director,
Yoon Hansol, and the actress, Jeon Seonwoo, have followed the under-
stated line of the play; this evocation is dignified and restrained, which
only makes it stronger and more significant.
The author and the actress have both interiorized the journey of this
artist, as if to present their view of the character as much as the series of
actions making up her life. In the first part, the camera follows the actress
through the streets of Seoul to her studio. Looking over her shoulder, our
contemporary eyes seek to discover this character by following her traces
as she crosses the city. We want to enter the studio and penetrate the secret
of this woman. But there is no trace of those times: contemporary Seoul
has erased every trace of this inglorious episode in Korean cultural life; the
I, NA HYESEOK, THE UNDESIRABLE: A STAGE REQUIEM BY KIM... 117
studio has been swept away, replaced by banks and offices. But can the past
be so easily repressed?
Dramaturgy
The dramaturgy of the play follows the chronology, describing a few key
stages of the painter’s life. Writing the biography of an artist is no simple
thing in the theater, especially if one resists the temptation of dramatizing
situations, of placing dialog in the protagonists’ mouths. Kim Minseung
opted to illuminate a few moments from the life, moments that also con-
stitute questions that are as pertinent for our time as they are for that of
the artist.
118 P. PAVIS
1. A double of the painter, the actress is filmed from the back as

she tries in vain to enter Na Hyeseok’s former studio. This
seems to have been the position of enunciation of the play-
wright: to imagine the life and the suffering of Na Hyeseok
from the current perspective, without claiming to reconstitute
and dramatize a life. So, little by little, we enter a universe of
subjectivity; we are invited to ring the doorbell of the past to
find out what really happened back then.
2. Next, the actress reads extracts of texts by Na Hyeseok, and

briefly explains them. She quotes previous articles that
attempted to “refute” her arguments, to discredit her, then to
120 P. PAVIS
destroy her. She complains about the mentality of Korean

men, who themselves lack the purity and chastity they demand
of women.
3. Starting from a painting whose origin and subject are con-

tested, the actress summons a polemic on the authenticity of a
work: is it or is it not a portrait of her? Implicitly, the spectator
senses that this is the very identity of Na, her clear awareness
of being different; at stake now is her relentless feminist and
artistic fight.
The dramaturgy has found its vantage point, its distance from the
object evoked, its pitch amongst words describing the artist’s stations of
the cross and the woman’s descent into hell: not with cries or blows, but
in a far more radical and pitiless way. This is the meaning of the play’s title,
which can be translated as: Na Hyeseok, the undesirable, or, translating the
wordplay (a word that means “me” and which refers to the proper name
“Na”), I, Hyeseok, the undesirable. In either case, someone is undesirable,
but passes unnoticed, eliminating her more efficiently than even the firing
squad could. It is the Na, the “I” of the artist and woman who feels unde-
sired, unseen, and is soon to be chased out of the social life of her times.
The story of the play avoids linear biography, with its inevitable anec-
dotes or overly formulaic interpretations, be they negative or positive.
The progression of the story is not strictly chronological, it takes place
by way of changes in discourse and in methods of investigation: mock-
documentary, extracts from written works with commentary, quotations
from critics of the period, discussions on Na Hyeseok’s self-portrait, a final
monologue by the artist. Na’s “I” appears to disintegrate, her identity
crumbles, her place within Korea’s art landscape fades. This is the subject
of this remarkable play by Kim Minseung, a young playwright destined for
a bright future in the theater.
A Discursive and Narrative Space

The stages in the progression of Na Hyeseok are figured abstractly by
way of changes of place inside the stage space where she speaks, as well as
by way of her changes of attitude and position (seated, standing, laying
down, positioned on a chair). The character, like the actress, goes from
one place to another without seeking to provide a motivation or to make
this or that move plausible; positions change as if it were a film-shoot, and
without fear of producing a certain discontinuity. The spectators, seated
on the ground, backs to the wall, in a deceptively rectangular room with
a few blind spots, perceive these successive actions from different perspec-
tives; they are more the witnesses of a very well-governed performance or
a static installation than the spectators of an overall dramatic or mimetic
action. Through her moves, her intonations, her changes of energy and
of attitude, the actress helps us to pass readily from one genre to another,
and the staging lends each genre great possibilities, all without eclecticism:
change is always at the service of the narrative.
The space is not mimetic: two leather chairs, a cold cellar floor upon
which pages have carefully been placed in lines, a fragile arrangement that
the actresses’ footsteps will progressively—especially towards the end—
disturb, and even destroy. The technological setup (spotlights, computer,
a video monitor) is in full view: no attempt is made to hide it.
Every movement the actress makes is meaningful: often following
perpendicular lines, as on a chessboard, like a series of moves leading
inevitably to the final fall. Only then do the movements become erratic,
describing curves as the strength and the will of this woman is forever
broken. The voice and the body, and the words or types of discourse are
perfectly controlled. This is because the writing and scenography (by Yon
Hansol, who is also the director), and the staging and acting are closely
imbricated, almost to the point that they cannot be separated or distin-
guished. The enunciation, be it vocal, physical, dramaturgical, or textual,
is always under control. The actress always adopts the same attitude in her
utterances on the painful life of Na Hyeseok. She demonstrates a great
deal of reserve in her way of speaking: the writer seeks to express herself,
to witness, rather than to complain. She measures her words, she controls
her emotions, she calmly returns to what she has lived and written, she
analyzes herself with the benefit of hindsight, the overview of history. Her
enunciation thus maintains a fragile balance between narrative and outside
perspective, stage embodiment.
122 P. PAVIS
Her acting consists of diversifying the possible modes of enunciation,

of not embodying everything at once, and avoiding overly psychological
interpretation. The first phase of recollection has a calm and measured
tone: the actress, seated, discusses Na Hyeseok in an almost cold and dis-
tanced manner. Next, in a sober costume from 1920s or 1930s Europe,
she slowly crosses the stage space, sometimes faced with her own image
on a screen: a woman in search of her past, looking for the studio where
she used to work. At other moments, she performs unexpected actions:
she supports herself on her hands in the planche position, precariously bal-
anced; or she talks with a man, a constantly changing role. She alternates
this with speaking into a microphone, lying on the floor, sitting, or falling
from a chair. These variations are punctuated by a recording of the door-
bell and the response from the intercom. Towards the end of her journey,
when she is forced to write comic texts to survive, she reaches the point of
no return, she “cracks”, stamps her feet, bursts into tears.
For the character and the actress, this biographical journey manifests
itself through an increasingly visible and sensory somatization of moral
suffering. The balance struck is the result of a constant tension between
terms previously seen as contradictory: telling and living, exhibiting and
embodying, telling and acting. This tellacting can be found both in new
dramatic writing and in acting, a renewed acting, relieved of the obligation
of “being the character”. Undesired offers a particularly successful example

of this: the relationship between telling and acting changes constantly,
although imperceptibly; it concludes with the very strong image of a fall-
ing woman, a defeated woman. The actress, upright on the chair, sud-
denly falls, still in a sitting position, letting herself drop without protecting
herself: a magnificent image of the attitude of Na Hyeseok, dignified and
determined to the end. But, by this point, nothing can stop the fall. Her
voice, her body, and her Self are forever shattered. The play and the mise
en scène manage to bring to life the progression which (we imagine) was
Na’s life: a calm assurance, an absence of provocation, a fierce determina-
tion to bring about the triumph of ideas until, under attack as a person and
an artist, she eventually “breaks down”: a deeply moving ending where
she shouts, stamps, and cries like a little girl, still without having in the
least conceded or compromised. The “objective” dramaturgy, the clinical
analysis of the staging, and the sober and distant acting make the moment
of rupture and the fall particularly harrowing. The evocation of Na ends
on this image: the actress leaves, her character finds the strength to pick up
a red rose from the floor before disappearing: neither comes back for the
curtain-call; the bell sounds its three notes, the “shaken” audience does
not dare leave.
Tellacting is a different new way of telling a story in the theater.
Contemporary dramatic writing increasingly, as in this example, sets up
a narrative strategy that draws on all the means of the stage, but does so
in an abstract, reserved, and minimalistic manner. This miniaturization
of dramatic writing is not merely a manifestation of a certain tendency in
“post-post-dramatic neo-dramatic” writing. It is also a strategy that avoids
the spectacular abundances of mise en scène; it is a reconquering of nar-
ration and story, of narrative enunciation and the powers of the actor, or
rather the tellactor (or narractor).
124 P. PAVIS
Fictional writing, mock-documentary, the staging of a text, perfor-

mance art, installation, dramatized reading: I, Hyeseok, the undesirable
offers something of all these genres at once, but in measured doses.
Perfectly mastered and integrated into this performance—poignant yet
light, nostalgic yet combative—the text and its stage enunciation open a
path towards the future, towards a new kind of theater that is rapid yet
profound, elegant yet militant, and which hits us in the heart. By evoking
a figure cruelly forgotten by Korean history, Kim Minseung and her team
are righting an injustice and magnificently pointing out a new path for
stage creation.1
Note
1. See photos and their captions in Critical Stages, n° 8, 2012 ( criticalstages.
org).
CHAPTER 7
A Few Productions by Kim Hyun-Tak:

Death of a Salesman, Medea on Media,
The Maids
Kim Hyun-Tak belongs to a new generation of directors who are still rela-
tively unknown, but whose work marks a clean and promising break with
conventional production work. The fact that he often stages European1
or Korean2 classics allows us to observe how he operates, through what
one critic,3 and the director himself4 term a deconstruction of works, the
relevance of that term remaining to be tested.
By way of three of his recent productions, which I will tackle in chrono-
logical order, I would like to study Kim Hyun-Tak’s mode of operating,
in terms of his adaptation of plays as much as in terms of the performing
style of his actors.
I always saw Kim Hyun-Tak as the Korean Grotowski, the Grotowski of origins.
For the wrong reasons, no doubt: an insalubrious cellar for a theater; a radicalism
in using classics more as material than as story; the apparent gratuitousness of the
stage actions; the urgency and hysteria of the acting.
In Poland, Grotowski was both closely monitored and economically
supported by the Communist regime. In Korea, Kim Hyun-Tak is free to come
and go in his cellar, nobody checks up on him; only a few ardent supporters and
critics ever pay him a visit.
During my stay, I saw all of his productions, usually more than once. After
each performance, I would talk with him, with the help of my interpreter, who is
also his dramaturg (Mok Jung-Won). My objections, his answers, always the same.

126 P. PAVIS
Death of a Salesman
A FEW PRODUCTIONS BY KIM HYUN-TAK: DEATH OF A SALESMAN... 127
With one of the plays on words he likes so much, and paying the price of
a spoonerism that ends up making sense, the latest work (2013), Sales of
a Deathman, is a reference to Arthur Miller’s play, Death of a Salesman
(1949). The staging in its earliest form dates from 2010, and was recorded
in November 2013.5 According to the Korean production model, stagings
are very often reworked, and significantly altered each time. More than a
reprise or a variation, this is thus a recreation, which goes so far as to take
into account suggestions from official cultural institutions and even from
critics themselves! It is enough to drive a theater historian to tears, search-
ing in vain for a hypothetical reference version.
Scenography
The very beautiful central idea of the staging was to have Willy, the pro-
tagonist and eponymous traveling salesman, running on a gym treadmill
throughout the performance. Using two microphones placed in front of
and behind the treadmill, the other characters step up to shout their short
lines, painful memories coming back to the consciousness of the salesman
at the moment of his death. On a screen in front of the traveling sales-
man, life seems to flash by one last time, just before the suicide of the head
of the family. The conveyor belt becomes a metaphor for a life without
rest, of an exhausting career that follows people without let-up, the only
way out being arrest, death, or suicide when one can no longer bear the
rhythm of work and the race for financial survival. It is a nice image of a
frenetic, tragic and unbridled form of capitalism, a phenomenon experi-
enced by all in the “Land of the Morning Calm,” but also lived every day
in China, in Japan, in the Americas: capitalism enjoys the luxury of physi-
cally eliminating those who are reluctant, by driving them to suicide. This
metaphor works like a charm to convey the central idea of Miller’s play.
Frantically running on the spot, Willy tries to follow the movement
of the conveyor belt along a yellow line; the spectators are seated on two
sides, very close to the actors, who move in a very limited space inside
an insalubrious cellar: the performance space, rehearsal space and, appar-
ently, the director’s home. For this particular play, in fact, it is more like a
garage than a cellar: here and there are costumes from other shows: plastic
chairs from The Maids, mismatched grimy items, neon tubes. Aside from
some weak lighting from two or three spotlights trained on Willy’s face
or chest, we see the action only with the help of low-powered lights or, at
the end, with torches that the characters use to make their way through
128 P. PAVIS
the darkness. The actions take place at full-throttle, with each performer
coming to deliver the line into the microphone before disappearing back
into the darkness.
Account of the Stage Action

The performance starts with a short dialogue between Willy and Uncle
Ben. All you need, according to Ben, is to have a $25,000 diamond in
your pocket. Tempted by this prospect, Willy gets on the treadmill: he just
needs to make good sales in order to amass a fortune, or so he thinks. The
lethal mechanism jolts into action. Heroic industrial music comes out of
the infernal running machine. Willy imagines the spectacular funeral that
will prove to his brother Biff just how well regarded he was. This episode,
which does not feature in Miller’s text, sets the tone for Willy’s memories:
grievances expressed by the family, shouted into the two microphones on
stands. The episode on marital infidelity unleashes the hostility of the son
and the aggressiveness of the family. Towards the middle of the perfor-
mance, which lasts around 50 minutes, the treadmill stops for an instant,
and we hear Willy’s heartbeat, produced by the son character rhythmically
tapping the microphone against his chest. Willy asks for the window to be
opened, then the pursuers get back to their persecution. The wife’s kindly
remarks about the household budget, in Miller’s play, here become spir-
ited criticisms. A long sequence talks at length about the American Way
of Life, with its myths (American football, the cult of money, a lifetime of
debt). A few minutes before the end, and unexpectedly, Biff climbs onto
the treadmill and embraces his father for a long time: the only moment of
respite and of forgiveness, but it comes too late. Soon, the treadmill stops,
we hear it brake and then it is replaced, little by little, by deathly silence,
in the most complete darkness. After that, the family throws flowers onto
the treadmill that has become Willy’s tomb. At this point he separates
himself from the group, places himself in the position of outside observer
and quietly whistles.
Adaptation
To understand the force and the originality of this mise en scène requires
reflection on the way in which Miller’s play has been adapted. Kim Hyun-
Tak offers a compressed version, which intensifies the force and the vio-
lence of the message, while also producing an explosive cocktail. The
result is an installation, compressed to the point of causing the text and

the acting to explode. This compression consists of packing and compact-
ing textual fragments (from Miller or from Kim!) into brief stage and
verbal actions performed and shouted into the microphone at full throttle.
This compressing of quoted, rewritten, or invented phrases sometimes
leads to a compressing of the meaning, to a reduction of the plot into shreds
of nightmares that all end up being alike, a series of criticisms, attacks, accu-
sations, and condemnations. In this way, the fabric of the dream or of the
hallucination retains a certain logic, one that remains to be interpreted. At
most, one can ponder the relevance or the length of the microphone inter-
ventions. Thus with the quarrel between two women over Willy’s character,
which appears a bit long and of great interest; or the two brothers’ game
of American football, which seems quite boring, since it is too predictable
and trite. One could surely respond that these are Willy’s obsessions and a
portrait of deepest America. What is more troubling, however, is that the
choice is unilateral, as it is entirely centered on the individual suffering of
the character. This fixation on the “American Way of Life” does not con-
clude, as with Arthur Miller, in an almost explicit critique of the economic
and political system that produces this lifestyle and which only ends in fail-
ure and death. The adaptation thus concerns suffering in the workplace (an
oh-so-current theme), but does not reflect on the solution proposed by the
author of the play. The spectator is pushed towards tragic conclusions, but
never to their causes, or less still the possible remedies. The spectator does
not grasp the family relations or friendships of the grouping, and even less
those of the American society embodied by it.
Such an adaptation-compression challenges Western categories. Is this
in fact an adaptation of an existing text, or is it not more of a rewrit-
ing, or even an original text? The classic argument against such a practice
would be: can one understand and appreciate this compression without
knowing the original play? And indeed, must one still refer to an original
source? The response can only be a technical one: this production is not a
translation of Miller’s play, nor a staging, and nor is it an adaptation that
respects the proportions and the spirit of the original play. It is more a free
rewriting that seeks out the play’s themes and formulations where they
correspond to the general direction of the compression. It is a thesis, clear
but simplistic, that can be reached by any means and transformed into a
high-speed and high-intensity performance.
The adaptation has been reworked into an interior monologue, a
stream of consciousness, a continuous yellow line, a compact text spoken
130 P. PAVIS
by aggressors, some memories that haunt the salesman. It is no longer, as

is more usual, any kind of qualitative or proportionate reduction, a nar-
rative unburdening. It is a reorganization via the consciousness of one
solitary character, a way of rebalancing the proportions without changing,
at least most of the time, the text on the page. It is a means of subjectiv-
izing a point of view, of reframing everything through the eyes of the main
character, who must perform and endure a performance.
This change in the system of enunciation has us move from a dramatic
and psychological play to a physical and rhythmical performance. The
adaptation leads us from a realist, even naturalistic style to a fragmented,
deconstructed, yet still very emotional style. The spectator is physically
touched, as if by vibrations, by a painful intensity, and not by the directly
mimetic psychological emotions of the characters. Arthur Miller had
already taken care to limit the realism of his dramatic writing by way of
changes of place, cuts, and acting conventions. Kim Hyun-Tak follows
and accentuates this tendency by compressing and fragmenting the fab-
ula, creating a montage of reactions and feelings. This compression of the
scenes, the words, the sounds lets him avoid the trap of a purely psycho-
logical and hysterical interpretation (of the Actors’ Studio variety). The
performance takes place at a frenetic tempo that “physicalizes” the acting
while granting it an almost geometrical precision.
Today, psychological and stage realism no longer really satisfy us. We
seek a more rapid, concentrated mode of communication, one which bet-
ter matches a different conception of the actor, or else a more reflexive
aesthetic, and which accelerates the rhythm and accentuates the frenzy of
our epoch and its taste for personal experience and shock-treatment. The
consequences of this are not insignificant: with little nuance in the words
and actions, Willy’s aggressors all speak in the same jerking, repetitive,
and simplistic manner. And this is the major difference between Miller’s
play and Kim Hyun-Tak’s performance piece: the play is rooted in sus-
pense, in anguish, an enigma that will eventually be resolved with an
explicitly political conclusion; conversely, the performance adaptation by
Kim Hyun-Tak shows characters that are angry, excessive, and violent
from the off. The director does not establish a continuous, varied, or
nuanced temporality.
This Korean example of the adaptation/staging of a Western classic
leaves foreign observers perplexed: is it a rewriting? Or a mise en scène, in
the European sense? Is the intent to say the same thing in a new form, or to
create an original work? Are originality and intellectual property valuable
in and of themselves? Questions of fidelity, and even of interpretation, no

longer seem to come up for this director. Perhaps he considers himself
beyond adaptation and rewriting, in a performance that is more about
the actors’ virtuosity than the idea of a (re)reading of a work. This per-
formance, from the European point of view, remains a simplification both
of Miller’s play and of the social question of work, be it in the American
Dream of the 1940s or in today’s Korea, in this cellar to which theater
is relegated, tolerated, and thus distanced from all political critique. The
mixture of family psychological drama and economic alienation, Miller’s
central theme, is almost lost in this hyper-psychological version of human
relations. The complexity of Linda, the wife, the complementary duality
of the two sons, and the political stakes of the suicide are not highlighted.
Hence the differing conclusion of the suicide for the two brothers is cru-
cial: one, Happy, decides to avenge the death of his father by seeking out
success in spite of everything;6 the other, Biff, demands a different life.7
Far from suggesting a real ethical or political alternative, as does Miller,
Kim Hyun-Tak offers a postmodern Korean version that is somber and
pessimistic.
Acting
From the start, the visitor to this dark place is struck by the consider-
able endurance of the lead actor (Lee Jin-Sung, who is not himself actu-
ally a runner!) in never stopping or slowing, in not getting ejected from
the conveyor belt. The other characters display the same aggressive and
intense energy. In a few well-chosen words from the script, they convey
a situation: the failing son, the son following in his father’s footsteps, the
mother who sees the total breakdown of the family, and the givers of
poor advice. The characterization is certainly somewhat exaggerated and
excessive, but it allows for the avoidance of a too-meticulous psychological
realism. It spares us the excessive expression of emotion, it intensifies our
perception of reactions, and it underlines the formal construction of the
whole, the detailed choreography of the pack-in-pursuit.
• Intensity. In Kim Hyun-Tak’s version, all the causes of the death of

the salesman are given in a haphazard fashion, through the choices
taken in the adaptation-compression as well as in the acting, which is
both highly psychological and highly formalized. Intensity swallows
up any dramaturgical intentions, any logic of the actions. Is this a
132 P. PAVIS
postmodern and postdramatic model for writing and performing

today?
What is gained from this intensification of theater? Efficiency, and the

pleasure of remotely receiving a series of shocks and virtuoso numbers
delivered by the actors.
What is lost? The subtlety of detail, the historical vision of the whole,
the causal linking of motives, and especially the possibility of transferring
the situation of the play into a current context. Because—at least accord-
ing to the Western conception of mise en scène—the dramatic situation
of a classical text must always be updated. For me, the question to ask of
this play might thus be: why do Chinese workers and Korean students
commit suicide today?
• Style: the question is whether Kim Hyun-Tak invents a new type of

acting. Recall early Grotowski, who staged universal classics using
a comparable acting style. The great texts, considerably reduced in
size, were chosen for the myth that they embodied, and each was
performed in a very intense style, written into the flesh of the per-
formers. The text was spoken by actors seemingly in a trance, but
perfectly mastering their roles, with diction at once artificial and
authentic, able to convey perfectly the geometry of a phrase. Their
acting constantly oscillated between organicity and artificiality.
Perfectly controlling both their emotions and their movements, the
actors left no room for vagueness or approximation. These actors
were very close to the spectators, sometimes in the same playing
area, but they were never in physical contact.
Kim Hyun-Tak’s actors retain most of these qualities. Their acting

is of a rare precision, of an intensity that never dims. What has perhaps
changed is the sense of purity of the theatrical-sacrificial act of Grotowski.
There is no longer a search for universal bodily hieroglyphs, the theatri-
cal communion between actor and spectator. The intense frenzy of Kim
Hyun-Tak’s actors is in no way ceremonial; it produces no apotheosis—
it corresponds to the economic and commercial frenzy of the travel-
ing salesman in search of new markets, of new sales. Here in the cellar,
we find ourselves in a sordid everydayness, very far from the American
Dream of the past. The message all the more violent since it reveals the
flipside of this dream: the neoliberal dream of a Korean society obsessed
with the clean, the tidy, the good and proper, a dream in which markets
are conquered whatever the price. But do the Korean spectators make
the link with their own situation, or are they satisfied just to note failure,
as in the new title: The Sales of the Deathman? Unlike so many European
directors, Lee Hyun-Tak does not furnish the signs and conceptual tools
required to transpose this play from the America of the 1940s to the
Korea of the 2010s, with its neoliberal and globalized ideology of suc-
cess at any cost, even the cost of a few suicides.
The question is, nevertheless, whether this brief and compact form
is the genre that best meets the needs of today’s Korea. A violent,
excessive, radical digest, leaving the central place to the actors, a per-
manent recycling: these are perhaps the most appropriate Korean forms
of the moment, and the ones that are replacing the European notion of
reading, rereading, and mise en scène. This intense and malleable form
of performance surely perfectly suits the rhythm of life in Korea, with
the necessities of the present moment. Western mise en scène—and this
is its function—must always adapt itself to an audience. But from the
contemporary Korean perspective, it must also create, educate, and
provoke the audience. In this performance piece, however, the provo-
cation remains quite formal; it is not enough to make the audience
change its mind, to prompt a political awakening. From a Western
“committed” point of view, cut off from the critical practice of dra-
maturgy and of critical and political mise en scène, we might regret the
play’s apolitical simplifications, which favor the somewhat superficial
violence of the central runner. For Miller, psychology and politics are
inextricably linked. Kim Hyun-Tak certainly shows the violence of the
salesman’s headlong rush, he denounces the extreme cruelty of those
who exploit and persecute this Woyzech of the American Dream. But
what political conclusions does he draw for our times, compared with
those made by Arthur Miller at the end of the Second World War? The
question remains open.
***
The same question is posed in another Kim Hyun-Tak staging: Medea
on Media. It is certainly a great idea, evoking the universally recognized
myth of Medea through the various contemporary media. One will nev-
ertheless not find here a rereading or a staging of the play by Euripides
nor its numerous versions, even if the programme does promise the
“Greek tragedy by Euripides, adapted and directed by Kim Hyun-Tak.”
134 P. PAVIS
Medea on Media
There is little of Medea in this performance, but a great deal about the
media and the way in which they treat Medea’s life. A quite complete
overview of the media is offered:
• Four old-fashioned journalists, notebook and pen in hand, inter-

viewing and recording the facts and the star’s movements.
• A film from the early days of the Japanese or American talkies: in a
melodramatic mode, Creon refuses to help Medea and rejects her.
• A talk show or reality show gets hold of Medea and Jason (and later
his fiancée), and they level abuse at one another and hurl all kinds of
criticism in each other’s faces before coming to blows, to the great
pleasure of the audience.
• An erotico-mystical yoga session.
• Video games telling the story of Medea using synthetic characters
with mechanical gestures.
• A television announcer presenting the domestic drama with all the
juicy details.
• In a studio, a children’s film is dubbed by actors with infantilized
voices, as in Disney cartoons.
• An American detective film covering the shoot-out occasioned by

Medea’s arrest.
• A Japanese song sung over a backing-track by the entire cast, which
ends the show on an ironic, or even cynical, note.
Each episode is interrupted very abruptly; the actors immediately aban-

don their characters and get ready for the next take. These are workers
under pressure, pushed to get it finished, and in no way concerned with
this bloody tale.
The exaggerated, stereotyped, parodic take on the media and its rav-
ages is somewhat naïve, and certainly is something we have all seen before.
One struggles to situate this project, and even the type of staging. Is it
simply parody? In terms of the narrative structure—a series of examples
of kinds of media, their techniques, their tics, no doubt it is! The parody
quickly has us forgetting the real issues of Medea,8 almost distracting us
from them, in fact! The staging does not provide the keys to the direc-
tor’s strategy, or to his dramaturgical choices. The performance is itself
presented as a medium: operating at high speed, without interruption for
reflection, with a technical coldness and a cynicism of comparisons, not
dwelling on the human drama of an infanticidal mother. One sometimes
has the sense of excessive speed, of a self-satisfied virtuosity, like the media
themselves: functioning in a mode of urgency, without giving explana-
tions, ensure whether the filming will pay off. It is as if theater had no
other way out than to transform itself into a super-medium, into part of
the media industry.
Dramaturgy and Adaptation

1. The plot of this mise en scène is centered on the grip of the media, on
the way news events are exploited using every possible technology.
Could it be said that the media provoke the crime in order to make
money on the backs of the perpetrators and the victims? That they
kill the actors and the spectators, their “children,” those they claim
to serve and to love, as if in vengeance for having been abandoned
by authentic art, their great love? This would surely be going a bit
far and over-interpreting what is basically a virulent and satirical cri-
tique of the media using the example of Medea. It would be more
useful, in order to do justice to this critique of the media, to ques-
tion the art of adaptation.
136 P. PAVIS
2. Kim Hyun-Tak takes up episodes from the plot of the myth, without
following the narrative or chronological line. This is not in any way
a literary adaptation, with a source to be found or a trace to be fol-
lowed, and it is in no way a “hyper-contemporary adaptation of the
Greek classic,” as the program claims.9 What motivates this adapta-
tion is not the ancient material to be reinterpreted, it is the concep-
tual mechanism of media accumulation and similitude, conjured up
by the persecution of Medea. It successfully takes the gamble of not
directly showing the media analyzed, instead evoking them by the-
atrical means alone (acting, music, speech).
3. The processes of the adaptation are very simple: the mise en scène
gives an overview of the modern media; it shows the same frenzy to
sell the story and to destroy Medea in the eyes of the public. It
emphasizes the particular techniques of each medium: it points out
their violence; it does not attempt to elucidate Medea’s motivations,
nor to inspire in the spectator a guilty sense of understanding for
Medea’s act. For the ancient Greeks, Jason’s speech seemed at first
plausible and reasonable, while Medea’s fury, expressed in a fright-
ening language, ended up making the spectators regret their initial
positive attitude towards Jason, thus developing an understanding
attitude towards Medea, identifying with her. It is only later, much
later, that the spectators would possess sympathy for the infanticidal
mother and condemn the behavior of Jason and company.10 Such is
the thesis of Kim Hyun-Tak, judging by the media misfortunes that
strike Medea, but this adaptation and this staging do not address the
problem of the tragic or of responsibility. The Medea character
hardly figures in her pain-wracked linguistic folly, nor in her murder-
ous actions. In focusing the staging on the influence of the media,
Kim Hyun-Tak devitalizes tragedy, making of Medea and Jason
insignificant characters, mere victims of the cultural industry. This
certainly risks tiring the spectator and hijacking the Medea myth,
but does tragedy still find a place within this rather apt critique of
the media? Should we believe that the media have become the Gods
of our era and that they take on the role of destiny, against which
nothing can be done now? This is sometimes the impression we get
from the endless media unpleasantness that weighs on Medea in the
Media. But this thesis of a new fatalism, if it turned out to be the
director’s own, should certainly be countered, and—at the same
time—carefully deconstructed.
Corporality
The general impression from the acting is the same as in other stagings by
Kim Hyun-Tak: rapidness, excess, intensity. Corporality is rejected at every
level, with each episode of this media saga privileging a particular mode of
presentation of the body:
• The stealthy, petulant body of the reporters, bodies from another era
of investigative journalism with all the usual stereotypes.
• The melodrama actor’s body: a languid, moaning, weakened body,
Medea’s almost mystical body, Creon’s falsely romantic and gran-
diloquent body.
• The unchained and vulgarly displayed body of the reality show con-
testants: a body and a behavior where emotion are expressed with
insistence, in a naturalistic manner, in the naive search for a huge
family “outpouring.”
• The mystical-erotic body of the churchgoers or the fitness-center
users—it is hard to tell which is which—combining mystical poses
and erotic figures.
• The body of video-game synthesis: an armed, repetitive, jerky, codi-
fied, posthuman body that mimes a limited repertoire of simplified
movements to an equally synthetic music.
• The infantilized body and the voice of the voiceover actors doing
cartoons, faces masked with Disney characters.
• The macho body from an American detective film, in shooting posi-
tion, corresponding to the laws of the crime novel.
• The body singing to a backing track, slightly out of synch. This
becomes the body of the chorus singing a fashionably kitsch Japanese
song. The mass media of international entertainment brings all the
artists together in a sickly finale in which the body has lost all indi-
viduality and become a globalized product.
The art of the actors consists of showing the media constraints on their
bodies, of regulating the energies and their intensity. Exportable, inter-
changeable, and mediatized bodies are produced live. We are far from the
idealized, neutralized, invisible body of classical tragedy.
***
One final example will perhaps help us to discern better the aesthetic of
Kim Hyun-Tak: his staging of Genet’s The Maids. Here, we see the major
elements of his method for staging a Western classic, which spares us the
138 P. PAVIS
need to supply a detailed analysis. The recording of The Maids is from

