Theatrics between Life and Death

Abstract

Soo Ryon Yoon’s ‘Theatrics between Life and Death: Performing the urban history of Garibong-dong, Seoul in Camp or the Place that Became a Lion by Miwansung Project and OLTA’ examines Camp or the Place that Became a Lion (hereinafter Camp), a site-responsive theatrical production co-created and performed by the Korean artist collective Miwansung Project and Japanese visual art group OLTA in 2014 for the Marginal Theatre Festival in Seoul. Based on participant observation in and close reading of Camp, this essay argues that theatricality as a concept and method has political potency that helps the artists create a space and undo ‘formal’ narratives about Garibong as always already a reborn space devoid of its violent and complex history and memories. The artists stage a two-part performance addressing the turbulent history of Seoul’s Garibong district, which is often imagined to be a dead, crime ridden and poverty stricken space ready to be revitalized by state-led urban regeneration campaigns. The first part is a ritualistic street procession where the artists invite the audience to walk through the streets of the Garibong district, engaging with its derelict buildings and local immigrant residents from China. The second part of the performance is an improvisatory play loosely based on Gipeun jam (Deep Sleep), a 1988 