2011, and thus predates the two other plays (2013), which have been
redone for video. We can thus consider that the last two plays benefited
from the possibilities, but also the errors, of the first. This Maids still posi-
tions itself as the staging of an earlier literary work, with the risk of being
accused of an error of reading. But, since Death of a Salesman and Medea
on Media, things have shifted towards another genre: mixed, autonomous,
a performance piece inspired by theater works.
With this Maids we could, from a Western point of view, speak of the
staging of a pre-existing text, and not of an original creation whose sources
cannot be identified. Kim Hyun-Tak, in fact, takes up passages from The
Maids verbatim; he does not rewrite them, but most of the time just places
them, following the chronological order of the text. This adaptation is
more like a reduction, a concentration. What changes, however, are the
stage actions, and critically the acting style. Indeed, we do not in any way
witness the two maids performing their ritual of the murder of Madame;
they are furious, their actions are to be taken at face value and not as a
theater score that they have the habit of performing and reperforming.
This is also because the adaptation suggests, in counter-text, that they
have just killed Monsieur and that they are endeavoring to eliminate every
trace of their misdeed (blood on the floor, stained clothes, chairs in disar-
ray). What’s more, the ending, and thus the whole strategy of the play, is
reversed: it is not Claire who, as in Genet’s version, demands that Solange
pour him tea that they both know is poisoned—it is Solange who kills her
sister with a hammer-blow.11 Following this action that, if it is not part of
a set of customs, is merely theater play miming the murder of Madame,
Claire gets up again and sings. But she does not voluntarily drink the poi-
soned “coffee” that Solange brings her and pours on her face: a red liquid
that immediately takes on a symbolic meaning—flowing blood, violence,
death. It is the first and the last time that the signs are used in a non-literal
manner, as a symbolic and theatricalized value.
These little tweaks are not insignificant: they attest to the director’s
uncertainty around the fictional or real status of various actions. What
is lacking, and what destabilizes Genet’s text, making it lose all mean-
ing, is precisely the misunderstanding of the ritual of a ceremony that
ends badly. All the masterful impact of Genet: the heroic-comic contrast
between the affectation of the language and the triviality of the words,
is totally destroyed by the hyper-realistic acting, the unending maneu-
vering of chairs, and the violent and sordid actions. Genetian irony, the
gap between a superb language and abject actions, is irrevocably lost and
Genet’s dramaturgy no longer functions. It is a shame that Kim Hyun-Tak
did not rewrite the plot or even create an original work, instead of impos-
ing such an unpleasant counter-meaning on Genet’s play! The director
does not manage to convey Genet’s guiding idea: the confusion between
acting and reality; the fact that the maids are condemned to remain maids,
through their acting, their representation, which prevents them from exit-
ing their conditions, except by way of suicide, which is an acceptance of
their subordinate status.
What in the other works of Kim Hyun-Tak makes up the strength and
the originality of his aesthetic—the intense, excessive acting—here works
against him. This occurs no doubt because Kim’s actors (like Grotowski’s
actors in the past) are incapable of showing sufficient distance from their
performing, incapable of indicating that their words do not always cor-
respond to their acts. Or, where they are in a position to suggest any
difference, it is merely formal—it does not engender a questioning of lan-
guage by way of actors, or vice versa. This lack of distance, of irony, and
ultimately this deficit of performance produces, for the sisters as well as
for their human brothers the spectators, auditory, visual, and intellectual
suffering. This suffering does not result in any catharsis, nor any relief;
no pleasure is provided by ironic beauty or black humor. Likewise, after
The Maids, Kim Hyun-Tak takes the plunge; he no longer feels tied to a
director’s text; he places himself in a metatextual and conceptual position;
he invents a performance that is no longer the staging of a text. He nev-
ertheless cannot escape comparison with the strength and the meaning of
the plays that are his inspiration. This is how, from this point on, he is not
serving a text, but accompanying an experience. And with serious compe-
tition from the works of Genet or Euripides.
Hearing this Maids in language whose meaning I do not understand,
but which I can more or less follow thanks to the written “translation” (in
fact Genet’s original French), I feel myself to be in a tricky position: like
any spectator, I must simultaneously read the emotions and the affects of
the actor-characters. But it seems to me—although I may be mistaken—
that the utterances of the three actresses are always carried out with the
same stereotyped affects (fright, anger, shame), and that there is thus no
progression or nuanced dramaturgy of the affect, but that everything is
located in the same mode of extreme intensity. Boredom risks taking hold
of the spectator-listener, who only finds distraction in the movement of
chairs, and in wretched and tearful actions without much variety.
140 P. PAVIS
On the evidence of these three stagings, does a style assert itself, or is

it a case of processes that are repeated and become fossilized? Since when
is it legitimate to speak of a director’s aesthetic? Although still young and
responsible for only a dozen shows, with Kim Hyun-Tak we see a stage
and acting aesthetic take shape, impinging on Korean, and even world-
wide, mainstream production. Its most striking contribution, present from
production to production, can likely be found in a very conceptual vision
of staging, allied to “intensive” and precise work with the actors. These
two undeniable qualities nevertheless are in danger of morphing into seri-
ous flaws. Thus the staging is sometimes too conceptual and formalistic if
it is based on systematically repeating the same and if it is not supported
or provoked by unexpected writing or acting. Likewise, the intensive act-
ing quickly becomes repetitive and tiring, it tends towards a gratuitous
aestheticism that is no longer challenged by the emergence and the suc-
cession of sudden actions. The virtuosity of the actors and the intellectual-
ism of the director are thus double-edged. They should be wary of their
excessive facility and confront their respective logics. Only then might one
speak of deconstruction. For now, in this cellar of the everyday, we instead
attend a situation of dismantling, of the works mounted, or of the too-
classical approaches of mise en scène. Deconstruction is coming soon, and
perhaps later if all goes well, reconstruction, and then finally construction.
Notes
1. In addition to the three plays analyzed here: Shakespeare’s Hamlet (2009);
Strindberg’s Miss Julie (2012); Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler (2012), Chekhov’s
The Seagull (2013).
2. A Forest Fire, by Cha Beomsuk; Ten Girls Choonhyang**; Blood Vessel, by
Kim Young soo; The Bicycle, by Oh Tai-Sok.
3. Critic Kim Kiran writes: “For him the purpose of deconstruction/con-
struction lies in revealing the deepest inner truth of the play and in creating
a new form which corresponds to the truth that he revealed.” (Presentation:
Theatre Group Seonbukdong Beedoolkee. Work introduction.*
4. “We can easily find our own state of mind in Medea—whether we suffer
from betrayal, jealousy, remorse or despair. Therein lies the power of the
so-called classics. That’s why I could deconstruct Medea in an exception-
ally contemporary way.” Programme, Singapore International Festival of
Arts, 3–5 July 2014.
5. http://vimeo.com/99855823
6. “He had a good dream”, says Happy (p. 110). Death of a Salesman,
Penguin Books, 1961 [1949].
7. “He had the wrong dreams. All, all, wrong.” Biff rebuffs (p. 110). “He
never knew who he was.” (p. 11).
8. Euripides’ thesis is concentrated in the famous words: “JASON: But you
killed them. MEDEA: To agonize you!”(p. 215) Translated by Ruby
Blondell, Medea in Women on the Edge: Four Plays by Euripides, Routledge,
New York & London, 1999.
9. Medea on Media Program, Singapore International Festival of Arts, 3–5
July 2014.
10. According to Heinz Wizmann, Penser entre les langues. Paris, Albin Michel,
2012, p. 267.
11. “Solange gives a blow of the hammer. An explosion. Claire falls to the ground
dead.” (play script, by Mok Jung-Won, p. 11).
CHAPTER 8
On Lee Young-Seok’s Production

of Orwell’s Coming Up for Air
With his production of Coming Up for Air, young director Lee Young-
Seok manages to adapt for an empty space and for two actors a complex
novel from a completely different historical and cultural context.1 It was
incredibly stimulating for me to enjoy an original way of acting-staging
and also to watch how Orwell’s masterpiece had found a very receptive
theater audience. When I discovered this production, I had already seen
Lee Jaram’s new pansori, and the expression which immediately came
to my mind was once again tellacting, an oxymoron, since telling and
showing are usually seen as mutually exclusive. I thought I would need
to return to Orwell’s novel in order to know what mysterious key Lee
Young-Seok had found.
Lee Young-Seok belongs to a generation of directors trained in the early 2000s at

the Korean National University of the Arts. I have followed his work since 2002:
always the same rigor, a taste for the difficult, an originality in simplicity.
I was delighted to observe how he set about adapting Orwell’s novel Coming
Up for Air, written at a time, in a place, and a style very far from contemporary
Korean reality.
In this textual and physical adaptation, the two actor-narrators engage two
identical English petit-bourgeois figures in dialogue. The divided anti-hero tells
his life story, and lays out his simplistic and naïve philosophy. Orwell’s writing,
magnified by the simple-minded pair, intimates the historical subtext and the
resigned and cynical attitude of a whole generation: Orwell’s generation, but also
our own, in Europe or in Korea.

144 P. PAVIS
ON LEE YOUNG-SEOK’S PRODUCTION OF ORWELL’S COMING... 145
But there was, in fact, no mystery and no key, only a very original and
challenging use of telling and acting, which, rather unexpectedly, led to a
discovery of Orwell and his political thought, hidden behind an account
of George Bowling—a petit-bourgeois Englishman of the 1930s—which
still made sense today, even for a Korean audience. I will somehow recon-
struct my approach and discuss the following, in the order in which, for
me, they appear: the formal aspect of storytelling, the invention of tellact-
ing, and Orwell’s political comments as they are understood and com-
municable, not only in his own time, just before the outbreak of World
War II, but also our own, in Korea and elsewhere.
Narration and Storytelling

Orwell’s novel is a first-person narration by the main character, George
Bowling. It thus could easily be spoken by a single actor. Lee’s idea, however,
was to split the speeches and the speaker into two characters/performers.
The aim was not to dramatize the spoken material, but to make a distinction,
and create an interplay, between the telling of a narrator transformed here
into a storyteller and the acting-showing of a character. There must have
been a strong temptation to have these two functions give rise to a dialogue,
or even to have one actor fulfill a single function. But, here, the two actors
alternately assume both roles, and it becomes impossible for each to special-
ize in one function alone. But after all, we do not usually just tell stories, but
also we play a role within them, or mimetically show some aspect of a role.
The two actors, whom, as we shall see, should instead be called “perform-
ers,” look alike—they are almost, but not quite, identical: the same grey
trousers, white shirt and braces, shoes, haircut, and often parallel gestures
like doubles. Their way of speaking and their behavior are identical: they
both look like simpletons, saying, or sometimes repeating together, a text
whose meaning seems to escape them. The text speaks through them; they
do not seem to be at the origin and source of their discourse. Sometimes,
for a few seconds, they look at and talk to each other. They are like musi-
cal or circus duettists, in the long tradition of a comic couple: found in
Shakespeare and in many genres of stage comedy; but also found in litera-
ture, where they are usually associates commenting on their environment
(Bouvard and Pécuchet, in Flaubert’s eponymous novel), or in performance
(Gilbert and George, and before them Laurel and Hardy, et al.).
Our two comic figures use the arsenal of classical effects of repetition:
they sometimes repeat the same sentence, do the same clown routine,
146 P. PAVIS
nish each other’s sentences, as if it takes two to think through their lines
fi
and lives. A real couple of sorts! They also perform complex and symmet-
rical figures, as if speech were a springboard or excuse for their acrobatic
and silly routines, and not the other way around.
A New Technique for Acting and Telling:

Tellacting?
Lee Young-Seok, his actors and their whole team might be inventing a
new way of acting, of telling and, as a result, of staging: tellacting, a mix-
ture of dramatic acting and storytelling. Why is it important to mix these
two principles, often seen as opposed and contradictory? For one simple
reason: the dramatic principle of acting has become unbelievable, while at
the same time the epic principle is often felt as too direct, didactic, artificial
and boring. Tellacting, however, plays on both levels: epic and dramatic; it
combines and enhances the playfulness of storytelling with the pleasure of
acting and mimicry. We are caught between narrative and action.
Tellacting is a fairly new trend in worldwide dramatic writing and act-
ing/staging. Theater artists are now moving away from mimetic repre-
sentation and realistic or naturalistic Stanislavskian acting styles. Since the
1960s, the influence of storytellers from various cultures and perform-
ing traditions can be felt everywhere. As a continuation of the European
(mainly French) théâtre-récit of the 1970s, Korean playwrights and direc-
tors begin to explore this new path, but in a distinctive manner. It hap-
pens all the more easily in Korea, given the long tradition of talking to the
audience during a performance, or at the beginning. Multiple narratives,
sometimes narratives-within-narratives, a confrontation of narration and
mimetic action, have almost become a must for playwrights.
In George’s double mouth, the text always feels like it is being directly
read or quoted to an implied spectator; the tone of voice indicates a
constant distance from, and a mockery of, the narrative; one sometimes
gets the impression that the speakers do not really understand what they
are saying and what it implies. They are happy to be simple-minded and
behave accordingly. The actor’s privilege is to convey through their text
the necessary modulation, nuance and judgment. Here we get the aug-
mented pleasure of understanding nuances of which the characters might
not be aware: the rare pleasure of listening to a simpleton giving a speech
which goes over his head.
There is a strong physicality in their speech: once launched and set

into motion, the double-headed George cannot be stopped. The impulse
keeps him going. Between the different “scenes” chosen from the novel,
the performers have devised a movement that marks the end of one scene
and the beginning of a new one—the actors perform the action of walking
towards the audience and back again, to start the new scene. This dyna-
mism is important as a structuring device, punctuating the continuous
flow of simple actions and verbal incontinence. That which, for the reader
of the novel, is transmitted slowly and carefully, at a “deep” reader’s pace,
is here, on the stage, a “speed-reading”, “speed-speaking”, or “speed-
dating” of meaning and of possible interpretations. The idea is no longer
to illustrate the text through staging techniques and acting, but to show
how the performers stand up to the text, relate to it, circle it, direct it
towards us, forcing us into a “speed-understanding” despite the fact that
the actors’ petit-bourgeois mentality2 and reduced faculties render them
unaware of what they are saying.
Tellacting Style and Technique

Nevertheless, what matters is how the spectator will understand the
novel’s message, and how or why it should be adapted and staged
today. The system of a divided figure, through which all the text passes,
becomes an inventive and powerful weapon. Lee Young-Seok’s original
idea was to divide George into two characters who look alike and who
are obviously one and the same person split into two actors. Actor 1
was supposed to be George Bowling only, as storyteller. Actor 2 was
supposed to be “George Bowling and everything that is seen through
his eyes,” or, to put it another way, “everything that he encounters”
(p. 6). For a spectator watching the performance or the subsequent
recording it is nevertheless difficult to differentiate the two perform-
ers according to this distinction and specialization. It is even harder to
maintain the distinction theoretically. Indeed, it would seem that no
storyteller (Actor 1, here) can avoid representing himself in some way
and repeating some characteristic actions like anybody else. (Even if we
could not see his body, but only hear his voice, we would still have some
type of mental image of his body in action, as a voice is corporal and
not a simple carrier of meaning.) On the other hand, even if an actor
displays different characters, one can still recognize a potential narrative
logic, that is, a storyteller behind the impersonation. The s eparation of
148 P. PAVIS
r epresenting and telling does not work, even if the distinction between
dramatic and epic is the basis of classical poetics going back to the
Greeks. Linguistics, since Bailly and Benveniste, has distinguished the
énonciation (the uttering) and the énoncé (the utterance). The énoncia-
tion is “the individual act of the use of language, while the énoncé is the
result of that act, it is the speaking subject’s act of creation.”3 Applied to
our theory of tellacting, we could say that the énonciation is the telling,
the action of telling stories, while the énoncé is the result, everything
that we can see, imagine, represent.
Returning to the double-George system, we could say that Actor 1 and
Actor 2 are both producing énoncé and énonciation: the narrative con-
tent (the énoncé) is always mixed with its énonciation, that is, with the
ensemble of circumstances and situations of speaking, acting, performing.
Showing (énoncé) and commenting (énonciation) are permanent tasks of
the two Georges and they can hardly be told apart. Rather than separating
the two functions, as Lee Young-Seok might have envisaged, we should
wonder what this system of enunciation implies for the tellacting process
and the stage performance. A wide range of discursive and acting figures
are used by the actors:
• parallel speeches and attitudes; sometimes mirror images (for exam-

ple, when shaving or fishing).
• face-to-face interaction and short dialogue.
• inner monologues, impressions.
• imitating and parodying a lecturer speaking on the dangers of fascism.
• full acting: a short moment of happy togetherness in Lower Beanfield,
underlined by piano music.
• The effects produced on the spectator vary within the same range.
Sometimes, the text is spoken seriously, objectively to the audience;
sometimes, ironically and over-theatrically, in a childish voice, as if
played by a bad actor who feels compelled to mime redundantly
what he is already saying.
To summarize, all possible means are used in the system of enunciation

to make the audience laugh at the two clowns while also enabling us to
perceive the dangers of the cynical, isolationist, policy of “wait-and-see,”
in 1938 as well as in 2012.
Historical Background
The very refined system of enunciation of this performance allows for many
readings. The actors perform two things at the same time: they portray the
average, stereotypical lower middle-class Englishman of the 1930s, and at
the same time make fun of him. The historical climate of pre-war Britain is
reconstructed through George’s petty actions, his poor language and his
low self-esteem. We do not find a full, realistic description of English soci-
ety or a historical interpretation of facts, dates and events. Retrospectively,
we can only admire Orwell’s intuition and analysis, his indirect character-
ization through an average citizen, an Everyman of the 1930s. Through a
few trivial details, Orwell makes us feel the atmosphere of his time. There
is already a certain abstraction, an ironic stylization, a comic distance and
an anticipation of political and social developments. Moaning, frustrated,
indifferent, and refusing to face up to his times, the anti-hero George
Bowling is only capable of looking back to, and taking refuge in, pre-1914
England and the village where he grew up.
Lee Young-Seok and his actors give us all the information we need on
the historical situation, but make no attempt to supply realistic details of
a time that is so far removed from the Korea in which they live. The two
Georges are shown as a rather abstract construction: their costume, ges-
tures, and behavior do not attempt to appear historical or realistic. They
are more like timeless performers who exist almost exclusively through
their tightly choreographed acting, abstract-but-agile figures from a con-
temporary commedia dell’arte. Their opening and closing sequences, with
a simple backwards-and-forwards movement beginning the next sequence,
becomes a very sophisticated algebra. George is “Everyman”: a mediocre,
self-satisfied and subservient citizen. In our globalized world this acting
style, simplified choreography, and presentation of the average George is
universally understandable. This, once again, is down to the new tech-
nique of tellacting, the type of mise en scène it demands, and—last but not
least—to the mode of production it instigates.
Mise en Scène
We can view mise en scène as what results from the whole creative process,
what is finally given to the spectator: the production, in other (English)
words. But we can also see it as the process whereby an aesthetic object is
gradually made, invented, or devised. This Korean Coming Up for Air is
150 P. PAVIS
a good example of this reversal, not merely because the working process
in the rehearsal room revolutionized its approaches, but also because we
as spectators are invited to “coproduce” the performance, challenging the
usual categories around which we operate.
The adaptation of Orwell’s novel has been done collectively by the
whole group: director, actor, dramaturge, and even the novelist Orwell
himself if we are to believe the director! By this, he simply means that the
choice of fragments clearly could not have been made without Orwell’s
authorial writing, thus the text is the first and most crucial, intervention.4
The actors’ task was to suggest and immediately test a few lines from the
novel by improvising for the group. What had to be decided was: who is
speaking, what part of the text, where should sentences be cut and what
is the non-speaker supposed to do at that precise moment? These choices
were followed by a process of editing and rearranging the material, dur-
ing which the dramaturge and director offered comments and made final
decisions.
In this devising process, adaptation was not, as is usually the case, the
starting point for everything else; it was the goal of the collective work of
the whole team as it tried to come to terms with all the reading, under-
standing, and speaking, and with the invention of a delivery method for
getting the aesthetic object to the Korean audience. Thus, adaptation
came at the end of the working process, as a result of long improvisations
being edited by the director and dramaturge. This working method might
be common in the United Kingdom, but it remains rare in Korea.
But what was the real impression of the spectators who had no idea
how the mise en scène had been prepared and put together? I would ven-
ture to say that the actors’ work challenged the spectators’ traditionally
accepted categories of acting, performing, staging and co-producing.
Let me try to remember what, as an average spectator, I had perceived
in this production, before reading, much later, Lee Young-Seok’s illumi-
nating “Afterword.”5
As soon as one understands the convention that the two actors both
speak George’s text, one has to accept that text does not coincide with one
person and that there is probably no reason why a part of the text should
be spoken by one or the other actor. Thus we no longer try to make close
links between speech and action; we no longer strive to explain a charac-
ter according to his discourse, and vice versa. The idea of a character as
a direct imitation of a human being vanishes. Our two simpletons seem
identical, ohne Eigenschaften,6 without qualities, mere empty chatterboxes
and language carriers. This has a double consequence and an unexpected

advantage: we can choose to concentrate on the text, since the characters
have no depth and do not imitate real persons involved in a story; but,
and maybe at the same time, we can also concentrate on the clown perfor-
mance and enjoy the (albeit intentionally simplistic) choreography, which
in fact gives a subliminal and wordless characterization, telling us much
about the emptiness of their lives. Once we have assimilated these conven-
tions, we can look for the rationale behind the speakers taking turns to
utter particular words. Apart from the always-successful comic effects, we
are encouraged to wonder why the text is consistently placed at an ironi-
cal and theatrical distance. There are many reasons, which the director
must have had in mind. Watching the immediate non-verbal response of
the one listening provides the spectator with a funny commentary; it also
underlines the stupidity and the mediocrity of the characters’ ideas about
life. The telling is thus immediately contradicted or mocked by the acting,
as if for just a moment, the two principles could miraculously be separated.
The spectators are, to some extent, invited to complete the undetermined
score of the production, and their perception is more “stereoscopic” than it
would be in a traditional, “authoritarian” mise en scène. They are constantly
invited to connect different and contradictory elements, to juxtapose the tell-
ing and the showing. The production has to be “re-woven.” The bare stage
and abstract acting (no scenery and objects, no local color, no reference to a
particular historical or geographical context)7 make any kind of connection
possible. The neat structure of the performance and simple system of acting
(which recalls the technical nature and clarity of commedia dell’arte) gives the
spectators the pleasure of “accompanying” the actors almost as if they them-
selves were moving by way of kinesthetic empathy. The structural neutraliza-
tion of all signs in the performance clears the way for all kinds of cultural and
historical references: from the England of the 1930s to contemporary South
Korea: its frequent blindness to political issues and its ignorance of what is
really happening north and south of its border.
The production can thus be read as a perfect semiotic performative
construction, offering both a European historical document and a range
of its possible transpositions, including the Korean ones. Who could ask
for more?8
Thanks to the work of Lee Young-Seok’s Shinzangno Company,
Coming Up for Air brings a breath of fresh air in terms of how theater
can be prepared (as devised performance) and received (as collaborative
spectating).
152 P. PAVIS
Notes
1. Performed by the Shinzangno Company in September 2011. With Lee
Young-Seok (director), Kim Seungeon and Lee Jongmu (actors), Kim
Deoksu (dramaturg), and Im Seungtae (dramaturg).
2. “Why the hell should a chap like me care?”
3. ‘Enonciation’, Dictionnaire de linguistique, Paris, Larousse, 1973, p. 192.
4. Lee Young-Seok. “Coming p for Air”, Critical Stages, n°10, 2004, p. 4.
5. “Coming up for Air : a Director’s Afterword”, Critical Stages, n°10, 2014.
6. In the sense of Robert Musil’s novel: Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften (1932).
(The man without qualities).
7. Orwell’s text is simplified to omit place-names that would mean nothing to
a Korean audience; for example « I had driven through Westerham » (p.169)
is changed to: “I had driven through somewhere”.
8. And who could give a better definition of his role as a director and of direct-
ing in general than Lee Young-Seok himself?: “The division between real-
ism and non-realism, psychological and physical, or epic theatre and image
theatre has no importance, and style coherence is not in selecting one of
them but in discovering how to unite all of them. To me, a stage director is
not a person who picks out his favourite style but a (performance) writer
with various tools for allowing communication in a given space”. Critical
Stages, op. cit., p. 9.
CHAPTER 9
Is Modernized Pansori Political? On Lee

Jaram’s Ukchuk-Ga (Mother Courage
and her Children)
With the production of Brecht’s Mother Courage and her Children

(Ukchuk-Ga), performed in pansori style by Lee Jaram and her musicians and
collaborators, we are given an example of how so-called modernized pansori
adapts and recreates Western plays or themes, how it invents an original and
new genre. This modernized form is very popular among young people in
Korea; it is increasingly invited abroad, where it is highly appreciated.
One had best know the rules of classical pansori to appreciate its musical and
vocal sophistication. And yet an ordinary audience of non-specialists, Westerners,
for example, can be profoundly affected by the vocal technique, so different from
the everyday uses of the voice. The grain of the husky voice resonates deeply in
every body.
I was expecting a lot from this adaptation of Brecht’s Mother Courage by
Lee Jaram. I was not disappointed, thanks to the power and sensitivity of the
interpretation. Like every spectator in the world confronted with this figure
of the mother and her daughter Katrin, I was moved by the characters both
embodied and borne by the singer.
I was nevertheless somewhat ashamed to go along with it, under the influence
of extreme emotiveness, and far from the political message that Brecht, always
in vain, endeavored to instill in us. It was impossible to resist this delicious
sentimental drift.
That day, I sensed that emotions are anthropological universals that unite all
human beings. Alongside these universals, ethical and political reflection must
ceaselessly be constructed and deconstructed by all the citizens of the world, if
only to keep emotions in check and subject to reason.

154 P. PAVIS
1. Ukchuck-Ga is a fascinating case of adaptation, or rather of different

types of adaptation: from spoken theater to one-person opera, from
literature to music, from the European (German) culture of the
1940s to the Korean culture of the 2010s; and also, even more cru-
cially, from the classical pansori of the eighteenth and nineteenth
century through the modernized pansori at the beginning of the
twentieth century and, in an even more modern form, to the newest
experiments of Lee Jaram (born 1979) and other artists of her gen-
eration. If we are seeking to understand how Korean artists are
adapting their traditions to their contemporary times, and to a
Western as well as an increasingly globalized context, the work of
Lee Jaram is a perfect, and also sophisticated and enjoyable, case
study.1
Originally a form of popular entertainment and a folk-art focused on

storytelling and singing, taking place in marketplaces since the eighteenth
century, pansori increasingly found its later audience among the higher
classes and the nobility. It was at that time performed by professional sing-
ers outdoors and in private homes. From its earliest origins, the audience,
standing around the performance, at the same level as the singer, partici-
pated through sounds of encouragement and other responses (Chuimsae).
Classical pansori can thus be described as a musical drama performed
by a solo performer holding a fan, telling a story that can last three to
nine hours. It involves song (sori or chang), gestures (ballim), storytell-
ing (aniri or narration). The performer is accompanied by one musician
(gossu) with a barrel-shaped drum (buk). The term pansori is composed of
two words: pan, which refers to the venue for the performance, the per-
formance itself for a large audience, and the idea of entertaining, and sori,
which means song, but also refers to sounds from nature. Classical pansori
is primarily a vocal performance style.
The vocal training of pansori singers is very long, complex and hard.
Singers used to be sent for a hundred days into the mountains to sing
in caves, near waterfalls or cliffs. Their voice would go hoarse, become
cracked and remain permanently damaged. The singers would feel blood
in their vocal organs. This would obviously change the voice radically:
“Through rigorous training, the voice learns to transcend age and gender
boundaries to project all ranges of tone and pitch in a typical huskiness
empowered simultaneously with strength and subtlety.”2 The radical
adaptation of the voice to such a style of delivery should never be forgot-
IS MODERNIZED PANSORI POLITICAL? ON LEE JARAM’S UKCHUK-GA... 155
ten when we compare the more gentle transformations, from Brecht’s play
to Lee Jaram’s newly created pansori Ukchuck-ga. The most significant
transformation, which a non-native spectator will not notice, is the mean-
ing of the Korean title: “the one who resists.” Compared to Brecht’s more
neutral and descriptive title, Lee Jaram’s title sounds like an interpretation,
which already tells another story, compared to Brecht’s play. What exactly
then has been adapted, and what has been invented in this modernized
pansori?
Analysis of a Scene
In order really to understand how this works, let us choose one of the
most powerful moments of Lee Jaram’s interpretation: when Choosun,
Mother Courage’s daughter, warns the city of an imminent attack and
gets killed.
29′00″: “Choosun (Katrin) has already made friends with the twins in
the family.” Storyteller Lee Jaram is speaking: most of the time facing and
addressing the audience in an objective, neutral voice. She also holds her
fan in neutral position. Almost imperceptible background music. Then,
suddenly, a change of direction and speed: she goes to another place,
already in another character.
29′20″: Kids speaking: noona noona (“Big sister”) “please tell us sto-
ries.” When the narrator (or storyteller) talks, she is always connected by
the orientation of her gaze toward the audience, a way to recapitulate,
slow down, before a dramatic scene, and so on. Lee Jaram only needs to
reorient her trunk slightly; her gaze clearly indicates who is speaking.
29′28″: A stage direction in the script says: “Choosun gestures.” We see
Choosun uses the sign-language Alphabet and speaks the answer: “I don’t
know many stories”. The acting invents its own system.
29′: “Then tell us what you told yesterday.” Change of bust orientation
means another person is speaking. Note how fast the change of speaker
is. The deictic function is fundamental in this art of metamorphosis: we
must understand how elements are connected, and how the story is told
by constantly changing direction, gears, tempo, while the line of action
remains perfectly traced and logical.
29′37″: Choosun takes another position before she sits and goes on
using the sign-language alphabet, while still speaking at the same time.
Her facial expression shows the different emotions of the children in a
fraction of a second.
156 P. PAVIS
29′45″: Chooson now sings in another voice, as in a lullaby, while imi-

tating the words, much more than when her mother speaks. This sounds
like a Western—or international?—type of melody. She is inventing a sys-
tem of gestures, which could be both a way of “talking” to children, or of
adapting, theatricalizing, choreographing a sign-system for the deaf.
30′: This seems a very codified language, a stylized discourse for deaf
people or for children.
30′30″: She says as a woman: “Oh dear an island is roaming about.”
The change of speaker is announced and spoken in a slightly different
voice (30′27″).
30′55″: Song ends; she looks for a reaction, moving quickly out of the
character of Choosun.
31′: One of the kids says: “then, we’ll say “Oh dear!” too. Neither the
story within the story, nor the gestures within gestures, is problematic. A
slight hand movement or facial expression is enough to signal a change of
character. We take pleasure in the virtuosity of the change, recognizing the
tiniest convention.
31′25″: Choosun has finished her story and leaves, waving to the chil-
dren. This was a kind of parenthesis of happiness, where the main point
comes across: her love for her children and her desire to have children. She
is already moving in another direction and the speaker becomes a different
character.
31′30″ to 31′45″: She is still Choosun carrying a child on her back.
31′47″: “Then, one day.” She is suddenly looking in the audience’s
direction, as “singer,” which means as a narrator she takes the fan from her
dress, and runs in another direction. Changes are always very fast, almost
imperceptible, but they are experienced by the spectator, even if the virtu-
osity consists in never interrupting the flow of the performance.
31′46″: Now Mother Courage is speaking again: “Choosun, I need to
go to the castle again and buy things.” Note how this moment is smoothly
connected with the next person’s speech (the neighbor), but we perceive
the change in the character’s identity.
31′55″: Another person is speaking to Courage, her neighbor: “could
you take the kids to the house?” Of course the speaking and acting, in
spoken, dramatic scenes, are culturally bound and give information about
the significance of politeness in Korean culture. This effect reinforces for
the audience the impression of being or reliving in a familiar environment.
A few gestures, merely sketched, are enough to characterize the tone of
the situation. A few scenes, like this one, are played in an almost realistic
tone, with a lot of recognizable signs.
32′17″: Again as Singer, which here means as an objective narrator: “So
Mother Courage goes inside the castle with the twins.” We can now make
a distinction between narrator and storyteller: a narrator speaks from the
outside, a storyteller from the inside.
32′23″: “Choosun is trying to sleep in the wagon in the yard.”
32′34″: “Someone is coming near with a rustling sound.” Speech and
music immediately go into dramatization and thus classical singing (using
her low, hoarse voice).
32′45″: Then as in a recitative, the Singer explains (narrates). The voice
allows for a dramatization, underscored by the drum. A very quick change
occurs between the singer explaining and the scene happening on stage
(with soldiers and farmers). There is never a long, neutral, objective nar-
ration by Lee Jaram, still less one by Mother Courage as the teller of her
own story. The singing gives an impression of intensification of emotion
as well as of artistic vocal expression.
33′05″: Already imitating the soldiers. The change from singing for-
mally to words of dialogue is immediate. Speaking-singing is a kind of
Sprechgesang.
34′02″: Here again we have a narrator’s commentary: “Suddenly, as if
struck by lightning, his wife falls on the ground and cries.” We hear and
see her immediately. Here narration and action are simultaneous.
34′07″: Lee Jaram gets up and now we have Choosun jump up and do
the action: so the speaker is still Mother Courage as the narrator, but we
can already see the character Choosun getting ready for the next action.
34′10″: The narrator goes on explaining, but her acting dramatizes the
scene more and more, as if she were a character, or a spectator expecting
tragic events.
34′22″: Choosun runs up the ramp. This is a stylistic break with the
static traditional pansori, confined to a small mat. What appears beyond
pansori is always part of an enlargement of the stage to a wider stage with
elements of a set: a ramp, a curtain, a space open to the infinite and the
offstage.
34′28″: She starts banging on the door (curtain). The scene is staged
with other means than the usual ones. It uses movements on stage, sound
and light effects, changes of scenery or the effect of the curtain falling.
34′35″: “She is crazy! Get down right now!” She plays both Choosun
and the soldier.
158 P. PAVIS
35′12″: Choosun and the soldier are played as if they are the same
person.
35′46″: One minute to show the scene: Choosun against the soldiers.
Obviously this is the most dramatic scene of the play, and yet it is per-
formed in the same stylized way.
36′: Mother Courage speaking, but in a dramatized manner, even if it
is sung in a classical pansori way.
37′10″: Singer: “Choosun, drenched in blood, beats the drum with her
left hand.” These moments of dramatic theater are unusual, and thus all
the more powerful. But again this is achieved in a stylized manner. The
shooting scene. Red curtain falls: very impressive.
37′30″: Change in music mood: slow, as a bell tolls. Curtain falls. The
whole dramatic scene is staged: a staged pansori is something rare and
maybe falls outside pansori’s style.
38′10″: Courage facing the back curtain.
38′15″: Singer: (38′27″):“She has saved them! Choosun saved their
lives!” She speaks as the narrator, and then immediately as classical pansori
singer. Yet, of course, not in a neutral tone of voice. There is in fact never a
neutral, cold-blooded narrator. And we are never sure who this narrator is,
or how the narrator retains some emotions from the different characters.
39′: Classical pansori technique and an example of speaking-singing.
The dramaturgical reasons for this form might be numerous, but are
always connected with a very emotional situation, as if the singing became
then too difficult, or the speaking would require singing as a higher mode
of expression.
40′10″ to 42′20″: a very long, painful cry, fading out, as do the music
and lights. Music accelerates a little as the cry intensifies.
Dramaturgical Adaptation
We can consider this one-person opera an adaptation because it tells the story
of Brecht’s play, sometimes even quoting a few words from the German
original. However, it is not a staging of the play, at least not in the Western
conception of staging a classic, which implies using the original text, q
uoting
it, and not claiming to have written a new work or performing a totally
different story. As we shall see, Ukchuck-ga has modified and adapted the
source material by a transfer of genre, acting mode, cultural references, and
political intentions. It might thus be worthwhile to check how dramaturgi-
cal elements of the original play have been transferred, sometimes retained,
sometimes completely recreated.
The story (the narrative content) remains the same: it is centered on
the figure of the mother trying to survive by selling goods, but losing her
children one by one. The plot (the structure of the story) is also close to
Mother Courage: the different episodes have been kept, albeit culturally
adapted to the Chinese-Korean context of the story and of the audience.
The same actions have been kept, even if they are set in another time and
location: China 184–196 ad. What seems important is to tell the same
story of an unhappy mother during a war lasting many years. Lee Jaram
takes time to characterize Mother Courage by giving details about her
past: she has been rejected by her family, after she had a first child, and has
been very unhappy in her relationships with a series of brutal men; now
she is on her own and has to raise three children. Unpleasant details of her
life as a canteen-woman are revealed: she rummages dead bodies (8); she
becomes a very hard-headed businesswoman.3
The main difference with Brecht’s play (set in the Thirty Years’ War in
Europe in the seventeenth century) is the system of characters. Lee Jaram
is not only playing Mother Courage, but all the characters who gravitate
around her. For cultural reasons some characters had to be modified. The
protestant pastor, who, in the German play, is courting Mother Courage,
becomes a Buddhist monk, whom she keeps to “protect the wagon with
his expert lip-service” along with the prostitute Madame Pang “to be cer-
tain to attract customers.” (28). Often, Mother Courage as a storyteller
explains to us what the play makes obvious by showing—she gives us the
key to the action or to a character’s motivation.4
Narration is part of any storytelling. But Brecht’s Epic Theatre also
specializes in narrating: he mentions the historical events at the beginning
of each scene. And the acting is, as we shall see, also epic in the sense that
the actor, according to Brecht, must seem to be saying before each state-
ment: “I am telling to the spectator that the character I am representing
answered…”. By contrast, the story is told by Lee Jaram in an absolute
continuity: there is a continuity between the different means of expres-
sion and a continuity between the different episodes. Pauses are used to
enhance the dramatic tension or, not unlike Brecht in this respect, to cut
a tragic story short and have the narrator and storyteller start in another
style, in what might feel like a Brechtian alienation effect, a very distanced
and cold attitude.
160 P. PAVIS
We begin to perceive Lee Jaram’s contradictory attitude toward Brecht.

On one hand she uses the same epic technique of narration, but on the
other she redramatizes the actions in her breathtaking performance of
singing-speaking-acting. The difference with Brecht is political (maybe also
generational and cultural?). Her choice of material or even of quotes does
not follow a political agenda and her alienation effects are not meant to
oblige the spectator to come to political conclusions. She sometimes feels
obliged to explain, or even to describe, what is happening; she might even
quote, at the turn of a sentence, a key-maxim from Brecht’s play, but then
forgets to recapitulate (as Bertolt would do!) in the conclusion: “You make
your living off this war, but you won’t give your son to this war? You should
provide a soldier so that this war can go on!” (11). As if she had forgotten
this earlier political statement, she finally insists on the sufferings of the
mother and encourages the audience blindly to identify with her: “In order
to survive in this world, one should struggle with relentless courage” (61).
Her conclusion is therefore very restrictive (and also contrary to Brecht’s),
because she praises Courage’s vitality in spite of the difficulty of survival.
Obviously, Lee Jaram does not undertake a very Brechtian type of dra-
maturgical analysis and adaptation! Her aim is different. Her dramaturgy
lies in the management of storytelling and music, in the mastering of a
musical and vocal dramaturgy, for which Westerners might still have to
find the proper key.
Physical and Vocal Adaptation

In Brecht’s Mother Courage, music also plays an important role, even if it is
limited to a few moments of “songs”. “Music” lies in the constant change
of rhythm and the discontinuities in the narrative; for instance the long,
descriptive titles of each scene, which are supposed to disturb the “iden-
tificatory” drive of the spectator. On the contrary, Ukchuck-ga relies on
the continuity of the performance by a single performer, on the virtuosity
of constantly moving from speaking, singing, miming, and acting, on the
ability to change mood and style and immediately move to a new attitude.
This does not mean the continuity of contact with the audience or the
unity of a character or of a fiction, but the continuity of a vocal or musical
performance, based on the emotional strength of voice and music, on the
pleasure of telling and hearing stories.
A Different Type of Adaptation

For Lee Jaram, adapting does not mean translating, inventing or devising
a written text, one that would then be systematically staged. Evidently, Lee
Jaram has read Brecht’s play carefully, but she has not adapted it into a tan-
gible written version. Her adaptation is much more a physical adaptation, a
condensation and absorption of all elements of the Mother Courage mate-
rial into bodily expression and voice work. There is no need for a prelimi-
nary written script beyond a provisional storyline used as an aide mémoire.
The script will probably not be published as a literary adaptation, which is
in fact a shame, as her literary writing is often exquisite and could also be
enjoyed as written poetry, at least in the case of certain passages, which coin-
cide, more or less, with moments of pure singing in a more formal classical
pansori style. Her adaptation is not a literary one; it is, first and foremost,
a direct embodiment of situations and actions, of telling stories from the
point of view of a storyteller and with an elaborate vocal technique. In Tara
McAllister’s words, “in pansori, the storyteller’s voice ‘authors’ the text.”5
One can, nevertheless, only admire Lee Jaram’s gift as a writer and as a
composer. It is worth reading her written text; her skill as an inventor of
quick dialogues, immediately shifting into physical actions and her talent
as a poet expressing her deep intuitions should not be missed! Even when
she uses a metaphor borrowed from Brecht’s play, she gives it a more lyri-
cal tone, pushing the metaphor even further.
In Brecht, the tone is one of a ballad: “Das Frühjahr kommt! Wach auf,
du Christ !/Der Schnee schmilzt weg! Die Toten ruhen!/Und was noch
nicht gestorben ist/Das macht sich auf die Socken nun!”.6
The English translation, however simplified, keeps the same rhythm
of a ballad or a song: “The new year’s come. The watchmen shout./The
thaw sets in. The dead remain./Wherever life has not died out/it staggers
to its feet again.”7
Lee Jaram invents and condenses the two beautiful metaphors of
melting and tears of blood: “Indeed Spring melts the world, which has
been frozen during the winter. As if thousands of dead soldiers under the
ground were shedding tears, red seeps out.” (42). The strong, but vivid
images, serve the dramatic composition and are actually intensified by the
pansori technique of the singer.
162 P. PAVIS
Condensation and Absorption

Lee Jaram’s body and voice, her physical and vocal performance allow her
to play all the parts, to act in all possible registers, to incorporate details of
the text, to absorb all means of expression. More than in Western literary
theater, text and gesture (attitudes and movements) are closely connected,
as they would be in Commedia dell’arte. The text we hear and the story
we understand are already embodied in a dynamic narrative, before they
are written down, if they are written down at all.
This process of absorption manifests itself in the acceleration and con-
densation of the long dialogues in Brecht’s play. Long explanations or
dramatic dialogues are concentrated in a few attitudes and in changes in
the means employed (singing, speaking, moving). The storytelling is the
binding agent of all materials and all the systems of expression.
Tellacting
In the Western, Aristotelian, tradition, showing (mimesis) and telling (dieg-
esis) are usually opposed as manners of representing the real. Evidently, the
history of universal theater proves that such a distinction is more theoretical
than actual. There is always in fact a collaborative exchange between the
two. In pansori, the close relation of telling and acting, their convergence,
is obvious. There would be no point in trying to tell them apart: they are
in a process of telling and acting at the same time. In pansori, and even
more so in Lee Jaram’s modernized and adapted pansori, the action comes
primarily out of an attitude (an exterior as well as an inner attitude). This
attitude is translated into speech, and speech is always accompanied by ges-
ture. Speech and gesture are therefore complementary and pansori emerges
from their interaction. The choice of attitudes and gestures is determined by
Lee Jaram’s understanding and testing of the story she wants to tell: that is,
from the storytelling she is elaborating, from the materials she is adapting,
and even more from the point of view she is adopting for her potential audi-
ence. Storytelling as the art of telling thus consists of choosing a few details,
putting them in a certain order, expanding on them, and finally embodying
them through the performer, inscribing them in space and time.
In the case of pansori, particularly the modernized pansori of the
twenty-first century, tellacting might be a better term than “storytelling”
because it involves aspects of the performer’s work: the art of moving,
miming, acting. Tellacting is deciding when to talk, when to act, and
when to show; more importantly, it is deciding how to combine them for

optimal effect. Tellacting is the ability to move effortlessly from speaking
to singing and back again, from acting to telling and vice versa. It implies
connecting the audience with the performer’s gaze, with the position of
the fan, be it closed (as is usual) or open, with the changes of bodily atti-
tude embodying different characters or organizing their dialogue. Surely
keeping contact with one’s audience, looking into the spectator’s eyes, is
the main task of any storyteller?
The deictic verbal and spatial coordinates of pansori are always clear:
the placement of utterances and gestures, the relation to the speaker-
storyteller- tellactor are always defined in terms of space (here), time
(now), identity and origin (a different “I”). Attitudes, moves, mimicry,
and gaits seem infinite in modernized pansori. However, we soon recog-
nize recurrent forms and attitudes, which almost constitute a codification
and an alphabet. But all these deictic elements come from and return to
the compact and concentrated body of the pansori performer.
Are these codified attitudes typical of a Korean body language? Yes
and no, and more no than yes: except in the attitudes and conventions of
politeness in a few scenes, the gestures and movements of Lee Jaram can be
understood universally, particularly because she often stylizes and univer-
salizes her gestures, and the comic caricatures can be enjoyed everywhere.
We could call speaking-singing the mixed form in which speaking and
singing constantly alternate, where the borders between the two seem
fluid. In these moments, the dramatic tension is at its peak, singing sounds
like an acceleration and intensification of speech. This phenomenon is
comparable to the European Sprechgesang,8 but pansori invented this tech-
nique two centuries before Schönberg.
While the classical pansori singer would be confined to the reduced
space of a mat where she would only stand, Lee Jaram often moves later-
ally, filling the whole stage space. She remains standing, but at a few dra-
matic moments, for instance when she realizes that one of her children has
been killed, she falls on her knees or sits or lies heartbroken on the ramp
in the background, where her daughter has just been murdered.
Real Acting
There are moments when characters seem to be acting “objectively,” no
longer in connection with the storyteller. We have a dramatic, psychological
164 P. PAVIS
acting style, which is very intense, before it gets reinscribed into the story-
telling or the lyrical singing.
In sum, we could say that both adapting a play such as Mother Courage
and performing a pansori version of it mean the performer must know
when to speak (to verbalize), to tell a story (using all possible means), to
sing (in more formal and artistic moments), to stage (to master space, time
and rhythm), and to heighten the situation, the words and the music (to
find one’s voice). It remains to be seen (heard) if there is a dramaturgy
of its physical impact of the voice. We should also describe the affects it
generates in the performer as well as in the spectator. We should first of all,
however, look closely at a scene where we can test some of our hypotheses.
Dramaturgy of a Rolling Stone

The analysis of this scene demonstrates how difficult a task it is, and also
how necessary for pedagogical and theoretical purposes it is to analyze a
scene and pin down the functioning of the components of pansori. It is as
if the performer successively embodied different channels of expression,
different ways of pushing the narrative forward. The performer is like a
rock, a stone which is an amalgam of several components and of the dif-
ferent tools at her disposal. These components and tools build a complex
system of enunciation. We should attempt to distinguish these instances:
1. The artist and performer herself, Lee Jaram, introduces herself at the
beginning and at the end of her long performance (two-and-a-half
hours). She establishes a connection between the story of Courage and
the audience’s social and moral situation, a device that Brecht some-
times also introduces in his plays, although not in Mother Courage. We
shall discuss later the message Lee Jaram is trying to convey.
2. The singer not only refers to Lee Jaram as an individual in her pro-
logue, but also to the artist who uses the art of singing in a formal
way: the classical technique of pansori. She even “performs a part of
Jukbyunga, one of the Korean traditional pansori repertoires” (3).
The heightened style of classical singing and the few lyrical passages
she sings can be immediately recognized, if only because the singer
does not move from a restricted area and uses a very marked vocal
technique. There are several lyrical moments, for instance at the very
beginning of the second part, when she uses the literary form and
delivery style of classical pansori to write her own words and com-
pose her own melody.
3. Very early on the singer begins impersonating various characters,
even if only for a few seconds and with very few, but very well-
chosen, details. Thus all the characters are embodied by the same
singer. They are given a few simple but typical characteristics in their
basic gestures and emotions (hence the impression of a sketch, even
a caricature or a parody). They can be recognized and enjoyed
immediately. The more economical the figuration of a character is,
the quicker and more powerful its characterization will be. A char-
acter can introduce and parody other characters.
4. Sometimes there is an “objective” narrator who seems to be speak-
ing stage directions or interpreting the actions. This is distinct from
the storyteller, Mother Courage most of the time, but also other
characters who tell their story from their own perspective.
5. The drummer (gosu) helps structure the verbal flow, answering and
commentating the singing or acting. What looks like a simple system
of percussion is in fact an important support and guide for the per-
former on stage. The drummer of the buk is always in a dialogue with
the singer and is also responsible for the accuracy of the timing. The
musical instruments—electric guitar and drums—have a very different
function. They establish an effect of contemporaneity (light folk rock),
set a mood, signal a change in atmosphere, stretch time, shift to other
situations, and become an important emotional framework. Lee Jaram
has composed a wide range of musical moments that all support the
situation and the words, creating a constant change of mood, with
tragic or comic effects. The musical composition is so strong and so
appealing that it often almost “steals the show,” or risks turning it into
a musical or a short concert, almost unbalancing the pansori style.
Nevertheless, it is always used discreetly, assisting the movement from
one motive to the next, and always leading back to pansori style and to
the strict percussion of the drum. Music never becomes pure music, it
always remains at the service of action and storytelling.
Voice and Affect

The voice is probably the most powerful instrument, and is at the heart
of the pansori performance. It is the quickest and most efficient tool with
the finest degree of nuance. Thanks to its semantic precision in conveying
166 P. PAVIS
language, voice can be used efficiently, for instance to identify a speaker

or a character. Thanks to its physical qualities, it makes a strong impres-
sion on the listener. The same performer uses different voices and styles of
voices, making the vocal work even more remarkable. Is there a system in
this virtuoso and anarchic use of so many distinct voices? We can at least
identify and differentiate a few of them.
The Low Voice of Classical Pansori

At the very beginning of Ukchuk-ga, and at the beginning of the second
part, Lee Jaram, introduced in the text as Singer, sings from a classical
pansori (Jukbykga). Is this supposed to reassure the conservative audience
of classical pansori that she is able to master this very difficult technique,
and that her work is a continuation of classical pansori, albeit written in
contemporary Korean? Whatever the reasons, she uses this classical tech-
nique whenever the “singer” is “speaking.” It is as if this type of voice
would constitute the basis of her creative work: not only for the story
introduced by this singer-narrator, but for the artistic and physical effects
that she chooses to make on her audience. In a typical pansori the voice is
low, hoarse, and powerful. It is a sexualized, but unisex, voice. Its recep-
tion is very physical in the sense that one hardly notices the meaning of
the words, because one is struck by the sheer physicality, the “grain” of the
voice, the “erotic mixture of timbre and language” of “writing aloud”9
(Barthes). The pansori voice is thus received as a sound-image,10 a “vocal
text,”11 a vocality12: different names for the same component of the vocal
message, which is more a corporal massage than a carrier of meaning.
Thus the texts written by Lee Jaram gain their meaning when they are spo-
ken aloud, when they have become an “écriture à haute voix,” a “writing
aloud” (Barthes). Rewriting, writing, speaking, performing become the
same thing. It is likely that the necessity of efficient and clear performing
serves as a permanent test for the writing speaking and singing.
The Dramatic, More Realistic Voice of the Performed Characters

When the singer, the external narrator, gives voice to Mother Courage and
all the other protagonists of the story, who then themselves become sto-
rytellers, voice and body perform in an almost everday, realistic tone. The
change of identity and mood is immediate; the performer has the ability
to characterize every speaker or protagonist with one or two details, which
are also usually mentioned verbally. The effect produced by the voice var-
ies from case to case, but there remains nevertheless the feeling of a com-
mon ground, which is obviously Lee Jaram’s own voice signature, and
which produces the common stylistic homogeneity of the pansori vocal
style.
The Crying Body

When Mother Courage realizes that her daughter has been shot while
trying to save the city from an attack, she can only utter a two-minute
long cry of despair. The musical and dramatic voice turns into a body
deprived of language, the crying body of a wounded animal: a moment
when Mother Courage is about to destroy herself, to lose her voice, that
is, her identity.
All these different types of voice are mobilized according to the necessi-
ties of dramaturgy. But this is not only a textual and narrative dramaturgy;
it is also, and primarily, a vocal dramaturgy which the listener and specta-
tor perceive physically and often also unconsciously. The power of the
voice is enormous in an opera like this, and the power extends into other
uses of the basic, classical sung voice. The pansori voice always takes a lyri-
cal path, reaching the crossroads of epic narratives and dramatic actions.
The example of Courage’s cry confirms an important law of the use of
sound in classical pansori. A sound can be both exteriorized and interior-
ized according to a double movement, in Korean referred to as yangseong
and yinseong. The first, Yangseong, consists of having the sound rise from
the navel upwards. This is the exteriorized sound, clarity as opposed to
obscurity. The second (yin) consists of swallowing and letting the sound
fade. This is the interiorized sound, the obscurity as opposed to bright-
ness. The art of pansori requires that one master these two principles. One
must harmonize them. That is why the singer must have a very wide vocal
range.”13 We experience this shifting and the width of the vocal register
when we compare Courage’s cry and Choosun’s song for the children.
Intensification of Pathos
Lee Jaram’s challenge is to hold together these distinctive and opposing
voices. This is only possible because the vocal work, the “writing aloud,”
is sustained and embodied in a precise mise en scène (choreography would
even be a better term). That which goes beyond the static attitude of
168 P. PAVIS
classical pansori recitation (always announced by the term singer, and

placed at the most crucial moments of the story, when poetry is vocalized)
could be named mise en scène in the Western style. But this unfolding in
space, time, and acting always has the precision of a living hieroglyph, a
minimalistic écriture, as if the “writing aloud” would coincide with what
one could call a “highly written body language,” a heightened intensi-
fication of voice and movement in pathos, in what Aby Warburg calls
Pathosformel, a form evoking pathos. In these pathos formulae, offered
by Lee Jaram through vocal and physical expression, we encounter what
Warburg scholar Georges Didi-Huberman describes as a concentration
and condensation of culture in heightened corporal states: “For Warburg,
the image constituted a ‘total anthropological phenomenon’, a particu-
larly meaningful crystallization, condensation of what a ‘culture’ (Kultur)
is at a given moment of its history.”14 In Lee Jaram’s modernized pansori,
we find recurrent postures, forms and vocal inflexions transmitted by tra-
dition and expressed, “stretched,” in the process of adapting and staging
by which she invents a “choreography of intensities” (Didi-Huberman).
This does not happen through gestus (Brecht) or habitus (Bourdieu),
but through punctum (Barthes), which is more a sensation than a sense
(meaning), more a sting than an explanation, more an intensification than
an intention.
Training of the Voice

According to Tara McAllister, we can better understand the voice work of
pansori singers if we know how their voice has been trained. One can then
imagine the difficulty of describing pansori vocal expression, particularly
from the point of view (or “point of hearing”) of a Westerner with totally
different hearing habits.
There might still be many intercultural misunderstandings concerning
the importance and the function of the actor’s training in different con-
texts. Indeed, there is a tendency in intercultural studies of actors’ training
to imply that the final performance can only be described and understood
if we have followed the years-long training process of the performer, as
if training could explain everything the performer does. Saying that the
pansori student trains in an environment in which the teacher’s expecta-
tions and the traditions of oral performance are made explicit through
the mimetic process does little to explain how this process takes place.
Moreover, for modernized pansori, the mimetic process does not offer a
sufficient explanation, because there is a considerable role played by inven-

tion, originality, and novelty, that is, there is a mise en scène in the European
sense. Stating that there is an exchange of Ki (energy) between performer
and audience, or that an interaction between performers and spectators
will automatically create a communicative performance does not help, and
seems merely tautological. It remains to be seen if such an experience is
comparable with the feeling of communitas in Victor Turner’s sense.15 If
so, however, the same could also be said of any communication between
work of art the spectator, in any situation of spectatorial identification.
The Politics of Modernized Pansori

All these formal qualities do not necessarily lead to a political play as
Brecht conceived it, curious as he was “to know how many of those who
see Mother Courage and Her Children today understand its warning.”16
Written in 1939 and first performed in neutral Switzerland in April
1941, one month before Brecht’s emigration to the USA, his play bears
the mark of a political anti-fascist text, which attempts to warn simple folk
not to seek to make a profit at any cost: the cost for instance of losing
one’s children one by one, the cost of becoming cynical and blind to their
exploitation by a criminal system and ideology. Nevertheless, the author’s
intention was almost never taken seriously and the audiences always—and
particularly with performances in Korea!—felt only pity for the mother’s
suffering at losing her children. We must therefore question Lee Jaram’s
political subtext and wonder if she had any kind of political agenda.
As writer, or rewriter, singer, performer, and ultimately director of the
whole performance, Lee Jaram has a contradictory attitude towards the
Courage story and towards her own involvement, as if she were wavering
between a purely formal, musical, emotional, work of art and a political,
critical, warning to her “dear friends” to “listen” (2). She does emphasize
the horrors of war; she suggests that Courage makes mistake after mis-
take. But she never makes the Brechtian main point that the Mother never
learns anything at all, and thus becomes a victim of her times. Even when
she quotes Brecht’s main ideological point, she does not seem to draw the
consequences.17 Although she follows carefully the story of Courage, with
its succession of personal tragedies, her conclusion as singer—that is, as Lee
the performer—is erratic, but at least follows Brecht’s suggestion: “It was
war that made Mother Courage’s life miserable … In order to survive in
this world, one should struggle with relentless courage” (61). Lee Jaram
170 P. PAVIS
and her audience offer no explanation for war, and less still propose how
wars might be prevented. Their fatalistic attitude is similar to the one of
the post-war audiences of 1949, as described by Brecht: “The audiences
of 1949 and the ensuing years did not see Mother Courage’s crimes, her
participation, her desire to share in the profits of the war business; they saw
only her failure, her sufferings. And that was their view of Hitler’s war in
which they had participated: it had been a bad war and now they were suf-
fering. In short, it was exactly as the playwright had prophesied. War would
bring them not only suffering, but also the inability to learn from it.”18
Obviously a Korean audience (and the same would be true of a
European one) has no first-hand, direct, recent experience of war on their
own soil. Lee Jaram’s audience is mostly made up of young people who
did not experience the terrible Korean War (1950–1953). The produc-
tion never alludes to the Korean historical context and to the division of
the country, the only topical reference being “though they say we are one
family, our own body is divided in two” (2). Maybe the repressed Korean
past and present, the ongoing cold war between North and South Korea,
cannot openly be discussed: it is too painful a subject, and moreover might
also harm South Korean consumerism. So war seems here to have become
a thing of the past, a word used metaphorically in an existential, expe-
riential manner: “thinking of how people live today—how they have to
struggle to survive—war is also here and now!” (61). “War, as a metaphor
for a divided and torn apart body; as a daily economic and existential
struggle.” The only change in Courage’s behavior, the only conclusion of
the performance is moral: “I want to live as a decent human being, I will
now quit feeding myself with the bread picked up from dead bodies” (60).
In spite of the moral evolution of her hero, it seems that, from a Western,
Brechtian point of view, Lee Jaram misses the political point. And this
brings us back to the basic situation of the audience, to its emotional and
participatory involvement.
Most scenes of this play or pansori opera are strongly emotional, filled
with pathos. Lee Jaram’s adaptation, but also her singing and the staging
of the tragic moments, produce an emotional involvement that is height-
ened by the artistic character of the whole performance. Those emotional
moments are also an integral part of Brecht’s original. But the crucial
difference is that the German author manages to combine the political
subtext with the original dramaturgy he invents. Commenting on Brecht’s
production, which he saw in Paris in 1954, Roland Barthes recognized
this union of the political and the dramaturgical as the key to a successful
reception of the play, in Brecht’s sense. Barthes suggests that Brecht “has
accomplished an authentic synthesis between the rigor of a political inten-
tion (in the highest possible sense of the term) and of the total freedom
of dramaturgy: his theater is both moral and deeply moving: it brings
the spectator to a higher consciousness of history, but this modification
does not come from a rhetorical persuasion or from the intimidation
of a preaching: it results from the theatrical act itself.”19 In Lee Jaram’s
version, the freedom of the pansori dramaturgy and vocality cannot be
denied, but the political intention is only partially “readable.” And, what
is more, we do not see how “the theatrical act itself,” that is, the practice
of a new aesthetics of pansori, could be connected with a political state-
ment or a spectator’s activities. Lee Jaram, unlike Brecht, does not theo-
rize her practice, at least not in the work of art itself. She erases the traces
of Mother Courage’s double game and of her guilt; she does not suggest
that Courage’s attitude, and her blindness to the mechanisms of war and
business, are part of the problem. The spectator is not given a chance to
intervene critically; the interruptions and changes of mood have an aes-
thetic, not a political, function.
Is Lee Jaram aware of her misinterpretation of Brecht’s Mutter Courage?
Most likely not! She probably did not aim to use the story for political rea-
sons, as would have been the case in the 1950s–1970s in Western Europe,
when, following the author’s instructions and the aesthetics of the time,
the idea was to adapt the story and the political message to the local cir-
cumstances and needs. Her Koreanization of this German material (via the
imagined Chinese backdrop) is not a modernization of the play, but only
a stylistic, superficial aggiornamento. She takes flight in the accomplished
form of a modernized, “de-Koreanized,” Westernized, pansori. But her
perspective on reality remains traditional and uncritical, limited to a
sound, humanistic common sense. The spectator is never given the key to
Mother Courage’s blindness and belief in fate. The fatalism of Courage’s
own view is never coupled with the spectator’s critical attitude towards
her blindness, as Brecht had planned it. The spectator is never given the
means to see this fatality. Missing is the ideal critical spectator dreamt up by
Barthes as he watched Brecht’s 1954 production of the play: the spectator
who “understands that he is also himself stuck in these numerous thirty-
year wars, that he is also, like Mother Courage, blind, conscious only of
losing in each battle a part of what he loves; but he also understands that it
is enough for him to see this fatalism if he wants to transform it into mere
unhappiness that can be remedied.”20
172 P. PAVIS
We can expect, or at least hope, that Lee Jaram’s drift toward a Western
type of performance, using (colonizing?) more and more the classical ele-
ments of a Western literary and critical mise en scène, will lead her, one way
or another, to a more political, committed, and less formalist theater. The
marvelous classical pansori voice has already given way to a modernized
pansori, and, through the possibilities of mise en scène, to a more figurative
and political view of the world. A virtuoso and unusually powerful voice is
no longer enough to achieve success and make sense.
Or is this just our Western impression, our obsession with hearing
a political subtext? Are we even talking about the same play, the same
story? It feels awkward to admit that a Korean artist could have the right
to use a foreign material in order to create a new work in its own right,
without testing its sources and its materials, without asking the same dra-
maturgical questions. Now it is we Westerners who might feel invaded,
colonized, because the whole original material—Brecht’s play—has been
restructured from the formal point of view of pansori, extended and
arranged with new melodies, a new orchestration, a new script, but in
fact remaining in the same spirit and tradition of pansori opera. From
a Westerner’s point of view, Lee Jaram’s production might look like a
superficial and merely formal Westernization; from Lee Jaram’s perspec-
tive, it could be seen as an absorption and an appropriation of foreign
techniques and technologies, a recourse to mise en scène, not only used
to enlarge, revise, but precisely to enrich the existing Korean musical and
performative tradition.
Could it be that Lee Jaram has a different understanding of politics?
Could it be that she has no illusions about the political function of the-
ater, unlike Europeans up until the 1960s, before they too gradually
abandoned the Brechtian quest for a political theater and for a transfor-
mation of the world through the arts? In the context of a deeply apoliti-
cal Korean society, with an overproduction of sterile artistic standardized
products, of McTheatre, McMusicals or McK-pop, Lee Jaram’s mod-
ernization and reconsideration of the material of pansori nevertheless
appears to be a radical and audacious, cunning and subversive enterprise.
It gives pansori a second life as much more than a stylistic variation. And
it also provides Koreans and non-Koreans alike with a new dramaturgy,
another way of practicing theater and performance. It is indeed a strong
political gesture to bring into the rigid traditional singing technique of
classical pansori new texts, themes and requirements from other cultures.
An adaptation such as Ukchuk-ga, in spite of its ideological uncertainties

and shortcomings (from a Westerner’s point of view), might be the price
that must be paid to save pansori from remaining a dying tradition, by
opening it to Western influences and making it accessible to new audi-
ences inside and outside Korea.
Notes
1. I would like to thank Lee Insoo for providing a copy of her English transla-
tion of Lee Jaram’s pansori. English quotations are from this unpublished
manuscript. I am thankful to Howard Blanning, the editor of Lee Insoo’s
translation, for his remarks on my article. My thanks also to Mischa
Twitchin for his help with the English.
2. Park Chan. “‘Authentic audience’ in P’ansori, a Korean Storytelling
Tradition”, Journal of American Folklore, 113, summer 2000, pp. 270–
286, p. 3. See also Um Hae-Kyung’s article on modern/new pansori:
“New P’ansori in Twenty-first-Century Korea: Creative Dialectics of
Tradition and Modernity”, Asian Theatre Journal 25:1, 2008.
3. “Don’t expect sympathy or mercy from my wagon. I threw them away
long time ago.” (44).
4. For instance: “Having lost her son to the war, Anna cannot but keep walk-
ing on.” (16).
5. Tara McAllister, personal correspondence.
6. Mutter Courage und ihre Kinder. Gesammelte Werke, Frankfurt am Main,
Suhrkamp, 1967, Vol. 4, p. 1438.
7. Mother Courage and her Children. Translated by John Willett. London:
Methuen Drama, 1980, p. 88.
8. Literaly: speech and song. Sprechgesang was introduced by Humperdinck,
and used by Schönberg (Pierrot lunaire) and Alban Berg (Wozzeck).
9. “Writing aloud is not expressive; it leaves expression to the pheno-text, to
the regular code of communication; it belongs to the geno-text, to signifi-
cance; it is carried not by dramatic inflections, subtle stresses, sympathetic
accents, but by the grain of the voice, which is an erotic mixture of timbre
and language, and can therefore also be, along with diction, the substance
of an art: the art of guiding one’s body (whence its importance in Far
Eastern theaters).” Roland Barthes, The Pleasure of the Text, New York:
Hill & Wang, [1973] 1975, p. 66.
10. Elisabeth Mills. “Theatre Voice as Metaphor: The advocacy of a practice based
on the centrality of voice to performance.” Diss. Rohodes U, 1999: p. 3.
174 P. PAVIS
11. In the glossary of her dissertation, Tara McAllister wrote, “Vocal Text – I
will use this term to refer to the way in which the text is performed vocally,
unless otherwise noted in the thesis.” Toward an intercultural/interdisci-
plinary approach to train actors’ voices, PhD diss. University of Exeter,
2006.
12. To use a more recent and technical term. See: Lynn Kendrick and David
Roesner (eds.) Theatre Noise: the Sound of Performance, Cambridge
Scholars Publishing, 2011.
13. Lee, Soojin. Une lecture du film d’Im Kwon-Taek, Le Chant de la fidèle
Chunhyang. L’Harmattan, 2005, p. 85.
14. George Didi-Huberman. L’image survivante, histoire de l’art et temps des
fantômes selon Aby Warburg, Paris, Minuit, 2002, p. 48.
15. See for instance Park Chan’s view: “The unifying force is the communal
sharing of heritage between performer and audience in the form of familiar
oral, melodic, or rhythmic segments, ethical values, and ethos that ascer-
tain and reinforce their connectedness or communitas, in Victor Turner’s
(1979) term.” Op. Cit., p. 270. On Turner’s notion of communitas, see:
Victor Turner. From Ritual to Theatre. The Human Seriousness of Play.
P.A.J. publications, New York, 1982.
16. Mother Courage and her Children, Translated by John Willett, Methuen,
1986, p. 147.
17. Lee Jaram’s text: “What, you make a living off this war, but you won’t give
your son to this war? You should provide a soldier so that this war can go
on!” (11). This is a free translation from Brecht’s scene one: “A minute
back you were admitting you live off the war, how else should you live,
what from? But how’s anyone to have war without soldiers?”, p. 9.
Translation by John Willett.
(E9)
18. Brecht, in Mother Courage and her Children, op. cit., p. 147.
19. Roland Barthes, ‘Théâtre capital’, France-observateur, 8 juillet 1954. Also
in: Œuvres complètes, Paris, Seuil, tome 1, 1993, p. 419.
20. Ibid., pp. 420–421.
PART 3
On a Few Theatre-Dance and Dance

Performances
CHAPTER 10
Woyzeck as Dance Theater: A Comparison

Between Im Do-Wan and Josef Nadj
In making a comparison between two productions of Georg Büchner’s

Woyzeck, by the Korean director Im Do-Wan and the Franco-Serbo-
Hungarian director Josef Nadj, as dance-theater interpretations more than
theatrical mise en scène, my intention is in no way to place them in compe-
tition. I simply take this opportunity to observe their radical differences:
differences of aesthetics, more significant differences of political vision,
and even more marked differences of the conceptions of the role of theater
The cultural tourist abroad loves to find familiar works from back home.
He imagines that local artists are restaging the work just for him and for his
benefit! His enthusiasm or disappointment is the measure of his self-centered
expectations.
I was delighted to be able to study Woyzeck through a staging by Im Do-Wan’s,
whose first version I had discovered in 2003. I had just seen for the second time
Josef Nadj’s famous 1993 choreography of the play. This formed my desire to
compare them, especially since their choices seemed to be diametrically opposed.
I was wary nevertheless of another illusion, widespread and difficult to
tackle: according to a certain conception, every cultural zone has its own way
of interpreting the great classics, not just as a result of its literary and stage
traditions, but because each culture would tend, as it were, to represent death,
violence, or love by way of its own conventions and methods.
A confrontation of works is meaningful only in terms of aesthetics, ethics,
and politics, and not when it is a standoff between assumed specificities or
cultural essences. It is only from a critical perspective that works are comparable,
especially if they are to be evaluated.

178 P. PAVIS
in social life. I thus hope to return to an aspect of interculturalism: the

use of cultures other than that of the artist, and the manner in which the
intercultural debate is always linked not only to cultural considerations,
but also to more or less conscious political presuppositions. Both produc-
tions were hugely successful, nationally and internationally, but for reasons
that are almost diametrically opposed, a fact that piques the interest of the
scholar, and probably that of the expert in cultural politics.1 These two
versions of the play could not be more different if they tried, in terms of
their spirit and their methods. A systematic side-by-side comparison casts
light onto the aesthetics and politics that underpin each.
Any cursory description is already an interpretation, an evaluation of
the merits of the work according to our expectations. I will nevertheless
begin by summarizing the two versions’ sequences of actions.
In Im Do-Wan’s Woyzeck, a choreographed prologue presents four
similar actors gathered around Woyzeck, holding a chair in the air; when
they move away, each keeps hold of a piece of the chair. Then begins
(2′30″) Astor Piazzolla’s tango music, which will accompany almost the
entire performance. It is hard to tell who the characters are, except for
Woyzeck and Marie. Everyone wears the same neutral gymnastics leotard,
which makes it difficult, or even impossible, to identify them. Piazzolla’s
music is played continuously, to the point that the stage action almost
seems to have been conceived from the musical score, as it would be for
an opera. The performers—actors as well as dancers, jugglers as well as
gymnasts—are all on stage; they make the same mechanical gestures within
an extremely precise choreography. Persecuted by all, running from one
to the next, Woyzeck does not manage to join the dance; he hides behind
the back of his chair. Not all of the play’s scenes are performed, but it is
easy to follow the story of the play; the key situations can be discerned,
and we also know where we are with the help of passages in English. The
homogeneous group of dancers at times breaks into vocal chorus (8′20″).
During a monologue, Woyzeck remains seated for a moment (11′15″),
before the group spins the chairs on one foot, lasting a long time. When
two characters speak to one another—for instance, Marie and her neigh-
bour (14′40″)—it generally only happens at the back of the stage, and the
text is thus mere background noise, hardly audible. Im Do-Wan translates
perfectly the crescendos of tango into choreographic figures; he is careful
to mark the pauses in the movement at the end of each musical sequence.
The scenes then return to the thread of the story. The doctor criticizes
Woyzeck; he seems to be on the verge of doing an autopsy. The medical
WOYZECK AS DANCE THEATER: A COMPARISON BETWEEN IM DO-WAN... 179
students are frightened by the crazy professor (25′). Marie is hassled by

the group of men. The grandmother tells her terrible tale. After a short
love duet set to a very languorous tango, we hear, not without a certain,
perhaps involuntary, black humor, Milva’s song “‘Je renaîtrai,”2 Marie is
killed by Woyzeck under the complicit gaze of the actor-spectators, after
the couple have exchanged a few final words in English.
Nadj’s version follows the story from a much greater distance. It does
not reconstitute a plot, with episodes corresponding to those of the play
(in any case we do not know the author’s preferred order).3 Everything
begins in silence and stillness. Woyzeck (played by Nadj himself) has his
back to the audience adopting the pose of a conductor at the start of a
concert. Only Marie, whose eyes are the most visible part, does not have
her face covered in a thick coat of plaster and dirt. Thus a soft and melan-
cholic Central-European melody is heard, played on a cimbalom. Woyzeck
is fashioning out of modelling clay a face that resembles his own (3′). There
follow short and slow actions lasting a few minutes, proposed by each per-
former. For instance, Woyzeck weighs with his hands the clay statue and a
feather, making the scales swing in the feather’s favour (3′40″). The group
of protagonists (these are not Woyzeck’s torturers, but rather his acolytes)
urinates in chorus to the sound of steel ball bearings falling into a tin can
(5′7″). Woyzeck riskily juggles with his knife; he shaves the captain, having
climbed onto his shoulders; he breaks a wooden stick by bending it against
his head (13′15″). There follows a well-orchestrated moment of madness,
with everybody tapping in time on the wall with wooden sticks (13′40″).
At the dining table, all eat enthusiastically—on the menu: toads, steel peas,
very dirty looking scrambled eggs, rotten apples, a latex mask and so on.
Inside one of the apples, Woyzeck finds Marie’s earring, the item that, in
Büchner, unleashes the process of madness and vengeance (16′10″). To
piano music worthy of burlesque silent movies, a bare-chested man comes
on stage and is manipulated by all like an object. Woyzeck finishes his clay
sculpture of his own head, and slices off the surface of the face. Two cyclists
begin a race on the spot. And so on and so forth: to list these aberrant
and comical actions would take a long time, the incongruity and inven-
tiveness of the manual activities is limitless! Woyzeck, armed with a hook,
extracts meat from a colleague’s back or from his own stomach, and greed-
ily devours it: Hungarian salami, no doubt. We do not entirely understand
how and at what point Marie is killed. Everybody leaves the stage, one
after another. The “madman,” the only character without makeup and who
appears “normal,” exits, carrying Marie on a chair (1′20″).
180 P. PAVIS
Adaptation
1. Im Do-Wan draws on a few major scenes from the play, but he does
not propose a mise en scène, in the European sense. Whatever the
term used, in any case, only the aesthetic experience counts here: a
choreography of a few moments of the play, almost all centered on
the leitmotif of the persecution of, and violence towards, Woyzeck.
The other guideline, actually very secondary in Büchner’s play,
seems to be the love-plot and the happy and sad experiences of
Marie, which give rise to tangos and to a few languorous duets,
worthy of the Crazy Horse cabaret… The overall dramaturgy is
translated into a simple, but perfectly ordered, choreography. It
offers multiple procedures, with all possible variations, and turns
them into a series of tableaux, separated by blackouts and each
almost discrete. The adaptation is more spatial and choreographic
than literary and thematic. With the rigor of the composition, the
clean lines and figures, the rejection of sordid details, the fear of raw
material (on stage or in the flesh), this is a very abstract adaptation,
a purging of the text that empties the play of its substance, interpret-
ing the text against its usual meaning.
2. Josef Nadj also offers a “free adaptation of Büchner’s Woyzeck”:
Woyzeck or The Outline of Vertigo. No words are spoken. The
scenes, which were improvised, then fixed, are freely inspired by
some of the play’s themes. But these themes come more from ges-
tural inventiveness, from improvisations with an object or material,
than from an overarching outline or a certified analysis approved
by a Dramaturge specialized in text-based theater. Nadj did not
aim to present the play’s story in any linear or literary manner.
What mattered more to him was to work on every character, and
every actor, from the inside out, aiming not for psychological inte-
riority, but for the palpable mass, the battered or muddy earth
from which the characters are extracted. What results is a series of
physical states, then physical figures that emerge and unfold
onstage according to a logic of their own, each trying to escape
being bogged down in matter.
Transfiguration and Interpretation

1. The stage translation of these two kinds of adaptation of course
yields very different results. The most potent image in Im Do-Wan’s
choreography is without any doubt the image of the chair maneu-
vered by the pursuing mob into numerous visual figurings. The
chair is the place where all are already seated, and where Woyzeck is
not permitted to sit down. Each performer uses a chair to devise a
collective movement, an overall figuring, an image with flexible
geometry. The moves, poses, and gestures are always clear and
defined. We notice a sense of placement, of rhythm, of crescendo, of
narrative and dramatic clarity that Im Do-Wan probably gained dur-
ing his training with Jacques Lecoq. But technique is nothing if it is
not accompanied by metaphysics and hermeneutics; by symbolism,
through an idea acquiring its meaning onstage. Here, however, the
formal perfection, the inventiveness of the figures, and the virtuosity
of the dancers make us forget about interpretation of the play and its
principal theme: the violence visited on Woyzeck by everybody and
the sordid killing of his lover. Violence is certainly suggested by the
rapidness and repetitiveness, but is also played down by the contin-
ual use of tango and cha-cha-cha music, and by the spectacular, syn-
chronized ballet of the chairs. The impassioned, romantic, gleaming
universe suggested by the music has nothing to do with the story
being told by Büchner’s play, within the text itself or in the stage
dynamics. Admittedly, however, Im Do-Wan does attempt at points
to work against the idealized and romantic transfiguration of the
scenes colored by tango and aestheticism. He thus radically alters
the rhythm and the atmosphere, struggling against it by imposing
moments of silence and flashes of dialogue onto the irresistible
motion of the tango: these scenes, in contrast with most musical
interludes, seem very long without the music, because of a deadly
drop in pressure. The more intimate scenes, which are performed
very slowly, lack the nuance and the finesse of subtly performed
dramatic situations. These individual scenes (dialogues or mono-
logues) are played very slowly: scenes of love, betrayal, and gang
rape resemble strange ceremonies (38′30″). Moreover, slowing
down is no longer possible: in fact, the tango and its crescendo
quickly come back and attempt to bring back to life an action at a
standstill. But the murder, the violence, the misunderstandings of
182 P. PAVIS
the couple, and the absence of reconciliation, in particular, once

again seem excused, and even magnified by this strange, aestheticiz-
ing, and almost mystifying ceremony. Im Do-Wan’s dazzling inter-
pretation is the very antithesis of Büchner’s universe.
2. This is very apparent by way of Nadj’s counter-example. We would
search in vain within his interpretation for a storyline close to that of
the play. The overall composition by no means follows pre-existing
guidelines. It is very likely the fruit of the actors’ improvisations in
the rehearsal room, the result of their physical engagement with the
matter. For each performer’s body is the inert matter from which
everything comes forth and which produces each scene. Thus there
emerges an overarching narrative possessing its own physical and
material logic, a narrative certainly far from the plot of the play, but
nevertheless close to Büchner’s universe.
Formalism and Organicity: Their Effects

and their Reception
1. Im Do-Wan’s choreography runs well, but goes nowhere, like a car-

rousel of fleshless and bloodless figurines. The dancing bodies,
including those of Woyzeck and Marie, seem interchangeable,
“without qualities,” indistinguishable: they are cogs in the mecha-
nism of a corps de ballet. In these bodies, seized from the outside by
the choreographer’s eye, one senses no organicity at all. The perfect
synchronization of the dancers (13′30″) and the precision of the
individual gestures both underline the mechanics of human relations
and of social wheeling and dealing. The ballet of shapes and rhythms
becomes an end in itself; it takes cover behind the geometrical preci-
sion and the abstract formalism. And with just a few exceptions: the
stage recovers some sensuality and organicity in the very sexualized
pas de deux of Marie and the Drum-Major. Abstraction is not itself
an obstacle to an organic scene; from such abstraction is sometimes
born a moment of grace or of life: when, for instance, four actors
stack eight chairs to create the menacing torso of a scorpion, a sud-
den organic shiver crosses the stage and the spectator’s body
(52′45″). Despite these few returns of the corporeal repressed, for-
malism dominates this mise en scène and the perceived suspicion of
aestheticism is confirmed: the choreography is preoccupied with the
formal harmony of the actions, or by the melancholic beauty of the

tango, but it remains blind, mute, and deaf to the play’s theme: the
daily social violence committed against Woyzeck and the sordid
murder of Marie. What regrettably seems to matter for Im Do-Wan
is that the audience admire his performers’ virtuosity. During the
curtain call, the director has his performers repeat the prettiest cho-
reographic figures, showing what the artists are capable of one last
time (1h5′–1h7′).
2. Poles apart, Nadj subjects his audience to shock treatment. The
spectators are confronted with actions that are at least as repulsive as
they are unexpected and absurd. These stage actions are not real (we
are at the theater and can take pleasure in such representations). By
presenting imaginary reality in an abject manner, the stage supplies
the double pleasure of denial: it is I who, facing the abject, perceives
these horrors; and, at the same time, it is not I who must endure this
punishing confrontation. This denial of the spectator recalls one of
the characteristics of the abject: to place the individual at the frontier
between the ego and the non-ego. According to the psychoanalyst
Julia Kristeva, “abjection would therefore be linked to the impossi-
bility of recognising the frontier between the self and the other …
Everything situated on the imprecise limit between the self and the
non-self—rot, dirt, excrement—can become the object of abjec-
tion.”4 Kristeva demonstrates clearly how the abject is linked, for the
small child, to the archaic, pre-oedipal, when the stage of the young
child’s cleanliness, necessary for the constitution of the subject, has
not yet been attained.5
Applied to the characters of Woyzeck as imagined by Nadj, this confirms

the impression that the swaddled man-infants have not yet reached the
cleanliness and language stage. Only Marie (her clean face and radiant
gaze) and the Madman (gifted with the power of clairvoyance) have got
beyond the pre-oedipal stage, have become subjects, the former in real
life, the latter in dream life. The others are stuck in abjection. But they
do not all act in the same way. In Büchner’s play, Woyzeck attempts to
escape his alienation, to attain speech, but he cannot succeed in this, since
everyone prevents him from doing so. And yet the spectator understands
his struggle, which is also the author’s quest to bring his characters out of
the “awful fatalism of history” (Büchner). Nadj’s Woyzeck is not able to
“escape,” either, since humanity is bogged down within psychological and
184 P. PAVIS
social determinism, just as it was in Büchner’s time. Büchner nevertheless

supplies the reader with a few keys to unlock this pre-revolutionary and
pre-oedipal situation. But Im Do-Wan does not ask himself whether his
Woyzeck wants to escape his alienation, nor whether theater is capable of
proposing any solutions.
The Intercultural
Interculturalism gets a bad press these days, for good and bad reasons.
These two versions of Woyzeck, the abject, by Nadj, and the object by Im,
help us to compare the very different practices and cultural images of these
two productions. This is also an opportunity to take stock on the valid-
ity of the notion of interculturalism for the analysis (and the making) of
contemporary productions.
The presuppositions and the methods of intercultural analysis should be
revisited: they are becoming more complex and are ramified to the point
of losing their relevance. It would be more productive to compare the per-
formers’ techniques of the body (Marcel Mauss). Is this the result of Im’s
education à la française, with the influence of Jacques Lecoq? In any case,
the movement of Im Do-Wan’s performers is dazzlingly clear, geometri-
cal, and rational. The ceremonies to which his characters are sometimes
subjected seem to obey a higher logic and to comply with a general exter-
nal design, where everything has a decipherable meaning. The actions of
Nadj’s characters are more like shared rituals for the swaddled and spat-
tered group, but each follows, and is followed by, an individual obsession.
The personal ritual has no overall symbolic meaning that can be explained.
In this crude art form each crafts his own body, like a body-artist. The dif-
ficulty of separating the human, the animal, the vegetable, and the mineral
would be striking to any anthropologist watching the piece.
Instead of searching for sources and for imported cultural elements, it
might be more prudent to observe the intercultural compression that each
of these creations demands and produces. Here, once again, our two art-
ists are like day and night. Cultural compression is weak in Im Do-Wan’s
work, as if he sought for his allusions to Latin American music to be quo-
tations, inviting admiration and recognition; on the other hand, Nadj’s
compression is more intense, and is more acknowledged in the work of
incorporation by the actor of cultures that are themselves already very
mixed. Thus Aladar Racz provides Tsigane music (and cimbalom tunes
inspired by Bach) that is in itself a confrontation of popular rhythm and
learned composition. Nadj’s tendency of having this music appear at rather

sombre moments is another confrontation, leading to an amalgam, like
modelling clay constantly being kneaded, a poor man’s deconstruction.
The intercultural theory applied in the domain of art is increasingly
becoming a question of aesthetics and of politics. Let us take two final
examples: the aesthetic question of rhythm, and the question of cultural
politics.
Im Do-Wan is ceaselessly at the mercy of the beat of recorded music,
since his performers dance or move to the musical rhythm, instead of
providing their own verbal or gestural tempo. The general rhythm of the
performance suffers as a result, especially during the scene-changes and in
terms of atmosphere, with everything seeming rather cobbled together.
Stemming from this is a mode of identification with the performance
that one might find both artificial (the formal beauty of the dance or of
the melody) and distant (barely linked with the ominous storyline of the
play). The bodies, the situations, and the sequences are all in some sense
operated “from above,” from the perspective of Cyrus, without sufficient
concern for the play’s subject matter. The work consisted of constructing
a very solidly built structure, but one lacking substance; the embodied
perception of the spectator remains rather superficial and thus frustrating.
By contrast, one senses immediately that Nadj’s production has been
constructed, and is now experienced, from each performer’s physical
experimentation. Everything originates, so it would seem, from the core
of the body, from a highly physical perception that the actor shares with
the spectator. It is as if we ourselves were required, along with each char-
acter, to climb up from the depths of our shadowy interiors to the sur-
face of our consciousnesses. The protagonists are seen from below, but
without any loftiness, without contempt, without any illusions, and with-
out despair, corresponding to Büchner’s own humane and sympathetic
treatment of his characters. Initially abject, these creatures little by little
become sympathetic (in the etymological sense): we suffer and we smile
with them, we put ourselves in their place.
Is the difference between these two artists a matter of culture? Surely
not! These divergent attitudes are not the fruit of opposing cultural tradi-
tions. Moreover, the most Western, or the most “oriental,” is not always
where we might think! We thus respect these two artists: their priorities,
their aesthetic choices, and even their opposing ideological and political
positions. The question that should ultimately preoccupy us concerns
the political positions, explicit or implicit, that orient and reinforce their
186 P. PAVIS
artistic work. But discerning the political positions behind such striking
artistic creations is not easy. Im Do-Wan initially seems open to other cul-
tures, to the entire world, but his way of presenting the nature of conflict
and action is superficial and, above all, it is troubling in that it idealizes,
neglects, and ultimately falsifies human relations, thus sidestepping the
historical and political strengths of the play. Im Do-Wan would probably
claim his work was only loosely based on Büchner’s play! Indeed! But even
if this were the case, and as legitimate as this approach might be, we are
still entitled to criticize the ethical and political vision of his production.
Conversely, Nadj might seem to be rolling around in an abject mire. But
if we take the trouble to follow the painful journey, we will find a path
through these dark regions; we will make connections with history, that of
two centuries ago, but also of today.
Comparison between the two productions, as I hope to have shown,
cannot be made using purely cultural or intercultural abstract criteria, or
on the basis of preconceived essentialist characteristics attributed to this or
that culture. It must emerge from an observation of the manner in which
the artists imagine their worlds, how they participate in their historical and
political contexts, but also of how they opt to take their aesthetic research
to its conclusion.
The relationship between these two directors and culture, or their own
culture is, as we have observed, very different. We should mistrust the dec-
larations of the artists on this subject just as we would mistrust an analysis
limiting itself to listing the characteristics of their cultures. In order to
understand and appreciate their work, it is more useful to grasp their atti-
tude towards culture, the way in which they amalgamate cultural elements
into their work. Broadly, one could say that Im Do-Wan is a specialist in
import-export, whereas Josef Nadj is not so much an exiled artist as an
exile in art.
Im Do-Wan, with his Korean perspective, imports: Latin American
music, an open dramaturgy from Germany at the start of the nineteenth
century, an open dramatic form that inspires theater-makers across the
world, an acting technique reflecting the geometrical precision of mime or
the physical theater of Decroux, Marceau, or Lecoq. Then, in Korea, he
transforms and remanufactures these imported goods into an exportable
product, sufficiently universal, compact, and compatible with the over-
arching story about persecution. Not only have the originating cultures
of this dramaturgy, this music, or this physical language been smoothed
over, simplified, but what remains is all too easy to spot: we immediately
recognize the stereotypical borrowings, which are almost verbatim cita-

tions, to the extent that it is hard to see how the director has reworked
them or integrated them into his own conception. Everything is (too)
clean and tidy in relation to other cultures. The Korean culture of the
performers has become invisible, colorless, and almost shameful, as if
we were dealing with a codified international form like classical dance.
Everything thus suggests that these different cultural sources (Korean,
German, Argentinian) have not been reworked in and through a corporeal
matter, a material; it is as if the body, the material, the everyday dirt and
impurity have been kept at bay, considered untouchable, with a kind of a
dread of physical contact.
For Nadj, the cultural origins of central Europe are certainly appar-
ent, visible, and audible, but they have been embodied in the actors, and
thus reworked—not quoted in order to be noticed, but rather “kneaded,”
like the modelling clay from which all the protagonists seem to emerge.
In this sense, Nadj is not an exiled artist, an artist nostalgically citing his
origins, his memories, his poetic interpretations, but rather an exile in
art, an exalted artist who magnifies and transfigures all his influences, an
artist exalting the body, exulting in it as the clay from which art can take
shape. The multiple experiences and cultural sources of Nadj are “trans-
lated,” “kneaded” into an artistic work. Their origin is perhaps of interest
to the anthropologist, the ethnographer, or even the theatrologist, but
what counts for the spectator is the work as it flows forth and is liquefied
or solidified in the mise en scène. Politics and history do not reside in iden-
tifiable references (for example, the Yugoslavian war of the early 1990s),
but in the artistic process that posits Woyzeck as mired in an inorganic
world with its life extracted, a deterministic and violent world from which
the infantilized people, their faces covered in plaster struggle to get away,
while the spectators, who understand the metaphor, are able to reflect on
their own position in the world.
Notes
1. A video recording of Josef Nadj’s production is available at the Centre
chorégraphique national d’Orléans (http://www.numeridanse.tv/en/
video/1036_woyzeck-ou-lebauche-du-vertige). There is footage of Im
Do-Wan’s Woyzeck, taken during a Latin American tour, available through
the company.
188 P. PAVIS
2. “I will be born again//a June evening//with a wish to live//to live more

than ever.”
3. Woyzeck. Bilingual edition presented and annotated by Patrice Pavis. New
translation by Philippe Ivernel and Patrice Pavis. Paris, Gallimard, 2011,
pp. 172–178.
4. Michela Marzano, ‘Abject. Abjection et pureté’, Dictionnaire du corps,
Paris, P.U.F., 2007, p. 1.
5. Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection. Translated by Leon
S. Roudiez. Columbia: Columbia University Press, 1982.
CHAPTER 11
A Seoul Song for Hong Sehee:

On the Dance Solo A Song for You
Dance and choreography are very active and popular in Korea. The qual-
ity is usually excellent, not only because of outstanding technique, but
because dance displays a creativity that theater sometimes lacks. I chose
to analyze A Song for You, danced and choreographed by Hong Sehee,
because it reflects the high quality and the style of many dance pieces that
I have seen in Seoul over the past few years.
This piece by Hong Sehee is a dialogue between the dancing body
of a bird and the singing voice of an electric guitar. This does not, how-
ever, represent the usual opposition between body and voice (or body and
Contemporary dance, just like traditional Korean dance or Western classical music,
is a jewel among Korean arts. Amateurs and professionals alike fervently practice it.
I had the good fortune to meet two shining representatives of this art, each
admirable in their field, and for whom I immediately felt “the surprising effects
of sympathy” (Marivaux).
One of them, Hong Sehee, had taught me how to walk (in a straight line) in
a non-dance scene in Swan Lake (choreographed by Cho Kisook at the Women’s
University); the other, Nam Jeong-ho, invited me to read the account of her
journey as a choreographer-performer, her “tightrope walk,” her dance along
the long and narrow diagonal line of life. For the first time, I saw the ballet of
Swan Lake (Le lac des cygnes) intimately and from within; for the last time, I
analyzed the signs (cygnes) from the outside or at a distance. The precision of the
choreographic figures would leave me speechless. Dance invited me to employ
the same rigor in the creation and the description of a staging.

190 P. PAVIS
meaning). Rather, it is an attempt to suggest the movement of an animal

or a person, with different materials and through different media.
The piece has a simple dramaturgy: the electric guitar dominates at the
beginning as the musician takes time to wander around the space while
playing the guitar, led by the discovery of feathers on the ground. As
he is not a dancer or an actor, but “only” a composer/musician (Lee
Chang-Young), his mastery of the space takes a long time. At first, we only
glimpse the dancer’s hand, illuminated and surrounded by blackness. The
spectator longs to discover the dancer’s whole body and to see how she
will react and dance to the shrill music. This frustration does not last too
long: the dancer now takes the floor and starts to develop her impression
of the bird: gradually, starting from the tips of her fingers and extending
to her whole body by the end of the 20-minute piece. Once the musi-
cian has gone back to the side of the stage, to his amplifier, there is even
a brief pas de deux between the two performers: it is as if the bird, almost
hidden behind the musician, was mimicking the guitarist’s gestures with
her wings, as if the bird’s body were eager to coincide with the voice of
the guitar. The light sculpts the body: darkness and light suggest precisely
which part of the body, which limb, we are supposed to be perceiving. The
sound sculpts the world of sound: the electric guitar leads us from noise
to more elaborate music.
Here dancer and musician share the same space. Their partnership seem
tricky, as each of the arts—music, dance—tends to incorporate and thus
to out-shadow the other. This is not quite the case here, but one feels the
musician’s awkwardness in filling a space that is still very much the real
space of the stage, where objects have been placed. Equally, with the danc-
er’s frequent proximity to the musician, the source of the music seems
“unnatural”: it disturbs us as we try to imagine the bird flying or moving
freely in space. In other words, this is no Musiktheater, a theater which
theatricalizes and includes the music; we are in a dance space, where the
musician, at the beginning and at the end, appears to invade the real and
imaginary space. The dancer starts moving, almost imperceptibly, from
the tips of her fingers, and the movement gradually comes to take over the
whole fragile person of a woman embodying a bird. We are given time to
watch so many undulations of an arm! Once the arm has reached complete
motion and has come to life, and is adequately lit, we begin to see the small
muscles of the upper back begin to vibrate and we feel that an infinite web
of muscular fibers is on show. There are many tableaux—the dancer strikes
a pose for a few seconds. The light captures, and carves, these moments
A SEOUL SONG FOR HONG SEHEE: ON THE DANCE SOLO A SONG... 191
very well. The visual sensation of the spectator corresponds to an element

in the reconstitution of the bird’s movements. The trembling of the bird’s
wings, for example, is like whispering, a slight noise just before the bird
takes off. The dancer, however, avoids the stereotypes of a bird flying. She
does not mime its flight, nor does she reconstruct its real movements. She
offers a choreographic evocation of a human body becoming a bird, a bird
as we can observe or imagine it. Park Seok-Kwang’s light beautifully cap-
tures, with surgical precision, the body segments which then begin to pul-
sate: the light “cuts” and sculpts into the body the required details of the
moving wing or trunk. It reveals the almost secret origin of movement,
flight, and our deepest sentiments. Obviously, this bird only exists in our
imagination, and only when it strikes a chord in us, allowing us intuitively
to associate an emotion with each movement it makes, and each discovery
it makes about its identity.
Hong Sehee’s bird and its movement gradually become recognizable
and acceptable to both dancer and viewer. Flying has always fascinated
human beings as something unachievable. Movements here are first
“steps” towards flying, the moment when an animal leaves the ground,
escapes the Earth’s gravity, and remains suspended in the air. The dancer
seizes the very subtle moment just before taking off. She then begins to
“fly,” with increasing ease. We are reminded of the delicate hand gesture
of a refined courtly dance, and soon witness its transformation into a wing
and a bird in flight. With the help of the spotlights, the dancer sculpts and
highlights a few points on her body, the points where motion originates
and which enable flight to take place. Movements become gestures and
objects, which, in their turn, lead us to a better perception and identifica-
tion of motion. Increased harmony and melody in the music lead to a more
and more refined vocabulary of hand gestures, as found in the Balinese
dance tradition. The crescendo of the music leads to a more animated and
vertical dance, which eventually vanishes into darkness and oblivion.
If we are familiar (but we need not be) with the dance of the Korean
traditional royal court, and with Prince Hyo-Mung, who wrote, for his
mother, the queen, a choreography (called Chung Aeng Mu), we might
appreciate how the dancer and choreographer Hong Sehee has adapted
this historical material. There would, however, be little point, except per-
haps for specialists, in trying to distinguish which original elements of
the courtly dance have been kept, which have been adapted, or what new
elements have been created. It would be like analyzing a Shakespeare play
by only looking at the possible different sources and influences. It seems
192 P. PAVIS
wiser (albeit much more difficult, if not utterly impossible) to observe

how the dancer embodies different movements and attitudes, whether
observed, invented or somewhere in-between. In any case, Hong Sehee
does find her own style. We recognize the dancer’s training in classical
ballet: attitudes, positions, and also a succession of stillnesses and quick
gestures like a bird taking flight. But the dancer has found her own style,
vocabulary, and vibrato. She has found her own language, even if one
can sense various possible temptations and imitations: an expressionistic,
“driven” expressivity à la Mary Wigman; or a mime performance style in
the spirit and style of Decroux, Marceau, or Lecoq. All of these artists set
as their goal the best possible imitation of an object, so that the audience
would acknowledge, respectively, the mathematical precision, the poetic
illusion, or the humorous recreation of the animal by a human being. She
also avoids the postmodern or postdramatic deconstruction of the move-
ment, or the abstraction of “Limb’s theorem” (Forsythe).
Hong Sehee has a quite different agenda: with only a few strokes, she
sketches a movement and a body (from the inside and the outside); she
does not try to reconstitute the animal in its totality, she suggests how the
human body awakes to motion, she captures tiny kinesthetic moments of
the animal which the viewer can immediately “translate” into her experi-
ence of movement and identification of objects. Idea and desire are at the
tip of her fingers: the arm begins to undulate, then the trunk, and finally
the whole body. The movement spreads to the whole person, and also,
albeit invisibly, to the body of the viewer. There is a constant crescendo
both in the music and the visibility of the dancing bird leading to a final
climax and later a cooling down, with a soft, peaceful music, as the bird
vanishes.
To dance is to transform one’s body into the object of a story: its own
story but also our own story. This happens the moment we imagine and
let others imagine that this body is becoming something else, gradually
but ineluctably.
A movement always finds its own logic as a choreographic reconstruc-
tion. But it also always retains something from reality; it remains mimetic
of something, at least in the sense that the viewer recognizes elements of
the world, traces from her own uses and images of the body.
The narrative becomes clear after the bird has flown away, once the
musician re-enters the “sacred” space of dancing and finds a few feathers
left by the animal. A sad return to reality: the bird has flown away, love is
gone. The red, blood-stained feathers and the shrill cries of the animal in
A SEOUL SONG FOR HONG SEHEE: ON THE DANCE SOLO A SONG... 193
the distance and a few paper birds on the floor are the only remains, the
only memories, while the bird has long since reached other shores.
Dancing is like flying. One risks falling at any moment: when the body
ceases to believe in its power, or when it is abandoned by an uninterested,
skeptical, or bored spectator, a spectator who suddenly refuses to lend the
body to imagination, in order to be carried away.
Imageless Memories
Can there be a dialogue between a dancer and a musician? Naturally, yes!
But between a bird and an electric guitar?
The bird needs a voice in order to come into existence. The guitar
needs a living creature to talk to? So they might meet, after all.
But for how long? When the bird has learned how to sing and fly, it
usually leaves the nest, leaving behind only a few feathers.
***
A hand gesture. The shape of what could become a bird.
But we do have to help the bird take off. We give it a soul, with our
music, which comes from nowhere else than from our soul.
The bird will play its part. It will take shape in our imagination and just
when it gets there, almost there, it will already have disappeared.
***
The extremities of the body. Raised arm, fingertips, stretched leg, toe.
From top to toe: this strange wing will transport the whole body.
Life will carry us, but only if we believe in our future, if we move on, if
we attempt to fly.
So, in the beginning there was motion, and it created a body: a body
of emotions.
***
Strong emotions, for sure.
But so far from Flamenco!
The bird does not dance to a music that can guide its first steps. More
than an exchange or a dialogue, or a joust, this is a love game, a playful
competition between two intensities, two vibratos. Not between signs or
forms, which would be in competition, but between two ways of being:
the more and more, the less and less.
194 P. PAVIS
As if, for a moment, one could measure two distinct vibrations: vibra-
tions of the body and of the soul.
Love, life? A fine-tuning of two intensities.
***
The bird seems to be on its way out, heading to nowhere, blurred and
sinking into darkness and oblivion.
No hand will hold it back, no music, no voice, even if they could blow
life into its frail wings. The gesture was more an image than a real thing,
more a line than a volume, more the outline of a distant limb than the flesh
of a tangible body.
Maybe there was no bird. Only a voice. An inner voice, a fantasy. Deep
in us. And it felt as if the musician and the dancer had only met in feelings
and thoughts:
SOMETIMES
I FELT
IT HAD BEEN
BUT AN UNNECESSARY
THOUGHT
COMING FROM NOWHERE
LEADING NOWHERE
BUT
---I THOUGHT---
IT HAD TO BE FELT.
CHAPTER 12
Self-Portrait: Three Stages of Life.

On a Solo by Nam Jeong-ho
A first phase—at a distance, on a diagonal beam of light: the dancer sketches

a possible path, straight but narrow, the path of life. The body here dis-
plays a lightness, a lyrical gaiety, dancing to Afro-Americo-Brazilian music.
Like a tightrope-walker, she dances on a stretched rope. The figures of the
dance are perceivable in two dimensions, like a fresco. In these simple and
repeated figures, child-like skipping dominates: the arms go up, the feet
jump from stone to stone over a stream or above the void. It is carefree,
and thus brilliant, but is perhaps already hiding some wound.
(Often the body accompanies us like this, skipping ahead or behind,
with a slight interval, so we can observe but never quite catch up).
But the second phase is already on its way: the character removes her
red tunic, then her blue trousers, her shoes, and finally her wig, depositing
these trophies downstage, closer to us, and then dancing inside the tri-
angle they form. Perhaps the character thus rids herself of all appearances:
an overly flashy stage costume, a shamanic Korean-ness that weighs too
heavily, an affluent youth that is too “Gangnam”? This shedding comes
as a surprise, and it reveals a yellow-white Pierrot lunaire, in the style of
a nineteenth-century pantomime blanche. This makes the start of a new
stage of life. After the carefree and virtuoso phase of youth comes maturity
and the time of doubt, of weariness with everything. The dance and the
dancer are grounded, the body huddles up, folds in on itself. This phase of
the choreography, much less virtuoso and less spirited, is the most moving.

196 P. PAVIS
Moments of crisis, moments where life is nevertheless at its zenith, where

the dance places itself in the entire stage and social space, limited only by
the remains of all that made up our splendor, our ambition, our desire to
create. Wrenching, acceleration, repetition. The dancer falls and gets back
up, she has lost her balance, the work repeats itself, until she finally comes
to a halt on her stomach, her face buried in the ground. We fear the worst;
we think she is finished. But she faces up to everything, burying her head
in the sand no more.
(Often the face we fear losing conceals from us a more profound image,
upon which we ought nevertheless to look).
Art and life both get over it; Pierrot overcomes his melancholy, he dons
his multi-colored garb once again; movement and dance can start again;
life goes on. It was a false ending: the audience clapped too early. Was this
to thank her, or to suggest she get out? The dancer plays with this ambigu-
ity, seeming to beg for applause in order to leave, or to start all over again.
This was not her end, nor the end of the dance. The dancer regains the
drive of her youth, and she exits on another diagonal line, the inverse of
the first, but just as clearly drawn. The percussive music pulsates with life
once more; the body reasserts its youthful lightness. This is the overall nar-
rative, but the body’s own must also be followed. For each phase there is
a gestural language suiting the moods and the ageing of the human being.
How to reconstruct one’s life? Three moments mark out its construc-
tion, then deconstruction, and finally its reconstruction. The same ele-
ments of costume, the same musical reference-points, the same kinds of
gesture mark its progression.
This choreography moves us deeply with its simplicity, its changes of
rhythm, its perfect coherence: all of us will recognize ourselves in it and
might perhaps reconstruct ourselves like so one day. There are few dances
(or dancers) who dare to address this question of the crisis, or of the
maturing of their art, the evolution of how they look, changes in their
bodies, or who are prepared to reflect on this for a moment without shame
or idealization. Nam Jeong-ho offers us a masterclass in dance as well as in
life. This image of the self is a gift to the other in us.
Every sequence of dance is a victory over chaos and over the non-place.
It writes itself onto a diagonal line going towards infinity, on a parchment
that unrolls before it like a carpet of light, a curriculum vitae, a drawing
of oneself, a self-portrait.
SELF-PORTRAIT: THREE STAGES OF LIFE. ON A SOLO BY NAM JEONG-HO 197
***
Let us return for a moment to contemporary dance and to the “univer-
sal” pleasure of its spectator. This pleasure consists of having the impres-
sion of escaping, moving beyond ever-visible physical identity and cultural
determinism. It is to have, so to speak, direct access to the other’s body:
access that seems personal, unmediated by cultural armor, sexual access,
offered without shame at the voyeur’s exterior and interior gaze. The
other pleasure, or another form of the spectator’s scopic pleasure, is that
of the movement communicated to the spectator by kinesthesia. This is as
true for dance as for theater or the staging of texts. In the theater examples
in the present volume, this is the musicalized movement of the treadmill
in Sales of a Deathman, or the synchronized movement of advance and
retreat of the two narrators of Coming Up for Air that come to mind
spontaneously and which are engraved into my body. The quality of the
movement still remains to be described: in Self-Portrait, lightness, virtu-
osity, refinement, and the shifts of movement; in Song for You, precision,
quivering, expressiveness, and the different rhythms of the bird.
These intrinsic qualities of movement, the impeccable technique,
and their emotional coloring return us to those of contemporary dance.
These will often go beyond cultural idiosyncrasies. An international
spectator will make do with these as they are immediately translatable
198 P. PAVIS
into a formal pleasure, an overall explanation, a coherent and effec-

tive choreography. Such a spectator could, without any difficulty, stick
to this pleasure and this perception. But the moment the spectator
questions the professional identity of the dancers, once he observes
more carefully the movements and the body techniques, he is able to
perceive the slightest variations in terms of what he knows about his
own body. Nam Jeong-Ho, for example, comes on stage hopping in
a line like a little girl, her shoulders and her arms move up and down
in time with her bounds; she wears a jacket and trousers in the colors
of the Korean flag, with long sleeves going past her hands. Then she
takes off the Korean colors, donning instead a costume that recalls
the white Pierrot, or Baptiste in Les Enfants du Paradis, references to
the French pantomime blanche. This French phase, with bouncy body
language and a carefree atmosphere, leads quickly to a crisis of gesture,
of appearances, of cultural or national identity. The character ends up
putting her original Korean clothes back on, she recovers her juvenile
energy, she amuses herself by soliciting applause that the spectators
believe are for the dancer and not the character. The spectator, Korean
or international, thus understands that this narration is founded on
different cultural moments. Without even knowing the cultural cir-
cumstances, the spectator sees that the body of the dancer is steeped in
techniques of the body, in ways of dancing and hopping, in attitudes
borrowed from Korean popular culture. As with the bird danced by
Hong Sehee, the spectator, even if ignorant of Korean culture and
incapable of finding the traces of a legend, will without difficulty bring
to mind a tale or a myth that features a bird taking flight or flying.
Once the spectator recognizes a narrative unfolding in a space-time,
the dance reveals its cultural referents, if not necessarily those of an
identifiable culture, at least those of participation in a cultural referent
that might be expressed. This narrative is by turns historical, mytho-
logical, individual, and even autobiographical. It recounts, more or
less explicitly, a curriculum vitae, the “course of a life,” a Lebenslauf,
as Germans say, a writing of the self (autobiography), a discourse on a
genesis. Is it by chance if this seems to be the case in both solo works?
Nam Jeong-Ho reviews each of the three major stages of her life. Hong
Sehee more indirectly and symbolically tells the difficulties, for the
wounded bird or for the human being, of taking flight. One might
read from this (this is not a hermeneutic hypothesis) the effort, even
SELF-PORTRAIT: THREE STAGES OF LIFE. ON A SOLO BY NAM JEONG-HO 199
the suffering, involved in “taking off,” finding one’s voice, like the
bird, finding the way in a world of choreographic chimera. Economy,
history, and culture are always printed on the dancers’ bodies. Nam
Jeong-Ho, a Professor at the Korea National University of Arts, cre-
ator of a considerable body of choreographic work, comes back to her
life, unfurls the curriculum; she renders an uncompromising portrait,
dances in one of temples of official culture. Hong Sehee, a young pro-
fessional dancer and choreographer, states the difficulty of beginnings,
the effort needed to pull oneself from the earth’s gravitational pull, to
take flight from a place too narrow for a bird attracted to vast spaces.
PART 4
On a Few Cultural Performances

CHAPTER 13
Parody in K-pop: An Analysis of the Video

Nobody, by JYP, with the Wonder Girls
The notion of parody is usually applied to literature. But it also applies

to other arts, media, and to all sorts of cultural products of everyday life.
Has parody not become a fundamental principle of life in society and of
our relationship to the “other”? In parody, we always stand next to, rather
than in front of, the other. This might not facilitate an exchange, but it
allows us at least to look in the same direction.
No Korean meal without kimchi, and, nowadays, no Korea without K-pop. I

never thought that I would one day become hooked on fermented and over-
spiced cabbage, less still that I would take such close interest in the Wonder Girls,
via a pop video by the creator of their songs and choreographies, JYP (Jin-Young
Park).
I had not planned to write about K-pop. The omnipresence of the K-pop
aesthetic in Korean culture changed my mind. Instead of engaging in a sociology
of K-pop and the Korean media, a task that exceeded my capacities, I chose to
focus on a video telling the story of Nobody. I was attracted, as well as appalled,
by the standardization of bodies molded by plastic surgery, by the mechanization
and formatting of movements and voices.
The cultural industry leaves nothing to chance: the choice and the training
of the performers, the synchronous repetition of the same simple figures, the
fabrication and generation of desire in the spectators. K-pop is a well-calibrated
mechanism, precisely machined, politically, aesthetically, and sexually correct.
Watching videos of K-pop dance, I chanced upon a television program in
which children, some very young, were invited to imitate or parody the Wonder
Girls. It was very funny, but…

204 P. PAVIS
What, then, are the devices and the functions of parody, and what are
the reasons for its enormous popularity in the media and in contempo-
rary musicals? To answer this question, we might want to start from the
broadest possible definition of parody, examining why and how it extends,
beyond literature, to all cultural practices and performances. Let us begin,
therefore, with the definition of this question by two excellent specialists:
Linda Hutcheon and Simon Dentith. According to Hutcheon, parody is
“a form of repetition with ironical critical distance, marking difference
rather than similarity.”1 This definition applies primarily to literary parody,
but it broadens to include other cultural practices. This is a complete defi-
nition, even if a few of the terms need to be more precise: the mention of
repetition, for example, puts too much emphasis on resumption or reuse
that is identical, but there are also parodies which are not repetitions but
instead land rather far from their starting points, and which are therefore
more satires than allusions to a particular object. As for the irony of this
distance, it obeys rules that must be precisely distinguished from those of
parody. Finally, the notions of difference and similarity are themselves rela-
tive, not relevant, and difficult to establish.
Dentith’s definition, then, is more appropriate than this an inquiry into
all kinds of parody which, beyond literature, target all fields of social and
cultural life: “Any cultural practice which provides a polemical allusive
imitation of another cultural production or practice.”2 Most welcome is
the return of the old notion of imitation in the sense of rewriting, pastiche,
homage, intertextuality. As for the somewhat neutral terms of “polemi-
cal,” “relative,” and “allusive,” they do not prevent us from making a
clear distinction between “practice” and “production”: practice involves
a social activity in general, a place where parody takes place, whereas pro-
duction deals with a given object, an instance where an object is parodied,
whether in a text, a gesture, or a cultural event.
If a synthesis of these two definitions can be allowed, we could consider
a parody to be any cultural practice alluding in a satirical way to a previ-
ous cultural practice, with the purpose of criticizing it and of amusing the
receiver. If the parodied object is not known or not recognized by the
receiver, the parody then does not function as such, it becomes an ordi-
nary text to be taken at face value.
We gain many insights if we study the origins and the tradition of
literary parody, from Aristophanes to the critical minds of the classical
European period of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. For the
Greeks, the term parôdein or parodia meant to sing alongside, or badly:
PARODY IN K-POP: AN ANALYSIS OF THE VIDEO NOBODY, BY JYP... 205
that is, to imitate while situating oneself beside the parodied text, with the
aim of producing a comic effect through a way of speaking, an interpreta-
tion intentionally erroneous and thus ridiculous. We should also always
remember that parody did not become a literary genre, as tragedy and
comedy did, but that it has always been a figure of speech within rheto-
ric: it must therefore “be considered as a figure, a potential ornament of
discourse (be it literary or not) rather as a genre, a class of works.”3 This
stylistic (and not generic) characteristic explains why parody can so easily
be transposed onto any cultural production, as long as one is able to dis-
sociate the parodical action and the parodied object. On the other hand,
it is likely that parody was not established as a genre, because its object
disappears rapidly and it must always find new targets, and this prevents it
from taking root as a genre of its own.
Parody should be clearly distinguished from similar but different
notions such as satire, travesty, pastiche, caricature. Satire is not limited,
as is parody, to an object directly identifiable. Burlesque travesty (as for
example Marivaux’s L’Homère travesti) “rewrites a text originally written
in a noble and elegant style, keeping its ‘action,’ i.e. both its content and
its movement (in rhetorical terms, its inventio and its dispositio), but it
imposes a very different elocutio, i.e. another style, in the classical sense of
the term…”4 Travesty deals with a noble subject in a trivial way. Burlesque
rewriting makes fun of serious themes in a crude, grotesque, absurd way.
Pastiche only imitates the manner and style of an author; it writes and
creates in the same “pasta” (“pasticcio”), it imitates a style, but does not
make fun of the text, it only enjoys pointing up a few unavoidable linguis-
tic tics. Far from seeking to ridicule the author or the one who produced
the text, it imitates, with a certain admiration, the text’s devices, to which
it pays homage. Pastiche, however, can also be satirical, if the imitator
imitates the style of an author by making him say unexpected or comical
things. Pastiche invents a new object, while parody always attacks the same
text or the object parodied. In brief, pastiche modifies its object by imitat-
ing its style, whereas “burlesque travesty modifies style without modifying
the subject”; inversely, “parody modifies the subject” without modifying
the style.5
Other categories, under different names, bring us back to the caricature
aspect of parody, according to the same criteria of comical deformation and
of movement, as in the case of the drawn or acted caricature. In Bergson’s
words: “The art of the cartoonist is to seize this movement, sometimes
imperceptible, and to make it visible to all eyes by magnifying it.”6
206 P. PAVIS
In transposing these logical categories to the world of entertainment

and show business, we will attempt to specify how they operate in the new
media. Our hypothesis is that parody is everywhere, particularly in produc-
tions we see in mass media, show business and short videos, and of course,
in the way we speak and act with other people. Let us take an example,
almost at random: a video of Jin Young Park (JYP) and his group, Wonder
Girls.7 In this six-minute long video, JYP tells us the fictional genesis of
their hit song, Nobody. He does this by showing the different steps they
took to create this song. He imagines an incident which results in the style
of the Wonder Girls and leads to their triumph, replacing the old recipes of
jazz and rock music with the choreographed, softer style of K-pop. What
happened? In a burlesque mode, JYP is waylaid on the toilet owing to a
lack of paper, which prevents him from joining his singers on stage (!).
When he finally gets on stage (nobody really knows technically how he
solved this problem), the girls triumph: pushed by the producers, the girls
had to improvise in a new style with new choreography. After the girls
have seized power, JYP, to claim his role in this success, has no other
choice but to act as if he was behind this new style, to leave performing,
and instead manage the media success of his singers.
This short video, remarkably well conceived, has all the ingredients
of a parody and of an ironic story. We must, however, sort out what
these notions contain; within these comic and critical situations, we
must distinguish different moments and different attitudes, in spite of
the apparent simplicity of the narrative. In this story about creating a
song, JYP makes fun of himself by showing everything behind (almost
literally) the success of the Wonder Girls. He makes fun of himself by
referring to the grotesque and indeed scatological incident of the lack of
toilet paper. This flirts with the idea of a burlesque travesty, which would
show an idealized and vapid K-pop through the eyes of a grotesque
and half-naked body. The subliminal message remains the same: K-pop
was invented thanks to a lack of toilet paper and the Wonder Girls took
power, albeit only for a while. Thanks to JYP’s scatological adventure,
the Girls leave their backing positions on the stage, where they func-
tion only as a chorus, and create their own choreography, in which all
their vocal and physical qualities are fully recognized. As a final, and
again ironical, counter-point, we find JYP, after the concert that saw
the consecration of his singers and dancers, in the same position, on the
toilet. But—as an ironical and tragic ending?—the toilet paper still does
not appear at the rendezvous. This time our hero, again blocked from
his purpose and helpless, feels abandoned by everybody. De profundis

clamavi… Is this embarrassing situation for the accursed artist parodical?
Yes and no: we should qualify this opinion!
Let us therefore rewind the video, if only to understand better the
variety of the gazes: by turns ironic, parodical, pastiche-like, grotesque
and burlesque, etc. We immediately see that the video does not parody
the song, Nobody. The words and music remain untouched, the music is
lip-synced; the choreography is never the object of mockery, the way of
singing and moving is never made to seem ridiculous. On the contrary:
the video highlights the group’s popularity and success with the media, in
a rather heavy and narcissistic manner, set in the American 1950s in the
style of a television show. This self-congratulation, this glorification, this
American-style success story, are the very opposite of parody, which does
not normally praise, but rather criticizes its object. So the parodical or
ironical moments, the pastiche or burlesque, are to be found only in a few
details of this edifying story.
These moments are nevertheless amusing and pleasant; they
demonstrate, once more, the virtuosity of show business: its ability to
comment on itself, to analyze and even to deconstruct itself. We find, for
instance, a rather beautiful reconstruction of an American variety show
of the 1950s, with all the usual stereotypes: tyrannical, greedy, and stu-
pid managers; a very chic night club; the somewhat phallic microphones
of yesteryear; black and white photos taken with a flash; a TV set from
the 1950s; a very “swinging” jazz orchestra; a swaying female choir sing-
ing in a style between rock and gospel; an emphatic announcer; a pianist
and an obedient movement coach; a sleeping artist who always wakes up
suddenly to create one of those beautiful melodies that just happen to
follow him everywhere…
We witness the first steps of the choreography, and how it is put together
according to the codifications of the different genres: the rhythm is simul-
taneously musical and physical: lateral movements of the hips, poses and
stops, arm gestures indicating a certain direction. We sense that the phatic
function of the K-pop gestures—movements of the arms and legs—are
not imitating any object; they achieve a rhythmical contact with the audi-
ence, following a simple but extremely precise system. The body is simul-
taneously offered to the erotic gaze and strictly controlled by a perfectly
codified etiquette of wholesome coquetry.
The American showbiz of the 1940s and 1950s is nicely observed, with
relevant details. Sets, acting and sound together create a very successful
208 P. PAVIS
pastiche. It is indeed a pastiche, because the singers, while moving,

singing, embodying the look of these years, also indicate that they are
aware that this style, which they master with precision and talent, has in
fact been imposed on them and is not natural to them. This pastiche is an
imitation of American culture with the usual stylistic and “philosophical”
stereotypes. The swaying walk of the group—one of K-pop’s preferred
weapons—but also their hairstyles (or their wigs?) and their glamorous,
silvery sheath dresses put the finishing touches on a perfect imitation of a
mythical America.
From a musical point of view, the influence on K-pop, and on this
piece in particular, of African American musical culture should be stressed.
It is obviously difficult to trace back all influences but in this piece, and
more generally in the Wonder Girls’ aesthetic, we find allusions to a vocal
style from African American groups from the Motown label (such as The
Supremes), famous in the USA during the 1950s and 1960s. One finds
the same mixture of dancing and singing while facing the audience. These
groups had many hits, for instance: Baby Love (1964), In the Name of
Love (1965), Ain’t no Mountain High Enough (Marvin Gaye and Tammi
Terrell, Diana Ross), I’ll be There (Jackson Five, 1966), I Heard it through
the Grapevine (Marvin Gaye, 1969).
Superficially one could think that K-pop borrows techniques of sing-
ing and performing close to those of the Motown style. The number of
singers is often the same: five men, three or more women. However the
substance, the quality and above all the energy is very different. Most song
lyrics had been written and composed by specific artists for the Motown
label or the Supremes. Mostly these are love songs, but there are also anti-
war songs, and heart-felt poems. They remain expressions of a time, the
Sixties, when minorities of all kinds were fighting for recognition. This
music is in tune with a time of racial and political tension, and with a hope
for renewal, when everything seemed possible. Their music, coming from
jazz, blues, and gospel, had to fight to be recognized or taken seriously by
the white majority and the media. In other words: text, music, song have
a feel, a vibration, which immediately catches people’s attention and emo-
tion. Their beat, rhythm, pulse is unique.
Compared with this style and mood, K-pop seems a smooth, hyper-
correct and shallow form of performance. The perfection is only formal,
especially in the dancing which consists of a perfectly synchronized ballet
of simple, repetitive gestures. The content of the song is as simplistic as
possible (“I want nobody but you”): there is no subtext, nor any hidden,
political allusions. Compared to the Motown style, everything is correct,

smooth, light, entertaining, and disposable. All efforts are concentrated
on the production of five identical, idealized, Lolita-like young girls. The
rap at the end of Nobody (and of other songs) is supposed to sound a little
different: sung by the girl with a lower voice, darker skin, and a stronger
physical build. But it remains very far from the African American voice and
body of a Motown or a rap artist. Thus we easily recognize in Nobody, and
in K-pop in general, the American model, but it has been seriously watered
down, it has lost its vitality, it has been reduced to a stylish décor. This is
obviously intentional. It has to do with a tamed use of the body (against
all appearances). The body has been completely channeled by the simple
and naïve choreography as well as by the homogeneous voice work. The
individual body of each K-pop performer is standardized, reduced to a
mechanism of perfect collective movement, where any difference is erased,
or is artificially stressed in the short rap sequence at the end. Because
Motown comes from blues and jazz, there is always room for improvisa-
tion (albeit slight) in the music and movement. In such performances, one
can thus notice differences of look or bodily posture, a mimicry that seems
to allow each individual to disappear into the collective, producing a per-
fect chorus, but contributing individually as well. And the corporality, the
grain of the voices, can be experienced almost physically by the spectators.
The dance-moves of the American artists of the sixties might sometimes
seem clumsy, but they are more natural in the sense that they are a strong
individual artist’s contribution to the ensemble. What is more, there is
always a certain spirituality in each performance, as if the performance
were of vital importance and had to be re-felt, re-experienced by each of
the artists and spectators, as in a Gospel concert, rather than mechanically
reproduced, as in K-pop. We will only be in a position to understand the
pastiche and re-elaboration of K-pop if we are aware of the influence and
intercultural allusion it makes to American popular music of the sixties.
The references in this pastiche are never openly ironical, and even less
parodical. They are not cultural or aesthetic codes. The video also docu-
ments a cultural transfer, an amused, almost critical and distanced gaze at
another culture from which it attempts with difficulty to break away. Is
this a mark of the ambivalent, even schizophrenic, relationship of Korean
culture to North American culture? In any case, pastiche, citation, and cul-
tural transfer are always at work in K-pop, as if they were mixed together
in a kind of chemical or alchemical laboratory. According to Steven
Greenblatt, knowledge of a culture helps us understand its literature
210 P. PAVIS
better, “for Western literature over a very long period of time has been
one of the great institutions for the enforcement of cultural boundaries
through praise and blame. This is obvious in the kinds of literature that are
explicitly engaged in attack and celebration: satire and panegyric.”8 When
transposing this observation to the field of K-pop, we could say that a mix-
ture of satire and praise, similar to what we find in pastiche, characterizes
the K-pop aesthetic, as we see in the passage from the “classical” American
to contemporary K-pop. The resulting pastiche bears the marks of post-
modernism, which Fredric Jameson sees as “a parody without purpose.”9
In this short video, parody takes on the identity of pastiche; it is not meant
to ridicule K-pop, but to imitate brilliantly American cultural products,
while suggesting that K-pop is more in tune with our time, and better
suited to attracting the world audience for entertainment. Parody, pastiche
and even burlesque seem essential in order to establish a certain circular-
ity between mockery and praise, parody and homage. We find the same
attitude and circularity in the parodical imitation of the dances (never the
songs) by fans on the Internet. Fans are torn between their desire to do as
well as their models and the secret urge to ridicule and rid themselves of
their idols. Parody is necessary for the smooth functioning of show busi-
ness, since fans have to be constantly mobilized, have to be allowed, as in
the carnival, to let off steam by imitating the “chosen” artists, their icons,
before reintegrating into the ranks of fans and paying customers.
An Example of Imitation by the Fans:

Wonder Girls vs Wonder Baby
On the Internet, one can find hundreds of imitations of videos by the
Wonder Girls. A particular genre is that of children, sometimes very
young, able to perform, after hard training with Mom or Dad, or with a
“teacher,” a parody of several songs by the Wonder Girls.
This is the case with the four-year-old who performs several dances on
TV, before the Wonder Girls themselves join her on stage, imitating and
dancing with her.10 This is undoubtedly a case of parody, intended to enter-
tain the TV audience: a satirical pastiche which both quotes the gestures
and mimicking of the Wonder Girls and offers a caricature of certain poses,
a gait, gazes and overly feminine “winks.” This imitation goes hand in hand
with a sexualization, which certainly goes over the little girl’s head, as she
merely attempts to reproduce the adults’ poses. This parodical stylization
does indeed capture several tics of the Girls’ moves and attitudes. But a
kind of forced and embarrassed laughter, and a certain unease, is produced
when the child parodies the Wonder Girls’ very sexual poses. Given her age,
it is difficult to find her sexualized behavior merely cute. Parody consists in
exaggerating the tricks and tics of seduction. What makes for (my) unease
is the way she performs like a kind of circus dog, obviously only imitating
signs taught to her by adults, for the amusement of the audience, encour-
aging the child’s natural tendency for ham acting. The result is, however, a
very successful turn, performed almost unwittingly and without the child’s
knowing it. So everybody can laugh at the child’s innocence and what her
parents managed to teach her: making fun of somebody doing a parody
without knowing it, and thus letting the adults reap the rewards.
When the “real” Wonder Girls come on stage and kindly dance to their
own song, accompanying the child, we witness how they adapt to her:
they simplify, stylize, sketch, and temper their usually coquettish danc-
ing style. This is another example of parody, an attenuated, interiorized,
schematic parody, like a dancer marking out a series of moves in rehearsal.
So, somewhat ironically, the Wonder Girls do an attenuated parody of
themselves and of the little girl imitating them. One usually associates
parody with the comic, and indeed it often operates in the direction of
ridiculous exaggeration. However, one should also consider the reverse
journey: from the comical to the serious. Parody, in that case, leads to
more simplification, to the erasure of comic effects, to a “physical retrac-
tion,” towards a serious summary in place of a comical expansion. Parody
is, so to speak, the norm and the obliged course: parody is always “of”
something that precedes it. When they lip-sync, the singers have to mold
their moves to a fixed rhythmic pattern, to a duration and with an energy
which have been predetermined. Their performance is always set to some-
thing mechanical; it is therefore a parody, a subsequent comment, even if
it strives to disappear into the original recording. In a mass medium, in
an industrial cultural product as complex as a video or a lip-synched live
performance, parody concerns this stable, technological machinery, and its
task is to adapt the fixed points of orientation to the unknown and unpre-
dictable factors of the body live and onstage. The whole system of ges-
tures, all the signs of seduction, all the winks, and all the direct address to
the camera and to the spectator have been planned during the recording
and have to be embodied, performed, and reconstructed according to that
original plan. The plan, which cannot be changed, must still be brought
to life, slightly adapted to the live audience. And this can also become a
kind of parody in itself. If the parody onstage, as an adaptation to the con-
straints of recording, functions so well—and, in the sense of a live inter-
pretation that “performs,” adapts and in its way offers a pastiche of the
212 P. PAVIS
industrially produced object—it is undoubtedly because the choreography

is set up with extreme precision: the system of emotions, the address to the
spectator by the music-, movement-, and seduction-machine are perfectly
coordinated and controlled. The living system is so well mastered that it
seems to be a collective, social body, an erotic body and machine, accurate
to within a millimeter, a body that transcends the individuals, however
interesting they might be in other respects. With this collective body, it’s
“take it or leave it.” We are no longer caught in individual psychology, but
are confronted with a dangerously efficient seduction machine. Individual
desire and the desire for authenticity are mixed together and pulverized
in a kind of media machine: a mass medium and a medium for fantasies.11
What Conclusions?
We must resist one temptation: to draw conclusions too rapidly from the
universalization of parody. For this universalization alone cannot explain
the evolution of our societies; it does not miraculously reveal a readable,
relevant and indisputable tendency.
We cannot, however, avoid one question: why this promotion of, and
obsession with, parody in the media, the arts, and our lives? Why so much
attention from “masspectators” and from the creators, who seem more
attracted to the satire and parody of something than to the thing itself?
Has the departure of the referent meant that the work no longer seems
connectable to reality, but at best to a simulation of reality, with another
text or object, no longer accessed, except in its parodical form?
Parody is comfortable; it is a denial, implying that we are no longer respon-
sible for things, because they are already quoted, parodied, spared any serious
analysis. Are we to remain in a process of quoting, of intertextuality, of free
interplay with no grip on reality, of inaction? Is this parody by denial, taking
place only for the sake of recycling themes, texts, ideas? It might also be, in
the case of marginalized groups, a defence against a dominant or knowing
culture that they consider to be inaccessible—what Marie-Luise Pratt calls
parody for the “arts of the contact zone,” where “marginalized, oppressed
groups appropriate, imitate aspects of empowered cultures.”12
I have to resist the friendly pressure to draw conclusions about the
state of Korean society solely from the analysis of its media, its cultural
industry, and a short K-pop propaganda video. This taste for parody and
the recycling of texts and ideas is obviously linked to the ideology and
aesthetics of the postmodern. According to Jameson, postmodernism is a
post-capitalist ideology that resorts to pastiche as parody without purpose.
What could be the purpose of parody today, in contrast with the stylis-
tic formalism of pastiche? The example of Nobody seems to confirm the
circularity of parody, its lack of interest in being a critical art-form. One
could even describe K-pop as a pleasant way of “de-braining” through an
act of disembodiment. Thus the desiring body of the spectator is submit-
ted to the laws of economic circulation. We witness a change of para-
digm: from an old American paradigm to a new global, Korea-compatible,
Korea-manageable paradigm. In this circular economy, everything that is
consumable in any cultural context, and by all classes and all generations—
words, music, bodies, desires, fantasies—is globalized.
The hypothesis of this micro-analysis of Nobody was that any artistic
work, or any video of a child’s parodical performance, is a semiotic sys-
tem which concentrates and absorbs social values and world views. This
hypothesis appears to be confirmed by Stephen Greenblatt: “Cultural
analysis has much to learn from scrupulous formal analysis of literary texts
because those texts are not merely cultural by virtue of reference to the
world beyond themselves; they are cultural by virtue of social values and
contexts that they have themselves successfully absorbed.”13
The little girl’s parody of the big Girl’s gestures is a good example of
this absorption of cultures, often accessible as a series of imbricated paro-
dies. The “Teacher” and also, most likely, the mother, have absorbed a few
tricks and idiosyncrasies from the bodies and gestures of the Wonder Girls.
The child could then easily imitate and thus caricature them (we know the
child could never have achieved this parody on her own). The mini-public
of parents, relatives and friends seem to guide the child, whenever there is
a change of moves. The live performance is organized and structured by
the TV apparatus: the presenter, a mixture of frightening ogre and kindly
teddy bear, the Wonder Girls themselves regulating the overall perfor-
mance, and the (particularly stupid) televisual tricks. At each step, content
and context are reframed, they absorb all the details and data, and absorb
all that they represent anthropologically and sociologically. Finally, this
absorption is contained and made visible in the little girl’s performance
through the different body signals she embodies and emits. The task of
the analyst is to untangle all these threads, to separate the different layers,
to distinguish play from business, to follow the sequence of parodies, to
trace the network back to where it all came from.
Small is beautiful. Everything is nice. My child is cute, if only she could
become a star!
Also a parody of joy, of happiness, of life?14
214 P. PAVIS
Notes
1. Linda Hutcheon (2000). A Theory of Parody. The Teachings of Twentieth
Century Art Forms. Champaign and Urbana: University of Illinois Press,
p. xii.
2. Simon Dentith (2000). Parody. London: Routledge, p. 9.
3. Gérard Genette (1982). Palimpsestes : La littérature au second degré. Paris:
Seuil, p. 25.
4. Ibid., p. 67.
5. Ibid., p. 29.
6. Henri Bergson (1924). Le Rire [1ère ed., 1900]. Paris: Alcan, p. 18.
7. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BA7fdSkp8ds
8. Stephen Greenblatt (1995). « Culture », Critical Terms for Literary Study.
Ed. Frank Lentricchia and Thomas McLaughlin. Chicago: The University
of Chicago Press, p. 226.
9. Fredric Jameson (1991). Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late
Capitalism. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. “Pastiche is, like parody,
the imitation of a peculiar or unique, idiosyncratic style, the wearing of a
linguistic mask, speech in a dead language. But it is a neutral practice of
such mimicry, without any of parody’s ulterior motives, amputated of the
satiric impulse, devoid of laughter” (p. 17).
10. See the clip :http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=endscreen&v=iLd
sC4338Xs&NR=1
11. According to Bernard Stiegler, the object-imagery destroys the mental
imagery, and thus the imagination of the human being. The control of
objects-images allows us to control mental images. Towards the end of the
twentieth century, there emerged a society of control of objects-images,
and by extension, of behavior. (“Ce qui crève les yeux. Une philosophie
des images,” Dictionnaire mondial des images. (L. Gervereau, éd.),
Nouveau Monde Editions, 2010, pp. 339–344.
12. Marie-Luise Pratt (1991). “Arts of the Contact Zone,” in Profession 91.
New York.
13. S. Greenblatt, op. cit., p. 227.
14. I would like to thank Lisa Tyler Renaud for her help with the English ver-
sion of this text originally written in French and translated by myself. Many
thanks also to Mischa Twitchin for discussing the style with me.
CHAPTER 14
Flowers and Tears. On Park Eunyoung’s

Installation and Multimedia Theater
General Disorientation
Perhaps it is the same for works of art as for people: our first contact is the
one that counts, we either meet or we do not, our bonding is immediate
or never happens. This is what Marivaux, on the subject of human beings,
called “the surprising effects of sympathy.” More than any other kind of
artistic work, installation plays on this moment of first sight, from the first
movement, and the first route that we are implicitly invited, as well as inti-
mately incited, to take along the path.
On the walls of the school a pretty poster announces an exhibition, with

quotations from Mallarmé in French and Korean!
I decide to investigate: who did it? Who dared to quote on the walls of
Seoul the most abstruse of our French poets? Was it perhaps for an exhibition of
recently discovered manuscripts?
No—“les Fleurs et les Pleurs” (“Flowers and Tears”) is an installation by Park
Eunyoung, who—as I would later learn—holds a PhD from the Beaux-Arts in
Paris.
Investigating in the field, I visit the site of this installation. I spend an entire
afternoon there, quickly absorbed into this visual and poetic universe that to me
spoke of old-fashioned theater, of photography, of video, and of Butoh dance: all
of these aesthetic practices and representational approaches.
I enter the labyrinth of representations. I install myself inside the setup
proposing a new theatricality. I expose myself to its charms, its arms, its tears.
“Flowers come out in tears”, Mallarmé says: so I had been warned! Charm
and happiness is what stays with me today.

216 P. PAVIS
Entering the rectangular, rather vast (12 × 22 m) space of the Kepco

Art Center, we are initially intimidated by the projectors, the computers,
and other technical equipment on view, all of which seem to be monitor-
ing the space. Two statues of characters in medieval costume welcome us,
a strange wig in the form of a dunce’s cap on their heads.1
We enter in a half-light. Where are we going? Visitors might tend to
begin their explorations on the left-hand side and with the film projec-
tions, displayed on a rather large screen that welcomes us and immediately
captures our attention. Then, as if in a museum, we continue on our way,
going from left to right, like reading, following the wall, spurred on by a
series of paintings framed by illuminated outlines.
We could, however, just as well go from one wall to another without fol-
lowing the path marked out by the paintings on the wall. Everyone chooses
a personal dramaturgy, decides how to order the sequences; thus this is a
scenography that asks only to be unfurled, one that is open and does not
impose an order. A dramaturgy that becomes a scenography. A scenography
that begins to dance before our eyes. In the dramaturgical environment of the
installation, the visitor chooses the origin and the duration that they wish to
grant each ‘activity’: screen, mini-installation, model, etc. It takes a few min-
utes for the visitor to acclimatize the gaze, to pay attention to each new visual
or thematic focus, just as each universe has its own laws and its own distinctive
atmosphere: this is a strangeness that each manages in his or her own way.
FLOWERS AND TEARS. ON PARK EUNYOUNG’S INSTALLATION... 217
The same music, piano then accordion, repeats and unites these het-
erogeneous universes. Instead of giving each of these tableaux individual
music (with the risk of cacophony), the staging—as this is a staging even if
no director can be identified—chooses a global soundscape, audible every-
where and at the heart of the overall atmosphere. The musical composi-
tion (by Taca, on accordion, and Riko Goto on the piano) creates a rather
unsettling ambiance, more mysterious and disturbing than harmonious
and “atmospheric.” The music, as often in a performance, provides the
key to the whole, predisposes us to a certain kind of reception, emotion-
ally colors the universe being created. This introduction, this emotional
coloring, is perfectly executed.
Installation and Apparatus

Every installation is an apparatus in the wide sense of the word as provided
by Giorgio Agamben: “anything that has in some way the capacity to cap-
ture, orient, determine, intercept, model, control, or secure the gestures,
behaviours, opinions, or discourses of living beings.”2
Park Eunyoung’s multimedia installation is also a promenade, in the
theatrical sense of the word. It proposes that the audience follow and
discover a delineated space into which sites, scenes, and actors have been
placed, as they please and at their own pace. Every journey gives rise to
a dramaturgy. Here, we go from one place, from one frame, from one
activity, from one home to the next. There is no concrete story to be
read here, but if, by way of our almost natural habits, we were to seek a
common thread, we would surely discern a body in all its states, a filmed,
sculpted, miniaturized body, evoked in numerous ways. The visitor’s gaze
must become adapted to the figuring, the scale, and the consistency of this
becoming body.
We cannot be thankful enough that theater has left behind the “the-
ater of daddy” (with its Grotowskian conception of theater as a meet-
ing between actor and spectator), that it now rubs up against the media,
which it once feared might absorb or engulf it. For theater, as for all the
other contemporary arts, the game is not about being specific, of claim-
ing lesser or greater presence, of asserting the purity of particular arts or
genres; it is about confrontation, interaction, “remediation.” This instal-
lation, by Park Eunyoung and her co-creators, renews the theater under
construction; it adds to the traditional and ancestral complexity of this art
form, it provokes a welcome collision of fine art and audio-visual media.
218 P. PAVIS
What is an installation? An installation invites the visitor-spectator, the

viewer, to relativize, and even to challenge theatrical identity: its claim to
outline the essential, its recourse to the convolutions of a text or to the
unfathomable facets of a body, its insistence on the so-called specificity
of theater (presence, liveness, etc.). By installing itself in a given or con-
structed space, the installation assures that it is visible, visitable, repeatable
and that it also possesses its own way, or indeed its own multiple ways of
showing the human body and making it speak, of inventing a thousand
different ways of telling, of exploding the notion of theater and the frame
of the “theatrical,” or artistic representational frames in general.
In these Flowers blossoming as Tears, in this beauty that draws tears by
bringing us face to face with ourselves, assailing us, the installation calls
upon many forms of media. It would be difficult to list them for risk of
forgetting some or neglecting the new ways in which they are combined.
Indeed, Park Eunyoung does not simply call on video, on filmic montage,
on animated photography, on different types of projection; she combines
them, connects them, invents previously unseen alliances. She holds to
her line of inquiry into ways of making human forms and identities appear
from the interaction and hybridization of media and of visual arts. It is rare
to encounter an artist equally at ease employing traditional fine arts (paint-
ing, sculpture, poetry, scenography) as employing audio-visual media; it is
rarer still to find one capable of moving beyond Wagnerian or symbolist
synthesis in the arts, able rather to converge them in a syncretic vision.
Indeed, her installation is syncretic in the anthropological sense, since
she calls upon textual, musical, and visual material belonging to several
cultures (notably European—French or German), but it is also syncretic
in terms of a hybridization of art forms, media, and of different origins.
Strictly speaking, her art is more syncretic than hybrid, since it proposes a
synthesis that goes beyond the traditional rifts between the arts, and more
significantly beyond differences of class, race, and cultural identity. Her
work is also syncretic in the psychological sense employed by Piaget and
Wallon, who show that the child always perceives the whole and not the
details.
The Theater of Yesteryear

From the theater of yesteryear, with its declaiming actors, its baroque
costumes, or its classical sets in pasteboard, some figurines and sceno-
graphic models remain. The figurines—finely detailed, extraordinarily
expressive in the prime of their movements or postures—are placed and

staged within an Italian box stage, closed on three sides. Their elegant
words (that we think we hear), their highly studied postures, and their
sense of distance all work wonders in summoning the European stage of
yesteryear as described by Mallarmé, who considered the chandeliers the
most important aspect of theater! But this does not preclude a few glances
toward the multicolored world of the musical.
The subtle action of Kim, Chul hee’s lighting imposes a rhythm on
the imaginary play, revealing unexpected facets of the characters. There
is great subtlety, and much tenderness, in this evocation of the enchant-
ing and aristocratic world of an eighteenth-century European theater.
Each figure seems to have recorded and refined a movement temporarily
reduced to a physical attitude, while still creating the illusion of move-
ment and of life on stage. The great care taken with the use of space (one
of the principal skills of any director), the accuracy of the proportions,
distances, and physical attitudes produces the illusion of an autonomous
performance within the overall stage apparatus.
Thanks to costumes by Yang Jaeyoung (YEDO)—who creates the out-
fits for the filmed dancers as well as the medieval statues, the figurines
in the scenographic model, and the characters in the animated films—
the installation acquires a cultural and historical identity. These costumes
are very precise, as if prepared for a theatrical staging in period costume.
They perfectly capture the spirit of French eighteenth-century aristocratic
festivities, while also transcending this with an exquisite aestheticization
and accomplished refinement. We find here the atmosphere of European
court performances and the fêtes galantes of Watteau: the same finesse and
swiftness of silhouettes, robes, implied movement, and conversation we
imagine must be quite witty. This elegance—which was already present in
the doll-like woman—is sometimes accompanied by its opposite (the two
poles of life): the representation of death. Figurines have death’s-heads,
skulls—pictorial reminders of the vanity of existence. Beauty and refine-
ment, grace and eroticism are here never far from their antitheses: this is a
contrasting, inverted, relative, and ambivalent world that obliges us never
to abandon the quest, never to rest on the surface of things, and never to
settle for appearances.
Sometimes a group seems to have detached itself from the rest of the
stage: two grotesque comedic types improvise a fight, flowers in hand. The
fall, the mouth from which a cry might escape, limbs that come to touch
the ground—all of these are impressively sketched in this vignette. As in
220 P. PAVIS
Decroux’s mime, we only believe in the movement and the figure if the
body has been drawn up according to the laws of a body in action, with
physical attitudes codified. The moment we shift around a little bit in rela-
tion to the figurines, the scene moves and takes life.
Another tableau presents a kind of animated film, a kind of object the-
ater whose organization in the space of the stage and then on the cin-
ematographic level constitutes a subtle mise en scène, suggesting conflicts,
exchanges, a whole, joyous dramaturgy that is a match for the plot of
classical dramatic theater.
The Double Play of the Image

Not all the tableaux are so joyous and cheerful, however. As with the
film of the doll-like woman (the dancer is Kim, Mamajung): the frontal
camera of Yoo, Singung and Seo, Yoona films a woman dancing like a dis-
located rag doll with an inexpressive face. Montage then isolates different
poses, giving the impression of a burst of photographs taken at different
moments and then played back in slow motion. Void of expression, the
doll comes to life little by little, facing the camera all along. These images
would seem whimsical and erotic if they were not so troubling, disturbing,
even, with the realization that the woman’s face is puffed-up, covered in
bruises and wounds: it is the face of a battered wife. The observer becomes
a voyeur, doubly guilty in the face of this beauty and pain.
The alternating of erotic photograms and realistic images of violence
easily troubles the spectator, making him guilty, and even accusing him.
His fascination becomes terror. The framing isolates such and such a detail
erotically, lights the skin in a sensual fashion, offers the body to be seen
from an unusual angle, as if the camera’s gaze, the viewing angle, and the
framing betrayed the desire for an almost physical exploration of corporal-
ity. But this exploration runs a risk: it quickly leads to an assault on the
woman’s body. The spectator-voyeur is ready to transform beauty into
suffering for his own pleasure.
Through this jerky montage of photograms, the spectator will readily
perceive the apparatus of the installation and will evaluate the enunciation
of the bodies, their organization, the way in which we perceive and situate
them, and how we situate ourselves in the personal and social space.
The body of this doll stirs up many things; she seems to be dancing “for
us”: she encourages us to approach with increasing curiosity and desire.
But her movement is constantly halted, arrested, frozen: it puts on display,
almost covertly, the flip side of the woman-as-object: the abused woman.
These brief stops of a few fractions of a second are sufficient to unsettle our
gaze. The identification of the spectator-voyeur becomes almost personal;
it is no longer lost in the erotic fiction or the narrative flow. Everybody
faces up to their responsibilities: to stop these mechanical movements,
to prevent this drift towards violence. But nothing helps: the film keeps
starting again.
This promenade through the installation necessitates that the visitor
stop before very different material and media. It is not entirely random,
but proceeds according to a logic begging to be discovered. It does not,
however, become a metatheoretical or abstract performance on the repre-
sentation of the human body in all its states and in all the arts. It remains
a playful walk, a series of variations that are lively and subtle, intuitive and
rapid (even meteoric, if you will!) on the art of presenting a human action,
through several media and confronting all of them, comparing the capac-
ity of each to represent and illuminate the body. Each medium, each art
form, each type of movement or dance has a particular faculty and method
for sounding out the human body and all that it sets into motion.
In the diagonally opposite corner of this rectangular room, another
universe has been installed. A studied disorder reigns, which introduces
us to, and then absorbs us into, the video image. This story, filmed and
danced underground, is always in view, and contrasts with the real objects
and the mass of red fabric, vibrant in its materiality and coloring.
Thus the Butoh dancer (Seo, Seung-A), filmed in a narrow corridor,
underground, seems to emerge from the bowels of the earth, the fires of
hell, or the depths of the sea. She struggles to get out, to express and exte-
riorize the simplest visible emotion. She moves forward, coming towards
us without ever reaching us, outside the image, into our space or into the
vibrant red fabric that contrasts with the pallid and blue-hued atmosphere
of the video image. As in a dream, where the dreamer keeps running and
never gets anywhere.
The camera, like the eye, only captures almost imperceptible move-
ments, like micro-movements bubbling up to pierce the surface of the
body. The body of the Butoh dancer no longer knows how to move in
space and time; it is a landscape into which a desire to move sometimes
emerges. The fluidity of video (“vide-et-eau”—“emptiness-and-water”, as
Park Eunyoung puts it) allows the artist to approach with care this intangi-
ble liquid body. The jerky image of the Western battered doll-like woman
contrasts with the blue-hued video of the Japanese or Korean Butoh dance.
222 P. PAVIS
What emerges is a female body, violent towards itself, but featureless and
emotionless on the outside. The installation does not choose between the
jump-cut and the dissolve, staccato and legato, as if to suggest the univer-
sality of violence in whatever form it is expressed.
Painting or Calligraphy?
In contrast to these moving and suffering female bodies, a man, immobile,
or almost immobile, meditating like a Buddhist monk, in a pictorial space
lit from within by candles, like a painting by Le Nain, hesitates before
putting writing brush to paper. He seems transfixed, petrified, frozen just
before taking action: something is holding him back, but what exactly? Is
he too much of a Western painter to become an Eastern calligrapher? Is he
floating, like a poet in the spirit of Mallarmé, between project and action,
idea and form, meaning and sound? Or is this the emblematic figure of the
artist who no longer dares depict anything, who refuses to be embodied in
the creative act. “Everthing in the world”—Mallarmé thought—“exists to
end up in a book … the hym … of relations between everything.” But this
book, today, no longer gets written, can no longer write itself. Perhaps it
would need to take the form of bodies in space, like a “hymn of relations
between everything”?
This gallery of portraits conceived and arranged by Park Eunyoung
with her team (another collective body, invisible yet omnipresent) pro-
vides in any case a magnificent sketch of these “relations between every-
thing,” and particularly between bodies. In the space of a few meters and
a few minutes, we have crossed paths with Park and her co-creators, expe-
rienced the unexpected pleasure of encounters, an entire universe that was
seemingly the fruit of our imagination and of chance. We have played the
game, we have followed the quest for our bodies and for the body of the
other, and yet we knew on entering that “a throw of the dice will never
abolish chance” (Mallarmé).
A theater installed itself within us, over a few minutes but perhaps also
lastingly. We managed to cross different stages, to imagine the script and
the installation as it was suggested to us. We attempted to open the the-
ater onto a stage, a much vaster stage within. But, at the end of this jour-
ney, and before leaving this subtly engineered place, we did sense that the
return to reality might be painful. But seeing the art of the theater and
of all its multimedia variations install itself within us, feeling its gradual
progress was surely a risk worth running?
Notes
1. All the photos are by An Chun Ho. The author would like warmly to thank
the photographer. To view all photographs, please see the French version of
this chapter in Critical Stages, December 2012: Issue No. 7 (criticalstages.
org).
2. ‘What is an Apparatus’ in What is an Apparatus? and Other Essays, Stanford:
Stanford University Press, 2009, p. 14.
CHAPTER 15
On Falling
A FALL
Leaving home, dormitory, certainty,
The fall
After the ascent
Is programmed.
Change of orientation
Change of air
Plummeting
Abyss.
After all my visits to theaters, concert halls, exhibitions, and installations, I am

sometimes tempted to draw conclusions about Korean culture and identity. I
struggle nevertheless to stick to my position as observer-participant, more of an
amazed observer than an active participant.
I don’t need to run around like my students, my colleagues, or all the
residents of Seoul. Here, time offers itself to me, I don’t need to run after it.
In my case, a fall would be unexpected, personal, almost voluntary. But the fall
that lies in wait for Koreans every day, it threatens the whole nation. Perhaps
this is merely an irrational fear of failure, a deadline to be kept or a decline to be
avoided, but in any case, a fall awaits them. For me, this is a metaphor, for them,
an obsession. Who, in a society of control and good manners, would not fear
that after the fall they might no longer measure up?
I work on different kinds of fall. I consider what would be my worst failure. For
me, failure would be not having understood how Korean artists see their work,

226 P. PAVIS
I am back in Korea. I am teaching at the Korea National University of

the Arts. Every morning, between 6:00 and 8:00, I go there on foot.
On the way, depending on the hour, I always bump into the same people
or groups of people. After a few months, we recognize and greet each
other. Every morning I take the same photo: three plastic cubes in front
of my apartment, in a different configuration each time. Then I perform
the same ritual—an action which can be broken down into five different
points: impulse, decision, critical point, outcome, recovery.1, 2
Impulse
For a long time, I avoided the dormitory where I once lived. Then I
decided to force myself to walk past this massive building, the site of a bad
fall for me. This fall is still in my body, since I fell headlong, and smashed
my ribs along with my dignity: heartbreaking.
how the audience communicates with their works of art. It would be to give up
the search for what gives life to the works and the artists; it would be to give
up and drop the subject. It would also be to stick to absolute relativism in the
evaluation of the works, to abandon all aesthetic, cultural, ethical, and cognitive
criteria, on the grounds of cultural difference. But failure would also be the
cultural and aesthetic flâneur, having returned home, adopting an overarching
and universal perspective, giving lessons, transformed into a universal theorist of
the intercultural, perhaps. It would be, more than falling from rank and lowering
my standards, letting myself down.
ON FALLING 227
228 P. PAVIS
So, I resolved to get to my office, No. 406 on the fourth floor, not by
taking the elevator anymore, but by walking up the exterior stairs that
lead to the fourth floor over the theater. The fourth floor, in the elevator,
is marked with the letter “F” for floor, so as to avoid the word for “4”
(tsa), which means “death” in Chinese. In Korean hospitals, there is never
a fourth floor. And here, too, in this high temple of art and its artists, one
avoids making any allusion to death. During my first year here, there were
four suicides in this elite school that welcomes the best students in each
of the art disciplines. I heard about these only by chance; I would never
have suspected it because the atmosphere of the school is so cheerful and
the premises are so safe and hospitable. But now, every time I climb the
stairs towards the high walkway that connects the roof of the theater and
the building with the offices, I am afraid to come across a body lying in
front of me. I know that the students, too, have been traumatized by these
suicides: in the middle of winter, and outdoors, they organized a very
moving ceremony in memory of their peers. Their absorption, reverence
and sorrow were palpable. They might have felt, like me, in some corner
of their young bodies, a sagging, a collapse, a depression, a pressure of the
ribs on the heart, slowing down their dynamism. A few weeks later, on the
façade of the theater, a huge poster appears with two little figures: one is
running and the other falling.
ON FALLING 229
I can’t help seeing in this the visual metaphor for what Korean society
expects from everyone: to run faster and faster, and never to fall along the
way. As if this society, always on the move, can never stop without imme-
diately collapsing.
Koreans seem to have internalized the real and frequent collapse of
structures—for instance, the Sampoong Department Store in 1995, or
the bridge over the Han River in 1994. An apartment building can be
erected here within a few hurried weeks, without a sound foundation. In
my working-class neighborhood, I have seen several such buildings shoot
up in a matter of weeks. I am always shaking when I approach a 30-storey
apartment building standing on a very shallow base. No wonder, then,
that the citizens of Korea have a vague fear of collapse. They are haunted
by the fall of a building or by their own falling, either physically or inside
themselves.
The fall of the stock exchange in 1997, and of sectors of production
in recent years, are felt as almost physical aggressions, always ending with
falling sales and thus falling people. To this type of local fall, we must add
the unconscious fear, in South Korea, of being hit by some kind of missile
from their Northern brothers, by radioactivity from their Japanese friends
in the East, or by economic expansion from their Chinese neighbors to
the West.
Decision Taking refuge in my office, I wonder what could make me leave

or fall, and whether the laws of universal attraction also apply in the pri-
vate space of my thinking. That an apple falls and Newton picks it up and
takes advantage of it to invent the law of universal gravitation is all very
well, but it is more challenging to accept that we are bodies which, like
apples, never stop falling, and that our mind is also subject to this law; this
is unacceptable to an individual who thinks of him- or herself as the center
of the world. And indeed, does not everything initiate from, and return
to, this individual? But if everything falls without falling, if “everything
moves,” how then can one explain the fear of falling, explain my fear, and
their fear? And, as a recent Neo-Korean, what kind of body do I have at
my disposal to evaluate the surrounding bodies? Does my being a stranger
pose a handicap or serve as a means of revelation?
The fall is certainly not a Korean specialty. It is universal, variously

embodied and interpreted in the most diverse ways. It can be a physical
fall—a comic “pratfall” with no serious consequences—or a moral fall,
230 P. PAVIS
tragic, where the hero does not rise again, either physically or morally. I
do have the sense that the action of falling and the fall itself are p
hysical
images, a metaphor obsessing an anxious and fearful Korean society. But
how, within what structure, can we sense this feeling, this unspecific, phys-
ical, psychological, existential fear? The fact is that this fear of the fall,
this feeling of decline or of decay is not always attached to a particular
work, recognizable situation or attitude. Raymond Williams’ notion of the
“structure of feeling” comes to mind, a notion with which he tries
…to describe the continuity of experience from a particular work, through

its particular form, and then the relation of this general form to a period.
We can look at this continuity, first, in the most general way. All that is lived
and made, by a given community in a given period, is, we now commonly
believe, essentially related, although in practice, and in detail, this is not
always easy to see.3
What would be the essential relationship between all these lived and made
elements within a “given community”? And what community? A commu-
nity of the fall, of the fear of falling and declining? I am aware that there is
no direct link between the obsession with a physical fall and the fall in the
metaphorical sense of sudden disruption in the Korean social and cultural
space, a space which is in any case varied and polymorphous. Changes in
social behavior, in the conception of the body, in what can be shown or
not, cannot be directly and immediately transposed to the arts of the body
(dance, theater, performance, pop music or K-pop). Only in the long run
will culture and art absorb and illuminate these changes.
Let us begin, for the moment, with a few observations on the
bodies, as treated and named by the Koreans themselves. How do
these bodies behave in the public sphere? Is it fatigue first and fore-
most that makes bodies fall to the side, or heads involuntarily bow?
Subway carriages are the only places in Seoul where people don’t run
and where bodies are entitled to rest. When heads are not absorbed
in listening to cell-phones or watching the various different screens,
they are unable to resist sinking.
ON FALLING 231
The city sometimes looks after the weakest. They often have their own
elevator. In Seoul Station, at the entrance to the express subway to the
airport, there are, near the huge escalators, two lifts, one of them reserved,
according to a sign in Korean and English “only for the weak”.
232 P. PAVIS
In the very chic LG Art Center, in Gangnam, a “Man” sign, positioned

very high overhead, shows the way to the toilet, up in the sky.
In the corridors of the subway, the order is given: “Do not run.” On
display monitors, a video keeps warning us about the dangers of falling
in all kinds of circumstances; it also tells us the right way to move rapidly
without any risk.
The fall is obviously more serious when it is moral. Christianity, particu-
larly Protestantism, is the primary religion in the country. Especially when
combined with Confucianism, protestant ethics stress individual guilt and
increase the possible causes of a fall. Failure is when the individual can no
longer hold on, is out of step with his family or professional group, or
does not participate in certain rites of passage, such as getting drunk with
ON FALLING 233
colleagues. Tellingly, theater directors insist less on the faithfulness of the

artists to the play produced than on the nocturnal bonding of the group
by the magical powers of soju. In this mad race for success or simply for
survival, however, the group no longer protects the individual. And this
is because, be it at school, at university or in business, the individual is
always meant to be more successful than other colleagues. Everything has
become a matter of ranking. Careers are decided according to the rankings
of schools, then of universities, and ultimately according to the decisions
of alumni of all these institutions, who decide the fate of applicants for
any position. Faced with the schizophrenia of all these groups of lonely
people, individuals (at least 95 %) are bound to fail, and end up stranded
on an isolated shore.
It remains to be seen how contemporary works that deal with falling
or failure address these various interconnected structures. While, from
the comfort of my office, I think about my own fall and failure, many
performances I have recently seen in Seoul come back to me: dance, the-
ater, pansori, installation. So many magnificent falls performed—how can
one call them failures, even if falling and failure are a recurrent theme?
The artistic work is the “structure of feeling” which can best represent
and sublimate falls and failures. These artistic experiences are an answer,
always specific, to the fear of falling and to the stifling hierarchy that stands
between people.
Critical Point This “structure of feeling” focusing on falling and failure

can be found in many recent dramatic works. This is not, however, a case
of classical Western dramaturgy where the hero falls as a result of his ideas
or actions then to be born again in a renewed structure, or succumbs
willingly to a tragic conclusion. For instance, in Dolnal, a play by Kim
Myung-Wha, the tyrannical, patriarchal and desperate husband commits
suicide, preferring to throw himself onto the knife held by his wife than
to change his attitudes and to accept the new realities of family and sexual
relationships. In Choi Zin-A’s play, Unexpected, a young Korean woman,
traveling to Vietnam, undergoes numerous cultural and personal trials.
There is no catastrophe involved, no fall, but a maturation of feelings, a
slow transformation of this young Korean woman, who discovers other
ways of living and of loving. In lieu of a violent confrontation, of a tan-
gible result, we witness an insidious undermining process: all the obstacles
between people fall one after the other, until her return to Korea, where
the fallen masks are put back on, but for how long? Baeck Harion’s play,
The Biography of Jeon Myung Chool, tells the life story of a builder who is
234 P. PAVIS
determined to succeed by all means and who ends up having a deadly fall:
a clear metaphor for Korea, a country building itself with fear of neither
God nor man, and which will ultimately fall.
The fall, however, is not always so easy to interpret, it often con-

tains a certain ambiguity as to its metaphorical and political significance.
Thus, for example, Lee Jaram’s adaptation and interpretation of Brecht’s
Mother Courage into a modernized pansori follows the story of the origi-
nal, but does not clearly establish the responsibility of Mother Courage
who remains blind to the political causes of war and the disasters of war,
despite the death of her three children. When her daughter Kathrin is shot
dead by the soldiers, Mother Courage also falls, and remains prostrate on
the ground. When she gets up, she not only shows no sign of political
understanding, like Courage in Brecht’s play, but she also maintains a very
humanistic, almost religious discourse about her intentions:
I want to live as a decent human being. I will now quit feeding myself from
the bread picked up from dead bodies. I was born a human being and I
should live like a human being. … Although I feel like dying, I should live
because I am alive. I should preserve this precious life granted to me.”4
Lee Jaram’s Courage seems decided, unlike Brecht’s figure, no longer to

profit from war, but she draws no political conclusion from her decision;
she rejects suicide for religious reasons. Her attitude remains in the tradi-
tion of accepting suffering as an unavoidable fate, useful to the commu-
nity. Thus, her fall brings her back to a heroic pose, compatible with the
Korean spirit of sacrifice.
ON FALLING 235
These examples borrowed from theater confirm the importance of dra-

maturgy in developing a notion of rising action, conflict, resolution—and
fall. Dramaturgy can be perceived as a conflict between ascending and
descending, rising and falling, tension and relaxation. If one wants to char-
acterize a type of dramaturgy, it is enough to examine how it handles
physically the figure of falling: as open conflict in the final confrontation in
Dolnal; as dissolution and decentering in Unexpected; as a stage metaphor
for a political accident in Biography; as a cathartic, but passive prostration
in Mother Courage.
Outcome As we can see, the fall does not always end in a recovery. Not
all artists find the right response to a fall caused by a fierce competition.
The abyss of sacrifice maintains the force of its attraction. The Christian
body keeps mortifying itself. It escapes verticality or the abyss with difficulty.
Contemporary Korean dance finds itself very isolated in its struggle to over-
come a vertical modernism, to move towards a horizontal postmodernism
where the body no longer falls from high up, but spreads itself into bound-
less horizontal space. In Korea, too, we have moved, at least in dance, from
a modern, vertical quest for the sublime, for the ascent and for the fall, to a
postmodern installation in a space no longer afraid of falls, as if gravity oper-
236 P. PAVIS
ated in all directions. A fact which, as Ric Alsopp and Emilyn Clayn rightly
remark, gives to the action of falling a very different dimension: “The West’s
post-war fall from the heights of modernity to the horizontal planes of post-
modernity, suggests that acts of falling now take on different metaphoric
functions and enter our consciousness in new ways.”5
Generally speaking, in social life and in art, in particular in an art of

expression or of mass, the “structure of feeling” remains vertical, con-
nected with the clear expression of emotions, subjected to an irremedi-
able fall. Raymond Williams mainly applied this “structure of feeling” to
modernism, to “Drama from Ibsen to Brecht.” In the following, so-called
“postmodern” period, the notion of apparatus (dispositif) appears more
appropriate for works of art which no longer try to reach the heights of
the sublime, but are content with questioning hierarchies and opening
closed structures.
In the case of postdramatic theater and postmodern dance, we have
to imagine an apparatus which projects the vertical axis on the horizontal
axis, which organizes all elements on a ground level, sets up the objects
differently, according to their permutability and not to their hierarchy on
the vertical axis. On the other hand, horizontality allows for displacement
in the Freudian sense of Verschiebung. Such displacements may surprise
us, as they reorganize the relationships and the exchanges between visible
and hidden elements. The idea is thus to rearrange things, so as to have
them at our disposal in different ways, as if gravity (or gravitation) were
no longer the authoritarian, hierarchical, necessary order. This means dis-
placing reality within the apparatus, while moving ourselves differently, no
longer taking the vertical frozen relationships into account. People and
things fall. Granted! But they no longer fall apart, because the choreog-
rapher and the thinker have planned their fall and their trajectory; they
ON FALLING 237
have decided on their landing place. Choreographers know this very well:
they transform a fall into a movement, gravitation into gravity: “Every
movement is a differed fall and depending how we differ this fall, different
aesthetics of gesture is born.”6 This aesthetic oscillates between “structure
of feeling” and apparatus of sensation. The distinction is not specific to
Korea, but it applies particularly to the country’s cultural productions.
Two examples come immediately to my mind—or should I say, to
my body: two particular cases of this aesthetic oscillation between struc-
ture and apparatus. The first example, Song for You, choreographed and
danced by Hong Sehee, is a typical example of a “structure of feeling”: the
dancer imitates a bird trying to take flight; the second example, Memory,
a performance by Nam Jeong-Ho, shows an elderly woman, dressed as
a cleaning lady, who gradually, progressively moves and dances. Song for
You offers an anti-fall, an age-old desire to fly, and to lift off, escaping
gravity. Movements created by the arms and back suggest such an escape.
This happens not so much by mimetism as by a system of contraction and
release, to use Martha Graham’s terms. Release followed by tension gives
an impression of rising. We are still in a vertical world, denying and chal-
lenging the act of falling.
238 P. PAVIS
ON FALLING 239
By contrast, in her performance Memory, Nam Jeong-Ho transforms a

long and narrow room in the old Seoul train station into an apparatus for
a demonstration, a large empty space, where the question of the passing of
time is performed and discussed. Inside this apparatus, different fragments
of reality are brought together: huge windows, the empty space of a small
carpet, old-fashioned clothes, allusions to different periods, gestures typi-
cal of different professions; all these elements together constitute a net-
work of references to economy, society, old age. Their installation in one
location, in this apparatus, facilitates their encounter. We are confronted
with a “dispositif pulsionnel” (Lyotard), an “apparatus of drives,” where,
by a mere association of ideas, our fears, our desire, our representations
of decline and decay, of aging, and of the means to master them through
art, circulate freely.
According to Doris Humphrey, the fall comes first, but it is immedi-
ately followed by the recovery. One accepts and encourages the fall (or
the decline) only in order to stress the recovery, the amortization (shock-
absorption) of movement. For Humphrey, any movement is subject to
gravity. “Movement is situated on a bow, stretched between two deaths.”
These two deaths are the vertical balance of the upright body and the
horizontal balance of the body lying down. This is exactly what happens
in this pulsation of actions embodied and shown by Nam Jeong-Ho: her
choreography—both how the body is held and how the performance is
composed—oscillates between these two “deaths.” The fall ends with a
recovery, which is more important than the fall, or at least relativizes it.
240 P. PAVIS
ON FALLING 241
Recovery This phase of recovery corresponds, in the theory of the five

points, to the amortizing point (“cushioning”), the final phase of move-
ment, just before the relaunching and the departure of a new movement.
It is what ends the fall, guides the action to its conclusion, recovery from a
disease or a moment of imbalance. Thus, order reigns once more.
All the Korean artists gathered here could certainly confirm that the amor-
tizing of a fall could take many shapes: obvious in contemporary dance,
which usually experiences and then overcomes the fall; serious in any play
dealing with the risks of falling; politically dubious, when Lee Jaram’s
Mother Courage disappears into the horizon, headed for a paradise of
heroic and courageous mothers, following a moralistic, and very Korean,
ideology that an individual should never give up, just try harder. This is
a typical attitude in Korea and one that can be heard in a whole range of
edifying, pedagogical and professional discourses, and also be read on the
walls of public buildings, and even in the subway.
242 P. PAVIS
ON FALLING 243
In fact, the Western world, in the areas of religion, sports, or circus, is

not easily outdone when it comes to heroic statements of this kind. The
French funambulist Philippe Petit, for instance, sees a failure or a fall as a
reprehensible lack of preparation and of pride: “The fall on the cable, the
accident up there, the failed exercise, tripping, all this comes from an exu-
berant self-confidence … It is a mistake to start without hope, to throw
oneself in a figure which one is certain to miss.”7 In spite of all these heroic
or conformist discourses, we note in most Korean artists the emergence
of a new “structure of feeling,” often based on an apparatus of drives
and on political convictions. These artists give a concrete response to the
painful contradictions of their time by creating their own way of rising/
falling/recovering/counterattacking. They all strive to amortize the fall,
while delivering their own message: a delivery and a deliverance. Whatever
their individual response to the fall may be, they express it through this
“structure of feeling.” Sometimes poetry and theater even challenge the
established order: they praise disorder and decay, like the fallen leaves,
which, as the poet says, are picked up by the shovelful, pointless, and
which, as another poet in the subway says, there is no point in raking up,
controlling, or hiding.
What do all these artists here gathered have in common? They want
to stay on their feet, or to get up, but not in order to fight their way
back or to make progress, to get better, to come closer to transcendence.
The fallen angel, no thank you! They rather ask the right questions in
terms of social consciousness. The fall is accepted; it questions the dif-
ference between high and low, between hierarchies and the Confucian
and Christian ideologies of effort. With the exception of Lee Jaram, who
might still be too caught in the classical tradition of pansori, artists no lon-
ger think in terms of fall, decay, low morale, sinking securities, stocks and
shares. All have come back to earth, all work on the ground, all calculate
and accept moments of weakness, of possible fall, of anti-climax, before
rise and recovery, somewhat like the old lady with the little dog who sits
on the edge of the pavement to rest for a while.
As for me, all these artistic works console me, reassure me, reconcile me
with myself. They show me that a fall is not always definitive or negative,
that one can begin to get back on one’s feet again. Now I accept being a
little ridiculous, and laugh about it; I feel like Bergson’s man and passer-
by: “A man, who was running on the street, stumbles and falls: passers-by
laugh.” I no longer think about what could happen to me, with this snow
244 P. PAVIS
that begins to fall, just after the autumn, the fall, ended. I welcome the fall:
“The fall is the only means by which we can fly. Only he who has fallen can
know what fright is, and then the pleasure of lifting off.”8
Every night after midnight, after the shows, I leave office No. 406 with
a feeling of appeasement brought by the artists and students. I slowly walk
down the slope; I no longer think about the fall, nothing frightens me
anymore. I can breathe better. I let myself glide towards the opening in
the trees turning yellow at the end of the stairs. I walk past the dormitory,
I have lost all my certainties, I am going home.
SNOW
It could be slippery
We could fall
We could love each other
It would be enough
To fall
In love
Notes
1. “We could thus distinguish five dramatic points of any action, which is
defined by a beginning and an end: impulse, point of decision, critical point,
outcome, recovery.” Bernard Guittet, Christophe Bara. L’Art de l’acteur
dans la tragédie classique. Bouffonneries, no. 35, p. 59.
2. A slightly different version of this text appeared in Performance Research,
n°18-3, 2013.
3. Raymond Williams. Drama from Ibsen to Brecht. Penguin, 1973, p. 9.
4. Text by Lee Jaram. English translation by Lee In-Soo.
5. Ric Alsopp and Emilyn Clayn. Introduction to Performance Research, vol.
18, n° 4.
6. Laurence Louppe. Poétique de la danse contemporaine. Bruxelles, Contre-
Danse, 1997, p. 97.
7. Traité du funambulisme. Actes Sud, 1997, p. 123.
8. Der Fall Franza, novel by Ingeborg Bachmann.
PART 5
Epilogue
CHAPTER 16
Can a Foreigner Watch the Performance

of Others?
Which is worse: to remain a foreign spectator forever, or to turn back into a

strange professor? As I left Korea, in December 2012, I knew that I would leave
behind a strange freedom, that of a “invited professor,” invited to do whatever he
likes, to see whatever he likes, to write whatever takes his fancy. This freedom, of
course, was provisional; it was also limited and illusory, as I knew that the life, the
culture, the theater, the university that I had barely begun to discover, and which
I was preparing to get to know over the course of the years to come, would no
longer exist, and that they were disappearing even as I thought back to them.
I nevertheless did not fear that my impressions would irreversibly fade away,
as I had already spoken, deposited, and interpreted them. It had therefore
seemed to me that, upon returning (or, rather, upon leaving) I would go back to
my notes and my articles, to gather evidence in order to see a case, a thesis, an
impression take shape. The naïveté of the explorer!
One always shudders at the moment of saying goodbye. And yet it has to be:
if the status of foreigner is permanent, the status of invited guest is temporary.
But we can’t leave like this, without a last word. It was in Ottawa that I spoke my
last word, in the other country where I almost settled 40 years ago.
In Canada, a country of immigration and of exile, I wanted to share with a
North American audience one last time my experience as a foreign spectator in
Korea. I read this last text in French. To my surprise, the audience’s questions
were less concerned with my theories than with the arts in Korea. Deep down,
I was rather pleased: once I could manage to transmit the desire to go and see
for oneself these works and this country, I felt it was quits; once I felt I had shed
some light onto these cultural and performative events in terms of dramaturgy,
staging, and cultural performance I would feel satisfied. I would thus have fulfilled
my contract to the best of my ability: showing goodwill, the best possible will.

248 P. PAVIS
Questions
For two years, in 2011 and 2012, I was a foreign spectator in Korea. Since
my return to France, I have not stopped asking myself questions about the
gaze we place upon cultural and artistic productions that are foreign to us.
But can one watch another’s performance, when one does not know their
language, their culture, their mores, or their behavioral codes?
How can a foreign culture be approached? Is it enough to approach it
solely through its artistic outputs? Culture is made up of plenty of other
systems of meaning-making: everyday practices, techniques of the body,
mentalities cast by history and reinforced by upbringing.
How can one know a foreign country? We might think that one must
know the customs, the history, the culture, but first and foremost the
language. But who among us has not shared Roland Barthes’ dream, “to
know a foreign (alien) language and yet not to understand it.”1 Thus, I
only recognize a few words of Korean, but the sounds, the intonations,
and the physicality of the language seem familiar to me, as does its particu-
larly pronounced affectivity.
What is it then to feel foreign? When is one a foreigner? From what
point? I was foreign in Ontario from 1973 to 1976, when I lived in
Kingston and taught French at the Royal Military College of Canada.
In what way? The English language? Obviously! The English Canadian
mentality seemed familiar to me, but was it really? The Québécois men-
tality was strangely familiar to me, and even more familiarly strange. In
those days, they sometimes called us the “damned French” (“maudits
Français”). I only realized the meaning of this term upon returning to
France, after several years abroad.
And, in Korea, did I feel foreign? Yes, and no. Am I foreign in Paris? No
and yes. I have never been so linked to Europe as in Korea, not because
of anything I did there, but because of the gaze and categories of thought
applied to me by others. All of a sudden, I had become a European for-
eigner: a very strange revelation!
So what were my points of view and my role when I was there? To be
a stowaway, a go-between, a smuggler perhaps, a traitor probably: he who
introduces the foreigner to his home and his home to the foreigner, he
who reveals everyone’s secrets. Writing about some of the country’s per-
formances, a few artistic productions, I attempt to return a part of what
I took—but within certain limits: I cannot give everything back, nor say
everything, and especially since, foreigner or not, there is much I cannot
CAN A FOREIGNER WATCH THE PERFORMANCE OF OTHERS? 249
grasp, or can grasp only wrongly. If I am to be honest and to get through

this, I will need fiction.
The Foreign: That Which Changes our Identity

What is my professional identity? A theater specialist, at worst classified as
an “intercultural semiologist” and at best as a “theorist of practice.” This
is both a gift and a curse: my great gift since, through accepted profes-
sional conditioning, I am authorized to analyze any kinds of productions,
shows, or performances that I do not find inaccessible; my great curse
because I am not sufficiently immersed in Korean society and culture to
pass any aesthetic or cultural, social or ideological judgment.
Even when I would forget that I was there a perfect stranger, people
took on the task of reminding me of the fact. They would often ask what
had attracted me to them. Not knowing what to say, I would reply: the
beauty of the women.
I was, and I am, always ready to change my role, my mind, my national-
ity, my address, my bank account, but not my gender, nor my profession,
nor my language, except temporarily and in order to “communicate.”2
And yet, I know it well, my only relatively stable identity, the professional
one, would soon become fossilized if I did not change perspective.
So where does this feeling of foreignness come from? What if it resides
in one’s nature, in people’s mentalities? What if the intercultural was just
a matter of character? That which, in Korea, ought, “normally,” be for-
eign to me is not: peoples’ affectivity, their strong emotiveness despite
the barrier of reserve, the nuance of their affect—all this seems familiar.
Where does that come from? I wouldn’t know, even if this is obviously
what made me want to discover the country. I sensed their resonances just
as well, if not better, than I do those of my French compatriots. Seeing
Korean dance and theater almost every single day, things that I could not
understand in terms of language or culture, I set about questioning my
expectations, my certainties, and perhaps also my taste for the exotic. But,
at its core, was this really exoticism and voyeurism on my part? Was it not
instead the desire to observe the foreign without attempting to tame it, to
be a flâneur (Walter Benjamin)? The taste for the unknown, or more pre-
cisely for the “as-yet unknown.” I felt neither voyeurism nor guilt at open-
ing my eyes in this beautiful country. In Seoul more than elsewhere, I had
the impression that opposing the foreign and the familiar no longer makes
sense. For we have taken on and learned much from others, and much has
250 P. PAVIS
become shared. Perhaps not so much through the effects of universalist

humanism as by way of globalization’s inevitable march. It has become
difficult to use the language of intercultural exchange, of multicultural
society, and of cosmopolitanism in its classical or postmodern varieties.
In the shift from cosmopolitanism to interculturalism or multicultural-
ism has anything really been gained? It was claimed that cultural blending
or exchange was possible: but this was a bit naïve. The aesthetic and eth-
nological category of artistic interculturalism has been recast as a politi-
cal category, the category of the multicultural: this happened too fast.
I would have preferred, like Luba Jurgenson, to stick to good old cos-
mopolitanism: “There was (before the borders of the East were thrown
open in the 1990s) more tolerance for a certain kind of cosmopolitanism –
you could be complex and nobody you encountered would seek to assign
you an identity. Today, there is an identitarian twitch, everybody wants
to give you a label. The multiculturalism that replaced cosmopolitanism
gladly accepts the other, provided the other defines who the other is.”3
But globalization precisely makes it difficult to define what one is, and
one might not necessarily want to state one’s identity, to remember all
one’s passwords, to confirm one’s ethnic belonging, to declare one’s faith
or religion, or to admit, for example, that one only is a white heterosexual
atheist man. One would rather be associated with the cosmopolitanism of
Voltaire. But is this still possible, and is it lawful?
My only ambition in Korea was to attend a few shows, to do micro-
analyses, to understand the aesthetic and political approach of a few
Korean artists. In order to do that, I needed to view them from my own
point of view, while committing to a political consideration of exchange
and of globalization. Was that a good enough way to talk about such rich,
diverse, and unexpected works? How should I see them and what kind of
spectator had I become?
A Spectator Who Doesn’t Have to Watch Out?

Of course, it is not about the spectator, nor indeed the non-spectator: there
are many spectators and there is always something to watch. Watching the
economic performance of this high-performance Korea, this Performing
Korea, I had imagined I might be able to swap its economic performance
and technological feats for something more fragile and playful, a Korea of
acting, theater, and stage performance. But did these metaphors of play,
performance, and performativity really apply to my object of study and to
my attitude as spectator? I concentrated on a few aesthetic productions

and endeavored to avoid too much generalization on the basis of iso-
lated examples, not to draw definitive conclusions about the culture of the
country or the aesthetics of an artist. I was a long way from the pointless
quarrels of the 1980s and 1990s on the legitimacy of intercultural theater.
But why did European-inspired theater (which was familiar to me in
terms of text, acting style, or staging) nevertheless seem somehow foreign
to me in Korea? Precisely because it is conceived, constructed, played, and
performed by and for Koreans. What counts in the end is not so much
the text, how it is read, the tradition of its interpretation, but its being
set before an audience, its mise en scène. This notion of mise en scène thus
remains crucial to me, provided it is defined as the overall enunciation of
the staging. It serves me better than the English terms “performance”
or “production,” which merely name, tautologically, that which is done,
carried out, produced, without stating what or how. And yet I have often
used the term “performance” in order to avoid judging in advance the
kind of work in question and to resist lumping it in with Western theater
before it even has a chance.
What type of spectator have I been? A spectator keeping a close watch
on the historical moment into which the show is placed! But where are
we, historically? In Korea, the spectator is first and foremost a consumer,
albeit one open to new aesthetic experiences. In Europe, particularly in
France, Germany, and the Scandinavian countries, the spectator is often
“in search” of something, and is more political, still convinced of theater’s
critical and political worth, committed to theater as a public service and a
political weapon.
In Korea, theater in its Western form is a recent phenomenon: it took
a bit more than a century to arrive, and it was not until the end of the
1980s that theater got past the dictatorship’s strict censorship. Despite the
very serious 1997 financial crisis, theater did not, with a few exceptions,
respond, as had happened in Europe, with political or militant works.
The economic crash of 2007 affected the middle and working classes, as
in Europe, but Korean theater did not strongly or frequently react with
political works.
The Korean audience reacts differently from the ones I know in France,
in Britain, or in Germany. They are “a good crowd,” easily pleased, open,
“good sports,” happy to participate (as with Chuimse, cries and words
of encouragement provided in a pansori performance). They never mind
being heckled by the actors (in all Yang Jung-Woong’s productions of
252 P. PAVIS
Shakespeare). Whether theater, dance, or installation art, Korean artists

have the gift of easily connecting with their audience: the operation is
physical before being psychological or political.
But can a performance, a performative practice, be international or
cosmopolitan? Let us take the example of contemporary or postmodern
dance: whatever the aesthetic differences, the dancers seem subject to the
same mode of training, to an abstraction of movement that erases all local
color, ignoring differences of physicality, race, and genre. The interna-
tional work of dancers does not seem to take ethnic or cultural difference
into account; at most dancers must adapt—and quickly—to various cho-
reographic styles. One might assume that the contemporary dance spec-
tator is a globalized spectator who will view contemporary ballet with
the same eyes in London, New York, or in Seoul. This is largely true:
contemporary dance circulates very quickly across the entire world; all the
spectators are capable of appreciating it, in whichever country. And yet,
although contemporary dance might very well seem accessible to all, do
we all really see the same abstract figures in the same way? Is the original
culture of the dancers and choreographers completely dissolved into the
international vocabulary? And if this were the case, would it be a good
thing and/or a step towards globalization?
The spectator’s reception never happens in a vacuum, but in a public
space, an Offentlichkeit,4 a public sphere,5 that should be interrogated at
every point and in its specific historical context. This public sphere is grad-
ually disappearing.6 According to Luc Boltanski, “today, we are headed
for the disappearance of the public sphere, not because the authoritarian
structures keen to keep secrets, to keep things under wraps, are winning,
but because the border between the inside and the outside of institutions
is being erased, so the very act of unveiling is itself losing its bite or is
becoming impossible.”7 This is indeed what is happening in the Western
world and in Korea: there is not much left to be unveiled, and thus to
be discussed, be it in the media or the theater. That the media is cahoots
with political power comes as no surprise, since politicians are instruments
of economic power, especially industrial conglomerates, chaebols, in the
hands of a few important families.8 But what about theater? On the one
hand, the state, as if to make up for lost time, pursues a proactive policy
of support for the arts; on the other, the politics behind this expects that
the subsidized products be profitable, an unthreatening consumer good,
a profitable export, or at least one beneficial for the image of the Korean
nation.
These political and economic conditions (lots of money, but not much
for critical or experimental theater) plot the scenography of the Korean
theater. While there is no longer official censorship, strong self-censorship
among artists limits the prospect of breaking the remaining strong taboos:
political (no praise for socialism), sexual (no pornography), familial (the
weight of hierarchy, patriarchy, domestic violence, no right to equal mar-
riage, no allusion to a double life, etc.). Of course, these taboos are fre-
quently broken, or at least addressed, in productions of Korean plays,9
but they are never tackled head-on. In a sense, this self-censorship means
Korean artists are obliged to find indirect and highly subtle modes of
transgression, while European artists, as Luc Boltanski notes, not only
no longer manage to make a scene, to “épater le bourgeois’” or frighten
the bobo (bourgeois bohême—the bourgeois bohemian). Each and every
transgression can immediately be appropriated and absorbed by the pow-
ers that be. Still more powerful, according to Boltanski, is the fact that
“those today who hold power, including the most abusive and disgraced
among them, are like us, people like us: ‘well-educated’, ‘simple’, ‘dressed
down’, etc.”10 Bobos are the only people, along with a few stray students
and professors, who still visit the subsidized theaters. For them, transgres-
sions of all kinds are an everyday occurrence. As for the decision-makers,
the upper classes, international financiers—be they European, Chinese, or
Korean—they couldn’t care less whether theater is transgressive or not:
they are only interested in fine art and show business, and only as high-
yield investments.11
The situation is simpler and healthier in Korea: Korean spectators, who
are mainly very young, appreciate theater, especially the avant-garde, as
an artistic activity useful in the cultural and democratic consolidation of
their country. They do, however, embrace the aesthetic qualities of the
work more than believing in any critical or political potential. Apart from
exceptional cases or examples from the time of the dictatorship, these
spectators have never really believed in the transformative power of the-
ater: they were postdramatic before the time of the postdramatic! Thus,
Im Do-Wan dangerously aestheticizes a play like Woyzeck; Oh, Tai-Sok,
no doubt too preoccupied with Korean identity, proposes no postcolonial
critique for The Tempest; Kim Kwang-Lim, in his play and staging of Batyr
Mamaï, is more interested in satirizing managerial mores than in analyz-
ing Korean neo-colonialism in Kazakhstan; Lee Jaram makes of Mother
Courage an apolitical figure of timeless Korea, far from the rifts of war;
even Lee Hyun-Tak misses the opportunity to transpose Arthur Miller’s
254 P. PAVIS
highly political ideas about the failure of the American Dream into the
contemporary Korean context.
This critique of the loss of the public sphere accompanies, or leads to,
the progressive disappearance of public theater, a citizens’ theater, sup-
posed to be accountable to the community, which, in return, supports and
subsidizes it. The phenomenon affects Europe as much as Korea, since it
emerges directly from an ultra-liberal political system more concerned with
economic profit than with moral benefits for the humanist education of
individuals. The “globalized” spectator is subject to the same steam-roller
of globalization. It is not so much that the spectator is bombarded by
the performances, the practices, the different cultures and backgrounds.
Rather, the spectator’s gaze is becoming standardized, reduced to mere
recognition of a few traits, reduced to a common denominator that erases
specificities, eliminating anything that stands out.
This shift towards homogenization, internationalism, and a cultural
Esperanto is not limited to the economic and political phenomena of glo-
balization. The arts—from architecture to painting, from dance to dra-
matic writing, from cinema to performance art—have experienced similar
developments. They seek out, more than endure, the internationalization,
simplification, and standardization of their artistic and aesthetic proce-
dures. Is the same true of theories of stage performance, and of intercul-
tural exchange?
Which Global Theory?
Which Spectator?
Did I only see the performances in Seoul differently because I was foreign?
Productions of Korean texts in French or English translation are rare and
are problematic (poor translations, cultural transfers that are tricky, or at
times impossible).12 But what makes a text remain foreign to a spectator
is not only the foreign language, but also the different habits and cul-
tural references. The spectator feels more or less foreign depending on
the genre of performance, the aesthetic pitch, and their own expectations.
Every spectator has a tendency to become specialized, to become a captive
within a single genre, a single style. Every spectator is a sectarian.
What Methodology?
I was teaching theater theory—the analysis of performances and the aes-
thetics of theater production, European and Korean. That was what was
expected of me (or so I imagined): a transferring of techniques, a delocal-
ization of my theater-analysis workshop. This drove me to check my tools.
Words like semiology, interculturalism, analysis, and postdramatic were as
mysterious for my students as they were for the theater critics. In “apply-
ing” my techniques to Korean performances I had seen with my students
(playwrights, actors, directors, dramaturgs, critics), I nevertheless realized
that I would need not only to summarize and transmit my method, but
also to go through their way of talking about a performance with a fine-
toothed comb. I had often to tackle aspects of the performance that had
not seemed important from an aesthetic or socio-critical point of view. I
was thus led to focus systematically my analyses upon theoretical notions
which themselves had to be reconsidered and possibly re-founded. Even
seemingly simple concepts, like mise en scène, representation, production,
or performance were up for debate. And yet this cultural decentering, for
which I had volunteered, also granted access to broader perspectives for
theories around globalization and thus were themselves “globalized.”
It is hard to list all the modified instruments that I employed to theo-
rize in different ways. Discussions generally revolved around the notion
of globalization and its effects on our perceptions, our judgements, our
simplifications, and our certainties.
Koreanization or Globalization?
Often during my time in Korea, I would wonder if my observations would
enable me to draw more general conclusions on the analysis of perfor-
mances. Would finding the sum of these fragmented results lead me to
the substance or the essence that linked them? Would a renewed theory
of the intercultural be waiting for me at the end of the road? Was I on a
“cosmopolitical” (Ulrich Beck) road?
The notion of Koreanness left me bewildered! Why on earth would
there be something specifically, uniquely, Korean? The performances and
cultural objects I analyzed never enabled me to put my finger on this
alleged “Koreanness,” a notion in fact more current among Westerners
than Koreans themselves. Only everyday life, a way of being, a “structure
of feeling” (Raymond Williams), and my encounters with people would
256 P. PAVIS
sometimes give me any such intimation. Beyond this mythic Koreanness, I

would, with increasing clarity, find myself faced with my own conventions,
expectations, values, habits, and tastes, risking platitudes in the search for
an unattainable essence. Had I actually needed to go so far to reach such
conclusions?
I persisted in any case in thinking that theater is not a mere formal game
(as with Robert Wilson), but that it pursues, or should pursue, a goal of
moral and political education. And I also saw clearly that art cannot be
reduced to a message or to a recipe for changing the world, not in Korea
or anywhere else. I realized that the world had become cynical.
The multitude of foreign works, of different ways of thinking and liv-
ing, in Korea or elsewhere, had me convinced that the West was in no
way universal, even if it continued to claim it was. And yet, I was not
ready to abandon certain ethical and political principles as applicable to
all human beings. As I entered the theaters and artistic spaces of Korea, I
was not seeking to validate a sense of the superiority of Western univer-
salism, in terms of ways of making theater, or mise en scène as it is done
in Paris, Berlin, or New York. I was simply aware, like the philosopher
François Flahaut, that universalism remained a good weapon in the face of
fanaticism, perhaps the last one: “Western culture, in this regard, remains
convinced that it is aligned with the universal … It is only progressive in
comparison with the fanaticism and obscurantism that certainly must still
be combatted. … But in reality it has no intellectual future ahead of it.”13
Applying, with more modesty, this principle of defending the universal
to the study of performances and to the work of artists, professors, and
theorists (Korean or otherwise), I wanted to test the question of the uni-
versal and the particular:
>1) In ‘theater’ of the kind I saw in Seoul over these years, it is no sur-
prise to find the Western universalism of textual dramaturgy and of actions
brought by characters, in various classical and modern European stagings.
Such plays are often performed again and again, and staged using trans-
lations that are close to the original. Only radical experiments in radical
adaptation and rewriting (Kim Hyun-Tak, but also Oh Tai-Sok) broke (or
escaped?) the mold of mimetic, narrative, European-style dramaturgy, thus
distancing themselves from any universal form (in the Greek or Western
sense) of narration or characterization.
This phenomenon is not unique to Korea: the paradigm of represen-
tation and of mise en scène, which had since the start of the nineteenth
century been the paradigm of European theater, were challenged, and
even replaced, by the performance paradigm and, more recently, by per-

formativity and Performance Studies. Even if the notion of performance
emerged precisely in order to counter the universalizing claims of the
Western mise en scène, it quickly became a universal blender, processing all
kinds of social phenomena, especially as regards identity and any kind of
speech act or social force.
>2) In terms of theory, performance became, in North America far more
than in Korea, the new paradigm and a “one-size-fits-all” formula for the-
ater. This is a symptom of the abandonment of the search for a coherent
whole and a unifying theory. In Europe and America as in Korea, semiol-
ogy has ceased to function as a method of global analysis: hardly any sys-
tematic analysis of productions can be found, nor much reflection on the
mobility of signs, and so on. The teaching of theater theory turned into
the eclectic borrowing of philosophical notions taken up by postdramatic
theater, as Lehmann terms it. Isolated systems of meaning and isolated
stories address particular aspects of a performance or of theater practice,
but there is no effort to unify, or even to link, these different approaches.
Even dramaturgical analysis, taught in numerous Korean theater depart-
ments as a fundamental discipline, is no longer summoned in any system-
atic way as it is in Germany or in the United States. In the name of “new
dramaturgy,” a dramaturg can only conclude that the work of actors and
directors has become too specific to a single culture to claim any kind
of universality. Indeed, in my performance analyses, I have often noticed
huge differences in how dramaturgical analysis is understood. These dif-
ferences do not only reveal dissimilarities in the works, but specifically sug-
gest methods, points of view, and approaches that are often incompatible:
hence the difficulty, even the impossibility, of positing any theory of the
whole for theater works. But, at the same time, I refused to give up on
dramaturgical analysis and performance analysis, I did not want to bring
everything back to a poorly defined postmodern hybridity, or to terms
like “negotiation” or “ecology,” repeated endlessly, but never defined.14 I
sought to make these formal analyses of works (analyses of text and of the
stage) closer to a sociological, economic, or political investigation of the
phenomena of cultural globalization.
A general perspective like this—global but not globalized—situates the
work within a universalizing philosophical discourse, as well as inside a
substance, a materiality, an individual aesthetic experience. Pleasure is not,
or not uniquely, the Aristotelian or Brechtian pleasure of philosophical,
narrative, or dramaturgical understanding: it is also the pleasure of being
258 P. PAVIS
immersed in stage materiality, in an “empirical existence” but also a con-

crete thought, a “social philosophy” and “feeling of existing.”15
I thus found myself in a rather schizophrenic situation: on the one
hand, I was offering my European-made (French and German, specifi-
cally) theoretical and philosophical services; on the other, I had ample
access to the empirical and naïve dimension of everyday existence: I
“physically” perceived the materiality of Korean works; I enjoyed the the-
atrical and performative content of the productions, without always know-
ing how it all related to Korean social reality. Examining European plays
staged in Korea, I was often frustrated that the stagings seemed ignorant
and neglectful of the historical and political dimension of the works. I
thus found myself in the guilty position of enjoying the theatrical matter
without really knowing why, and simultaneously demanding of my hosts a
more committed and political art, without knowing for certain whether a
political connection had, in fact, been set up without my having grasped it.
Moreover, I was frustrated at realizing that Korean theater departments—
especially the department at the Korea National University of Arts—were
designed exactly along the lines of the American drama departments of the
1970s and 1980s in which many professors had themselves studied.
It was only much later, back home in France, that I found some consola-
tion, from studying philosophy applied to theater. Alain Badiou explained
in illuminating terms what I had felt in Korea: the spectator always con-
ceives of theater according to the desiring identification or/and the peda-
gogical apparatus available. The spectator seeks a place between cathartic
identification with the passions and a critical and political distance from
the stage: “Either theatre is a capturing machine of desiring identifications,
and its thrust is by analogy psychoanalytical – it transfers, displaces, filters
and purifies that which the sexual underside of the speaking being attaches
to it in terms of latent meanings; – Or theatre is a perfected pedagogical
apparatus, and its thrust is by analogy philosophical – it distances the Idea
in the veil of representation, and forces us to an elucidation that, if we did
not have the mirage of voices and bodies to elicit it, we would not even
be able to know for sure it exists” (p. 225). And thus, Badiou concludes,
“The spectator would be there, not for pleasure, but for a therapy or an
apprenticeship” (p. 225).16 Thus the spectator would be caught between
identification and philosophical distance.
Between therapy and apprenticeship, between identification and dis-
tance, that was where I, like everybody else, positioned myself: did I need
to travel so far in order to realize this? Probably not, but after my return
from Korea, I drew a few conclusions. Seeing or experiencing a perfor-

mance always means finding the right distance (right for ourselves or for
others) between sensory immersion in the materiality of the work and
the system of its dramaturgy or mise en scène. Depending on the circum-
stances, and on the kind of performance, we favor one or the other. Even
in a foreign country, with a language and a set of social practices that
are unknown to us, we cannot settle for sounds and images. We attempt
to establish how things operate, how signs are organized, and do this
according to a hypothetical system of meaning. It is, so to speak, impos-
sible to abandon explanatory theories of the performance, critique of its
incoherences or its imperfections. The critical capacity is universal, even if
its expectations, methods, results vary considerably from one context to
another.
A Spectator on the Road to Globalization?

After these lengthy theoretical clarifications, I thought I was done with
global explanations. I had not anticipated the return of the question of
globalization, with the Global Shift17 affecting both the world economy
and the cultural outputs of the entire world. It is hard to picture how
macroeconomic phenomena might influence the isolated theatrical and
cultural productions described here.
How did we get here? The economic surge of Korea since the 1970s is
part of the extraordinary revival of East Asia. While the Japanese economy,
which grew from the 1960s onwards, has experienced a downturn since
the 1990s, Korea has continued to advance, despite the major financial
crisis of 1997, and despite the irresistible rise of China. Since the start of
the twenty-first century, a doubt plays on the mind of Koreans, an aware-
ness that the economic surge does not profit all, far from it in fact.18 As
its Westernization continues, Korea “has been seized by European-style
doubts” and “the Korean style, often conflictual and very hierarchical, is
closer to the French than to the German version.”19
In Global Shift, Peter Dicken shows how, contrary to what is commonly
believed, capitalism is far from being universal and unified; he reveals dis-
tinctive modes of economic organization, going beyond the difference
between the LME (Liberal Market Economy) of the USA and the UK
and CME (Coordinated Market Economy) of Germany or Japan. Such
differences can to a great extent be explained by the different histories
and mentalities of those nations. Korea sits between neoliberal market
260 P. PAVIS
capitalism, the UK’s CME, and the social market capitalism of Germany,
Scandinavia, and France. In the “development capitalism” of Korea (and
indeed of most countries of the “Far East”), “The State plays a much
more central role (although not usually in terms of public ownership of
productive assets). The State sets substantive social and economic goals
within an explicit industrial strategy. Capital markets tend to be bank cen-
tred. There is a strong emphasis on tight business networks.”20
These economic details help to clarify how theater and the arts operate
in Korea, even if geo-politico-cultural logic lacks the clarity of economic
logic. One’s social circle, for the smallest group and for productions, plays
a crucial part. Through a long series of prizes, checks, validation from crit-
ics, precedence accorded by age or by qualifications awarded by universi-
ties (themselves ranked in a hit parade or league table), artists are closely
monitored. Korean cultural politics tends to protect its national compa-
nies and its traditional forms of dance, song, and opera (pansori), con-
sidered living national treasures, from invasive globalization. But foreign
works in the Korean cultural sphere do not enjoy the same protection.
They are often used as material or as inspiration, as the artists do not fear
incomprehension or excommunication from interculturalism’s purists.
‘Transnational companies only receive the same treatment when import-
ing or transferring a musical, adopted as it is or imitated—a “McTheatre”
that appeals to the young even if it does not feed them. As for K-pop,
it is the undisputed champion in the use of mass media, especially the
Internet and specifically Google: Gangnam style, a pop video from the
singer Psy, was viewed online by two billion people. K-pop and McTheatre
fully belong to the mainstream economy, while stagings of Korean and
foreign plays in the countless small theaters of Daehangno are more like
“community economies” that desperately struggle to survive. A very frag-
ile subsistence economy is maintained, in a state of extreme poverty. No
“micro-financing scheme” provides small loans to young artists, who in
any case they would never be able to pay them back. Aside from a few
community theater projects, like TUIDA, experimental theater is in a very
fragile state. This little island of creativity is a place of learning more than of
production, mirroring the great many university theater departments that
are free to experiment but struggle to make an impact in the theater mar-
ketplace. The shows available to the tourists in Seoul or worldly audiences
are certainly “spectacular,” but with little artistic merit. For example, the
NANTA group specializes in percussion performances, inspired by Korean
traditions, playing with various kitchen utensils to create frenzied rhythms.
The mixing of martial arts, traditional dance, hip hop, and breakdance is
also very popular in Seoul or in European capital cities; the shows sold
to an international audience as examples of the Korean avant-garde, with
little regard for cultural or artistic identity. The blending of genres has
become the norm and it is eating away at the genuinely creative theater.21
The way that theater productions are prepared is specific to the indi-
vidual, even individualist, approach of artists, but the Korean mentality
tones down this individualism. The running of a production, once we look
beyond amateur theater, participates in a more or less globalized economic
circuit. Theater, if it aspires to be seen beyond its immediate community,
requires at least some subsidy. The benefit system of the intermittents in
France has no equivalent in Korea or in the UK. Intermittence is a method
of resistance, a way of delaying the effects of the liberalized economy,
which excludes any artistic working method considered too costly. The
cost would not be prohibitive in Korea, however, but would be contrary
to the principles of a state that is both rich and subordinate to the bosses.
Thanks to the rising power of the economy and to a proactive cultural
policy seeking to make up for lost time and for the destruction of culture
during the dictatorship, and with the help of “development capitalism,”
Korea is discovering a young audience that is still more interested in enter-
tainment (musicals, K-pop) than in avant-garde art or socio-economic
analysis. The same prestige politics favors luxury items: traditional music
and dance, pansori or Western music and opera, and occasionally produc-
tions of great universal classics. It grants much less favor, if any at all, to
European or Korean avant-garde theater, unless the production or its crit-
ics have the presence of mind to declare it “postdramatic.” This is thus a
proactive cultural politics, albeit a rather uninformed one, too concerned
with fashion, and too far from any critical or educational role for the per-
forming arts. There is nothing comparable with the Cool Britannia iden-
tity created in the 1990s. The theater movement, which in fact is hardly a
movement at all, has not been taken up as a youth movement to celebrate
youth culture—that task is undertaken by the mass media and K-pop.
From the perspective of globalization, the notion of cultural differ-
ence is growing dim; cultural specificities erode as they brush up against
one another. This is the case with the pansori adaptation of Brecht’s
Mother Courage: it borrows from German seventeenth-century history
the Mother Courage figure, using it as a parable to speak of the war of
its own era and of the little people who believe they can make their little
profit, not recognizing their failure and blindness. In the pansori version,
262 P. PAVIS
Lee Jaram maintains the figure of the torn mother, but—like many direc-
tors around the world in fact—makes of her an idealized figure who never
considers her own guilt and her own ethical and political blindness. So is
this a simplification caused by globalization? Or is it rather a clash of two
staging interpretations? In this specific case, it is not easy to distinguish
the aesthetic choices of the staging and the simplifying effects of global-
ization. Lee Jaram’s staging brilliantly recruits an important aspect of glo-
balization: the possibility of blending texts, stories, and different cultures,
and creates her own updated pansori. The mixing and homogenization
of the Mother Courage materials enables her to create a global version of
opera, which becomes an autonomous work with its own independent life.
This device is not unlike that of “glocalization”: the work uses globalized
specificities, blending and hybridization, but reconfigures this material in
an original work with the flavor of local Korean culture emanating from
the music, the vocal work, the stories and the atmosphere of the country.
Thus her work moves away from standardized, uprooted globalization.
It gets back its lifeblood and its distinctive taste. It thus troubles, or even
questions, the principles of Brechtian and Western dramaturgy and the
principle of the critical function of theater. This is what Chris Balme calls
“decolonizing the stage.”22
Thus globalization and globalized theater take their place in a circuit
that sometimes yields an original creative work, or a work more intercul-
tural than globalized, a work in which the differences between cultures
remains discernible and relative, in which the author voluntarily takes a
stand on what Ric Knowles calls the “shifting grounds of difference,”23
instead of getting bogged down, as with a globalized work, in what I
would willingly call “the shifting sands of indifference.”
The influence of globalization is not limited to the thematic, to the
ways of seeing, but also concerns the forms and structures in use. This
is the case in new Korean plays by figures like Kim Kwang-Lim (Batyr
Mamaï) and Kim Myung-Wha (Dolnal, the first birthday), which draw on
European dramaturgical techniques (that the artists themselves probably
consider universal: fabula, dramatic tension, carefully sketched characters,
etc.). Other contemporary Korean plays (by Choi Zin-A, Paik Ha-Ryong,
de Park Keun-Hyeong, Park Sang-Hyun) are close to those by the authors’
European counterparts, in that they call upon post-Brechtian or postmod-
ern narrative techniques, which they themselves sometimes call postdra-
matic, although they stop short of the non-figurative or non-linguistic
usage of text employed by some European and American directors and
performers. In more rare cases, Korean artists stage or adapt European

plays or novels (for example, Lee Suk-Young’s Coming Up for Air by
George Orwell, or Lee Jaram’s and Brecht’s Mother Courage), inventing
a new form, borrowing from European dramaturgy but within a highly
original reinterpretation, inspired by Korean artistic forms.
There can thus be no one, correct, intercultural way of mounting,
then presenting, and finally receiving material or work from “elsewhere.”
When we examine a work of art, for example a theater performance, we
are immediately attentive to aesthetic differences, to complexities, to the
originality and strangeness of the stage practice. We are less able to notice
ethnological or socio-economic factors. The whole polemic around inter-
culturality in the 1980s and 1990s can be explained as this misunderstand-
ing: we judge works of art, not nations, cultures, or political discourses.
With globalization, our relationship with the foreign has changed. Our
relationship with art still remains rather mysterious: which work still seems
foreign to us, the work of a total stranger? But when does avant-garde
work not seem strange? What is strange is that we have all become global-
ized, yet somewhat unreliable and uncertain, subjects?
I have one remaining certitude, however: the certitude of having been,
for a while, in contact with beautiful things: beautiful persons, without
ever sounding out their hearts; beautiful works of art, without ever freeing
myself from their hearts in order to talk about them, as I had imprudently
promised myself I would do.
Notes
1. Empire of Signs, London, Hill & Wang, 1982, p. 6.
2. “One does not inhabit a country; one inhabits a language. That is our
country, our fatherland – and no other.” E. M. Cioran ‘On the Verge of
Existence’ in Anathemas and Admirations, New York, Arcade, 2012,
p. 11.
3. Le Monde, 19 September 2014. See also the following comment from
Jean-Marie Le Clézio: “I prefer this idea of an ‘intercultural’ society over
that of a ‘multicultural’ one. It imagines that we learn from one another,
as usually happens in business, commerce, the arts, or literature; that we
can hear one another, accept one another, debate, discuss areas of tension,
or even we be ‘reasonable’ and ‘accommodate’ our difference, as the
Canadians suggest.” Le Monde, 13 September 2014.
264 P. PAVIS
4. In Jürgen Habermas’s sense: Strukturwandel der Öffentlichkeit.

Untersuchungen zu einer Kategorie der bürgerlichen Gesellschaft. 5. Auflage,
Neuwied/Berlin, [1962]1971.
5. Cf. Christopher Balme. ‘Distributed Aesthetics: Performance, Media and
the Public Sphere’, Theatrical Blends. Art in the Theatre. Theatre in the
Arts. Edited by Jerzy Limon and Agnieszka Zukowska. Gdansk, SLowo/
ObrazTeritoria, 2010, pp. 138–148.
6. Since the start of the eighteenth century, in Britain, then in France, “the
public sphere was imagined, using theatre as its model, as the site of public
representation where all that had hitherto been cloaked in secrecy was
unveiled: institutional secrets, family secrets, court secrets, the secrets of
political life, etc. The public sphere is first and foremost a place where we
unveil and unwrap, in open view, the secrets of the powerful.” Luc
Boltanski, L’Assemblée théâtrale, Paris, Editions de l’Amandier, 2002,
p. 13.
7. Boltanski, L’Assemblée théâtrale, op.cit., p. 13.
8. See Philippe Messmer, “Dynastie’ au pays de chaebols’, Le Monde, Friday
23 January 2015.
9. Korean society functions well, but at what price? With the safety of my
tourist status, I could enjoy all of this, but had I been Korean things would
have been more difficult. I was a victim of positive discrimination from
morning ‘til night! I was paid to observe their working methods, to com-
pare them to my own. I was far from being a paperless migrant worker
from South-East Asia. It is an efficient society, at least for entrepreneurs.
But what about culture? The state, and the sponsors wish it would be so—
they are investing in it, and their motives are obviously more economic
than aesthetic and humanistic.
10. Luc Boltanski, L’assemblée théâtrale, Paris, Éditions de l’Amandier, 2002,
p. 14.
11. See Nicole Vulser. ‘Bernard Arnault mise sur le chanteur coréen Psy’, Le
Monde, Friday 22 August 2014.
12. See my article on Shin Meran’s staging of OMI: http://www.alestdunouveau.
fr/fr/reflexions-sur-mise-en-scene-de-mere-par-shin-meran-et-sa-
reception-en-france
13. François Flahaut. Le sentiment d’exister. Ce qui ne va pas de soi. Paris:
Descartes et compagnie, 2002, p. 47.
14. As in Ric Knowles, Theatre and Interculturalism. London, Palgrave, 2010,
pp. 1–7 and 58–63, respectively. My own hourglass model has been criti-
cized by Knowles, by Lo and Gilbert, and by Li and Pitches. (Li and
Pitches’ article is entitled: “The end of the hour-glass: alternative concep-
tions of intercultural exchange between European and Chinese operatic
forms”, Studies in Theatre and performance, Volume 12, Number 2, 2012,
p. 123). According to Li and Pitches the hourglass is conveying “the idea

of distilling cultures in a western-designed melting pot,” despite the fact
that I explicitly wrote that the hourglass should be constantly turned over!
Li and Pitches propose a “ ‘toppling’ of the hourglass on to its side and an
alternative view of intercultural exchange, tentatively called the ‘Shaker’
model’” (p. 123). I don’t mind the idea of toppling and horizontality, but
it means that the sand no longer moves (which poses a problem for a cul-
tural exchange); I would therefore suggest to free the sand and to see it as
sand in a desert, dunes constantly changing shape with the effects of the
wind, the wind of causality and of history. Whatever image is used —hour-
glass, shaker, “layered, individualized model of intercultural process”
(p. 122) or Chalk Circle (p. 123)—we still need a theory of change and
exchange; we must understand better—poetically, but above all intellectu-
ally and politically—what is going on: we need a theory. It is not enough
to say that we should avoid “binaries in favour of layers” or “attempt to
foreground process rather than visual aesthetics as the ground for intercul-
tural analysis” (p. 124), we must now “deliver the goods,” that is propose
a theory. By a theory, I certainly mean more than an “inter-methodological
exchange” (p. 124), which is defined by the authors as “the meeting of
traditions” (p. 125), a process which is never theorized or even precisely
described by the organizers of a project focusing on “alternative concep-
tions of intercultural exchange between European and Chinese operatic
forms” (p. 121). Not only is Europe big and diverse, but the methods (by
which is meant obviously “the artists’ individual training background”,
p. 129) are only superficially suggested through the artists’ own verbal
description of their training. We never find any attempt to explain these
methods,” and less still any explanation of how the project brings them
into confrontation. What we do find are mere superficial descriptions: the
performers are supposed to “inject life into the traditional repertoire
learned through training or from their individual masters” (p. 129). The
stylization of the Beijing Opera is reduced to “conventionalization [which]
is the key guiding principle of the theatre” (p. 129). But what kind of
stylization and what conventions? As for the European artists’ training
method, this cannot really be understood as it relates to “a single artistic
discipline – Laban or Guildhall, for instance” or belonging to a “notori-
ously eclectic and fluid creative industry in the United Kingdom” (p. 131).
We are never told of what the contrasting European and Chinese methods
might consist; we are only assured that the cross-cultural work “demanded
mutual understanding between the practitioners through working together
and feeling each other’s training grounds and personal approach to the
project” (p. 132). This seems like stating the obvious without being able
to show how the collaboration happened. We are assured that a “collective
266 P. PAVIS
identity was created” (p. 133) and that “the harmony suddenly emerged
creating a specific identity” (p. 134). All these statements do not, however,
even begin to approach an explanation or a theory. We are back to the
hypothesis that “each cultural project must define itself on its own terms,
naturally resisting any linear models of communication and instead nego-
tiating the layers of cultural complexity uniquely each time” (p. 136). This
view sounds more like a wish-fulfilling prophecy than a theoretical, or even
methodological, explanation. Can we settle for such a project?
15. Flahaut, ibid., p. 800.
16. Alain Badiou, ‘Rhapsody for the Theatre: A short philosophical treatise’,
trans. Bruno Bosteels, Theatre Survey, 49:2, November 2008, pp. 187–238.
17. See Peter Dicken’s Global Shift. Mapping the Changing Contours of the
World Economy. London, SAGE, 2011.
18. We must not forget that Korea, which is currently one of the most dynamic
and powerful economies on earth, was, as late as 1960, one of the poorest
countries in the world, with a per capita income comparable with that of
Ghana (according to Peter Dicken, op. cit. London, SAGE, 2011, p. 526).
19. Philippe Escande, « Les trois leçons de la rivière Han », Le Monde, 19
March 2013.
20. Op.cit., p. 177.
21. For current shows, see: www.kperformance.org
22. Chris Balme. Decolonizing the Stage. Theatrical Syncretism and Post-colonial
Drama. Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1999.
23. Ric Knowles. How Theatre Means. London, Palgrave, 2014, p. 207.
Index1
NUMBERS & SYMBOLS B

“2011 Asian Arts Theatre Residency Badiou, A., 258
Gwangjiu”, 104 Balinese performative culture, 65
Balme, C., 262
Barthes, R., xi–xviii, viii–xi, 82n27,
A 170–1, 248
Agamben, G., 217 Batyr Mamaï (Kim Kwang-Lim), 61,
Alsopp, R., 235 103–14, 253, 262
American Dream, 131–3, 254 Beckett, S., 20
American variety show, 207 Bergson, H., 205, 243
“American Way of Life”, 128, 129 Bharucha, 40
An Chun Ho, 223n1 Biff, 128, 131
Anderson, B., 74 Bildungsroman, 89
Anglo-American model, 19 Biography, 235
Angot, C., 100n1 The Biography of Jeon Myung Chool,
Appadurai, A., 41, 56n18 91, 233
Ariel, 69, 71, 76, 80n15, 82n23, Bishop, C., 18
82n26 Bleeker, M., 17
Artaud, 39, 40, 65, 70 Bobos, 253
artistic interculturalism, 250 Boltanski, L., 252, 253, 264n6
Asia-centrism, 39, 70, 76 bourgeois social milieu, 50
1
Note: Page number followed by ‘n’ refers to notes.

P. Pavis, Performing Korea, DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-44491-2
268 INDEX
Bouvier, N., xvii Clayn, E., 235

Bowling, G., 145, 147, 149 closed sign system, 60
Brecht, 65–6, 159–61, 164, 168–71, Clôture de l’amour, 86
233–5, 261 cognitive narratology, 16, 17
Mother Courage and her Children cognitivism, 16, 17
(Ukchuk-Ga), 22, 153–74 “collision of cultures”, 40
Brechtian alienation effect, 160 colonialism, 36, 39, 65, 67, 74
Brechtian dramaturgy, 91, 262 Coming Up for Air (Orwell), 96,
Brechtian political dramaturgy, 91 143–52, 197
Brechtian theater, 22 commercial exchange, 36, 50
British Research Excellence community economies, 260
Framework, 27 Confucianism, 232
Brook, P., 6, 15, 39, 40, 66 contemporary dance spectator, 252
The Mahabharata, 4 “content industry”, 25
Büchner, G., 177, 179–86 Cool Britannia identity, 261
Woyzeck, 177–88 corporality, 17, 137–40, 209, 220
burlesque mode, 206 cosmopolitanism, 250
burlesque travesty, 205, 206 Craig, 65–6
Butoh dancer, 221 “creative industry”, 25, 52, 265
cultural aesthetic forms, 63
cultural delocalization, 22
C cultural democracy, 37
Caliban, 72, 73, 75, 77, 78, 81n18, cultural fragmentation, 37
82n22, 82n23 cultural globalization, 15, 21, 36, 39,
capitalism, 18, 28, 57n19, 112, 127, 257
259–60 cultural homogenization, 37
Cendrars, B., xvii cultural hybridity, 37
chaebols, 252 cultural identity, 7, 37, 70, 75, 79n1,
Cha Geun Ho, 101n7 106, 107, 218
Cha Ji-rang, 92 “cultural industry”, 25, 52, 136, 212
Chekhov, 53 “culturalist” model, 15
Choi Chi Eon, 101n7 cultural particularism, 37
Choi Sung, 11 cultural performances, xvi, 4, 5, 7–9,
Choi Yong Hun, 101n7, 101n13 12, 14, 21, 28, 61, 66, 69, 77
Choi Zin-A, 44, 87, 89, 90, 233 cultural tourism, 53
Choosun, 155–8, 167 “cushioning”, 240
Cho-Shin, 94
Chung Aeng Mu, 191
Cinderella, 96 D
classical pansori, 20, 154, 158, 161, Death of a Salesman (Miller), 126,
163, 165–8, 172 127, 138
classical Western dramaturgy, 233 decolonization, 66
INDEX 269
de-ideologisation of culture, 28 Euripides, 133, 139, 141n8

Dentith, S., 204 Euro-American conception of mise en
depoliticization, 7, 8, 15 scène, 61
Derrida, J., viii, 12, 29, 30, 31n9, Eurocentrism, 12, 34n47, 39, 70
34n44 European avant-garde theater, 261
Dicken, P., 266n18 European communism, 6
Global Shift, 259 European dramaturgical techniques,
Didi-Huberman, G., 168 262
diversity, 38, 53 European industrial production, 22
Djan, P., 28 European theater, 4, 9, 13, 36, 40,
Dolnal, 233, 235 80n8, 219, 256
dominant model of theater, 66 Everyman, 149
double-George system, 148 exception culturelle, 25
Doubrovsky, S., 87 expressionism, 9
Fils, 100n1
dramatic acting style, 163–4
dramatic writing, 16, 42–4, 86, 96, F
98–100, 122, 123, 130, 146, fabula, 91, 93, 96, 106, 113, 130,
254 262
dramaturgical adaptation, 158–60 “feeling global”, 43
dramaturgical theory, 9 Fensham, R., 18–19
dramaturgy, 10, 12, 22, 23, 43, 53, figurines, 219
70–6, 86–91, 99, 107, 108, Fils (Doubrovsky), 100n1
117–20, 133, 135–6, 139, 160, Fischer-Lichte, E., 20
164–5, 167, 170–2, 180, 186, “fissure of the symbolic”, x
190, 216, 217, 220, 234–5, 256, Flahaut, F., 256
257, 259 Fludernik, M., 16–17
Dream, 94, 101n13 Franco-Korean communication, 87
Freeman, J., 33n37
free trade agreement, 25
E French contemporary playwrights, 85
economic delocalization, 22 French dramatic writing, 96
economic globalization, 6, 26, 56n19 “French Theory”, 23
electro-acoustic technology, 111 Freud, 29, 112
embodied spectatorship, 18–19 “functional” dramaturgy, 99
Engels, F., 56n19, 57n19
enunciation, 48, 98, 109, 118, 121,
122, 124, 130, 148, 149, 164, G
220, 251 Gangnam style, 260
erklären, 97 Genet, 137–9
ethnic identity, 7 German postmodern theater, 20
Eunyoung, P., 215–23 Gide, A., 87
270 INDEX
Glissant, E., 37 Humphrey, D., 238

global commercial exchange, 36 Hutcheon, L., 204
global homogenization, 49
globalization, 21–4, 35–6, 70, 255–9
consequences of, 24–6 I
global politics, 38–9 Ibsen, 53, 88
glocalization, 50–4 I, Hyeseok, the Undesirable (Kim
intercultural theater, globalized Minseung), 115–124
theater, 39–42 imageless memories, 193–4
politics, 37–8 imagined community, 74, 78
in production and reception, 42–9 Im Do-Wan, 177–88, 253
unified culture, 36–7 Incheon art platform, 92
globalized culture, 41, 67 industrial exploitation methods, 24
globalized spectator, 252, 254 “inter-Asian” commission, 106
globalized staging, production and intercultural artist’s self, 40
reception of, 45–9 intercultural experimentation, 8, 50
globalized textual production, 42–5 intercultural globalization, 75
globalized theater, 15, 35, 36, 38–42, interculturalism, 3, 30, 39, 40, 62,
45–7, 52, 65, 262 65–7, 70, 75, 79, 178, 184–7,
global political systems, 15 250, 255, 260
Global Shift (Dicken), 259 intercultural model, 15
global subjectivity, 44–5 intercultural theater, 4, 15, 35, 39–42,
global theory, 254–5 66, 251
global work, 42 intercultural vision, 40
glocalization, 49–54, 75, 262 intermittence, 261
Go Jeag-Wi, 112 intermittents, 261
Graham, M., 236 intracultural immersion, 75
Greenblatt, S., 209, 213 intraculturalism, 56, 70, 78, 81,
Grotowski, 125, 132 81n16
intracultural Koreanization, 78
intracultural staging, 69–70
H “In-Yer-Face”
Hamlets, 8 dramaturgy, 43
Hardt, M., 38, 47 theater, 88
Harion, B., 233
Heinich, N., 21, 33n41, 51, 67
heroic industrial music, 128 J
Hirsch, M., 34n49 Jameson, F., 210, 212
homogenization, 35, 37, 38, 41, 49, Japanese bouquet, xiv
70, 254, 262 Japanese colonization, 11
Hong Sehee, 189–94, 198, 199, 236 Japanese cultural products, 24
Hong Won Ki, 101n7, 101n13 Japanese economy, 259
INDEX 271
Japanese neologism, 49 Korean culture, 10, 11, 53, 56,

Japanization, 67 56n17, 62, 64, 65, 68, 78,
Jeon Seonwoo, 116 80n16, 154, 157, 187, 198, 203,
Jilji, 82n24 209, 225, 262
Jin-Young Park (JYP), 203–14 allusions, 69
Jo-Shin, 94 artifacts, 62, 69
Jurgenson, L., 250 identity, 107
life, 116
performances, 56n17, 80n16
K politics, 260
Kane, S., 43, 88, 90 products, 24, 56
Kazakh culture, 111 Korean folklore, 75
Kazakh economy, 105 Korean identity, 93, 249–50, 253
Kepco Art Center, 216 Koreanisms, 71, 73
Ki Kuk-seo, 8 Koreanization, 30, 53, 61–78, 255–9
Kim Doong-Hyung, 95 Koreanized theater, 65
Kim Hyun-Tak, 125, 130–2 Korean mentality tones, 261
Death of a Salesman, 126, 127, 138 Koreanness, 56, 65, 74, 255, 256
The Maids, 127, 137–9 Korean popular theater, 18
Medea on Media, 133–6, 138 Korean production model, 127
Kim Jung-ok, 79n4 Korean social and cultural space, 230
Kim Kwang-Lim, 61, 103–14, 253, Korean society, 54, 88, 89, 96, 106,
262 107, 115, 132, 172, 212, 229,
Kim Minseung, 115–24 230, 249, 264n9
Kim Myung-Wha, 44, 87, 90, 94, Korean spectators, 133, 253
101n7, 233, 262 Korean stock exchange, 106
Kim Tae Hyung, 101n7 Korean traditional forms, 30
“kinesthetic impact of performance”, K-pop, 20, 24, 25, 203–14, 260, 261
78 Kristeva, J., 183
King Jabi, 69 Kuhn, T., 32n18
King Jilji, 69 Kung Lee, 94
King Sejong, 95
Kiran, K., 140n3
Klossowski, 18 L
Knowles, R., 262, 264n14 “Land of the Morning Calm”, vii, 127
Korean aesthetic theory, 30 Lang, J., 31n3
Korea National University of Arts, 79, Latin American theory, 24
199, 258 La trilogie des dragons (Lepage), 4
Korean audience, 64, 68, 69, 82n24, Laurent, C., 87
86, 145, 150, 152n7, 170, 251 Lauwers, J., 8
Korean avant-garde theater, 261 Lecoq, J., 181, 184, 186, 192
Korean cultural performances, 56n17, Lee Hyuntaek, 79n4
80n16 Lee Hyun-Tak, 133, 253
272 INDEX
Lee In-Soo, 114n1, 173n1 Medea myth, 46, 136

Lee Jaram, 22–3, 143, 233–4, 240, Medea on Media (Kim Hyun-Tak), 45,
242, 253, 262, 263 46, 60, 133–6, 138
Mother Courage and her Children Memory (Nam Jeong-Ho), 236
(Ukchuk-Ga), 153–74 Meyerhold, 65–6
Lee Kwang-Soo, 94 micro-financing scheme, 260
Lee Mee-Won, 8, 31n6 A Midsummer Night’s Dream (Yang
Lee Sang-Woo, 79n3 Jung-ung), 78
Lee Seong Yul, 101n7 militant theater, 7
Lee Yoon Taek, 94 Miller, A., 127–31, 133, 253
Lee Young-Seok, 96, 98, 143–52 Min, J. J., 87
Lehmann, H.-T., 8, 20, 257 Minjung, O., 87
Le Nain, 222 Miranda, 71, 72
Lepage, R., 3, 25, 26, 68 mise en scène, 19, 20, 45–7, 59–60,
La trilogie des dragons, 4 71–3, 76–8, 105, 109, 123, 128,
“Le Raoul Collectif”, 92 130, 132, 133, 135, 136, 140,
Les Enfants du Paradis, 198 149–51, 169, 172, 177, 180,
L’Histoire terrible mais inachevée de 182, 187, 220, 251, 255–7, 259
Norodom Sihanouk hypothesis on, 60–2
(Mnouchkine), 4 koreanization, 62–5
Li, 264–5n14 representation of one’s own culture,
Limb’s theorem, 192 65–8
Lim Eun-Jo, 111 The Tempest (Shakespeare), 68–77
Lipovetski, G., 37 Mitterrand, F., 6
literary parody, 204 Mnouchkine, A., 4, 6, 15, 39, 66, 70
Lyotard, J.-F., 17, 18 L’Histoire terrible mais inachevée de
Norodom Sihanouk, 4
modernized pansori, politics of, 22,
M 169–73, 233
Macintosh, C., 48 Mondialization, 6, 55n1
The Mahabharata (Brook), 4 Mondzain, M.-J., 52, 57n33
The Maids (Genet), 127, 137–9 Monnier, M., 100n1
Mallarmé, 215, 219, 222 Moon Jae-Hee, 111
Mamaï, M., 104–5, 107–9, 113 Mother Courage and her Children
Marivaux, 90, 189, 205, 215 (Ukchuk-Ga) (Brecht), 22,
The Surprise of Love, 90 153–4, 233–5, 240, 261, 262
Marx, K., 56, 56n19, 57n19, 91 analysis of a scene, 155–8
Mauron, C., 114n2 dramaturgical adaptation, 158–60
McAllister, T., 161, 168, 174n11 dramaturgy of a rolling stone,
McLuhan, 37 164–5
McPherson, C., 79n3 physical and vocal adaptation, 160–4
McTheatre, 48, 57n20, 172, 260 voice and affect, 165–9
INDEX 273
Motown style, 208, 209 Oh Tai-Sok, 10, 15, 17–18, 38, 41,
Mouawad, W., 95–6 55n12, 55n17, 59, 62–5, 68–78,
“movement’s contagion”, 78 79n4, 82n22, 253
multiculturalism, 28, 250 “old cultural stratum”, 70
multimedia installation, 215–23 “one-size-fits-all” formula, 257
multimedia theater, 215–23 “only for the weak”, 231
Musiktheater, 190 Orwell, G.
Coming Up for Air, 96, 143–52,
197
N The Outline of Vertigo, 180
Nadj, J, 177–88
Na Hyeseok, 115, 118–23
Na Hyeseok, the Undesirable (Kim P
Minseung), 115–24 pachinko, xii
Nam Jeong-Ho, 189, 195–9, 238 pansori, 143, 153–74, 233, 242,
Memory, 236 260–2
Namsan Drama Center, 85 pansori singers, 69, 72, 154, 158,
Nam Young-dong, 6 163, 168
NANTA group, 260 Park Choon-Keun, 112
narratology, 12, 16, 17 Park Eunyoung, 215–23
National Theatre Company of Korea, Park Jung-Hee, 101n7, 101n13
54, 93, 94 Park Keun-Hyun, 44, 91
naturalism, 9, 88 Park Sang Hyun, 101n7, 262
Negri, T., 38, 47 Park Seok-Kwang, 191
neocolonial conquest-capitalism, 107 parody, 135, 203–14
neocolonialism, 74 pas de deux, 182, 190
“neo-dramatic theater”, 92 pastiche, 23, 204, 205, 207–12,
neoliberalism, 47–8 214n9
neoliberal market capitalism, 259–60 Pathosformel, 168
New World Order, 47, 67 pathos, intensification of, 167–8
Ninagawa Yukio, 68 performance art, 8, 12, 14, 92, 254
Nippon culture, viii Performing Arts Market Seoul
Nobody, 203–14 (PAMS), 80n6
non-Brechtian dramaturgical analysis, personal dramaturgy, 216
22 Petit, P., 242
non-European civilizations, 65 physical adaptation, 143, 160–4
Nordey, S., 95 Piazzolla, A., 178
Pinguet, M., xixn4
Pitches, 264–5n14
O politics of modernized pansori,
occidental food, xi 169–73
274 INDEX
Pommerat, J., 96–8 Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes, viii

Ponge, F., xi, xvii Ruby, C., 29
The Voice of Things, xi Ryong, B. H., 91
post-Baudelairean modernism, 39
post-Brechtian techniques, 262
postdramatic theater, 3, 8, 16, 23, S
235, 257 Sales of a Deathman (Miller), 127,
postmodern globalized production, 46 133, 197
postmodernism, 47–8, 57n24, 96, satire, 204, 205, 210, 212
114, 210, 212, 235 savoir-faire, 22, 26
postmodernity, 24, 41, 235 savoir-vivre, 26
postmodern narrative techniques, 262 scenography, 42, 49, 60, 95, 121,
“post-post-dramatic neo-dramatic” 127–8, 216, 253
writing, 123 Schechner, 13, 40
Prince Hyo-Mung, 191 Segalen, V., xvii
Produktionsdramaturg, 22 self-censorship, 253
Prospero, 71–5, 77, 80n14, Self-Portrait, 195–9
82n22–82n24, 82n26 sexologico-cultural position, xiii
Protestantism, 232 ‘Shaker’ model, 265
pseudo-socialist authoritarian regimes, Shakespeare, 53, 54, 56, 63, 68–71,
7 73, 75, 76, 79n4, 79n5, 80n16,
Psy, 260 82n22, 145, 191
psychological acting style, 163–4 Prospero, 82n24
Pyeong-Mok, 94 The Tempest, 10, 59
Shanghai, 27
Shaughnessy, N., 20
Q Shevstova, M., 80n7
Québécois mentality, 248 Shinzangno Company, 151, 152n1
Silla Dynasty, 70
Single European Act, 21
R Singleton, B., 41, 55n12, 55n17,
Racz, A., 184–5 56n17, 80n8, 81n16
radicalism, 125 sinization, 67
Rambert, P., 86, 87, 90 sinocentrism, 39
Ravenhill, M., 48, 88, 90 soju, 232
real acting, 163–4 A Song for You, 189–94, 197, 236
Rebellato, D., 47 South Korea, 7, 151, 170, 229
recovery phase, 240 Soyons Oublieux des Désirs d’Autrui
refined system of enunciation, 149 (SODA), 92
“regime of singularity”, 21, 28, 51, 67 spectator, 17, 18, 21, 22, 24, 28, 39,
Richter, F., 86, 100n1 40, 43, 45, 47, 48, 51, 56n17,
Robertson, R., 36 61, 63, 64, 73, 76, 77, 81n16,
INDEX 275
89, 92, 97–9, 103, 110, 111, research blockages, 12–15

113. 120, 121, 127, 129–33, re-search engines, 8–12
135, 136, 139, 146–51, 155–7, theater glocalization, 50–1
159, 160, 163, 164, 167, 169, theater of yesteryear, 218–20
171, 183, 185, 187, 190, 191, theater theory, 255, 257
193, 197, 198, 209, 211–13, “théâtre du moi”, 86
217, 218, 220, 221, 247, 248, The Three Kingdoms, 54, 93–5, 98
250–5, 259–63 time space compression, 56n17,
Spregelburd, R., 24 81n16
stage action, 128, 138, 178, 183 total work, 41–2
Stanislavskian acting styles, 146 tout-culturel, 37
Stiegler, B., 18, 28–9, 214n11 traditional Korean performative
stock exchange in 1997, 229 culture, 78
“structure of feeling”, 230, 233, 235, transculturalism, 40
236, 242, 255 transnational companies, 260
subsistence economy, 260 travesty, 205, 206
Sun, W., 80n11 Tsigane music, 184
The Surprise of Love (Marivaux), 90 TUIDA, 260
Swan Lake, 189 Turner, V., 13, 14, 169, 174n15
symbolist synthesis, 218 Twelfth Night (Yang Jung-ung), 78
syncretic vision, 218
system of enunciation, 48, 130, 148,
149, 164 U
Ukchuk-Ga. See Mother Courage and
her Children (Ukchuk-Ga)
T (Brecht)
taboos, 253 Uncle Ben, 128
Tadashi Suzuki, 15 Unexpected, 44, 89, 233, 235
tango music, 178 Urfallino, P., 31n3
tellacting, 97, 98, 123, 143, 145–8, US cultural imperialism, 67
162–3
The Tempest (Shakespeare), 10, 17, 38,
41, 59, 61, 68–78, 253 V
theater and theater research in Korea, Valéry, P., 12, 31n9
3–5 Verschiebung, 235
new fields, 15–20 verstehen, 97
rerouting, diverting, redirecting, Veyne, P., 62
politics of the university, 26–31 visual-musical dramaturgy, 72
rerouting theater/rerouting society vocal adaptation, 160–4
of spectacles theater, 21–6 The Voice of Things (Ponge), xi
rerouting theory, 5–8 voice training, 168–9
276 INDEX
W Wooster Group, 8
Wagnerian, 41, 218 Woyzeck (Büchner), 177–88, 253
Warburg, A., 168 “writing aloud”, 166–8, 173n9
The Weir (McPherson), 79n3 Wuturi, 61, 63
Western classic, 61, 130, 137, 189
Western dramaturgy, 233, 262
Western intercultural performance, 30 Y
Western staging practice, 61 Yang Jaeyoung (YEDO), 219
Wievorka, M., 37 Yang Jeong Oong, 101n7
Wigman, M., 192 Yang Jung-ung
Williams, R., 43, 230, 235, 255 A Midsummer Night’s Dream, 78
Willy, 127–30 Twelfth Night, 78
Wilson, R., 3, 20, 68, 256 Yoon Hansol, 116, 121
Wol-Rae, 94 Yoon Jeong-Seop, 103, 111
Wonder Baby, Wonder Girls vs., Yoon Yeong-Seop, 108, 109
210–12 Young-dong, N., 6
Wonder Girls, 203–14 Yukio, N., 68

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PERFORMING KOREA

ISBN 978-1-137-44490-5 ISBN 978-1-137-44491-2 (eBook)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2016959561

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2017

Cover image © Yooniq Images / Alamy Stock Photo

Printed on acid-free paper

This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by Springer Nature

Often, during my two-year stay in Korea (2011–2012), I asked myself what

Barthes’ Point of View

Nevertheless, and here I do sign up to the Barthesian project, I realize that

deceiving everyone, including oneself. Such witnessing seems useful to me: an

The Objects Analyzed by Barthes

paternal) tools, are contrasted with chopsticks: “maternal, they tirelessly

To re-evaluate Barthes’ sexologico-cultural position, a position very

The Future of the Barthes Method

Can we, then—returning to my initial question—apply the analysis of

Barthes to A Lover’s Discourse and Camera Lucida—become autobio-

Nam Geung-Ho, Nam Jeong-Ho, No Yi-Jeong, Park Geun-Hyun, Park

Part 1 Introduction to the Examples and to the Method 1

1 Theater and Theater Research in Korea and

2 Globalization in a Few Korean Performances 35

3 Mise en Scène Made in Korea 59

Part 2 On a Few Theatre Productions 83

4 A Few Contemporary French and Korean

5 Questions to the Past: The Puppet Play

6 I, Na Hyeseok, the Undesirable: A Stage Requiem

7 A Few Productions by Kim Hyun-Tak:

8 On Lee Young-Seok’s Production of Orwell’s

9 Is Modernized Pansori Political? On Lee Jaram’s

Part 3 On a Few Theatre-Dance and Dance Performances 175

10 Woyzeck as Dance Theater: A Comparison Between

11 A Seoul Song for Hong Sehee: On the Dance Solo

12 Self-Portrait: Three Stages of Life. On a

Part 4 On a Few Cultural Performances 201

13 Parody in K-pop: An Analysis of the Video Nobody,

14 Flowers and Tears. On Park Eunyoung’s Installation

Part 5 Epilogue 245

16 Can a Foreigner Watch the Performance of Others? 247

A Spectator Who Doesn’t Have to Watch Out? 250

Introduction to the Examples and to

Theater and Theater Research in Korea

I remember asking myself, many years ago, it was in 1985 in Barcelona,

© The Author(s) 2017 3

begin, nor indeed end, on a pessimistic note. I am not claiming either to

which are always in danger of running out of steam, of sticking to a

We are in the habit of separating these pathways and these questions,

Rerouting Theory: What (a) History!

thus to imagine a setting, be it a mountain range or an ocean, that enables

of weariness in the face of intercultural experimentation, against which

Our Re-search Engines

a ­contrario when observing the fascination of Korean critics and teachers

1. Performance Studies: The expansion of the Western notion of the-

It is thus hard for scholars to evaluate the experimentation being

1. The intercultural model, developed in the 1980s, before the col-

There is an old metaphor of an hourglass with two bowls, allowing sand

2. One of these turns is towards a new narratology. The question is:

key tools: gapping (filling holes) and ending (imagining an end). To

Thus, unexpectedly, cognitive narratology leads towards the personal

a contrario when observing the fascination of Korean critics and teachers

k inesthetic subtends, precedes, and provokes the aesthetic response

ualification. This is the opposite of a humanist education, with theater or

thematic choices depend, if only in part, on the conditions of their pro-

Marie-José Mondzain, been “the decisive symptom in order that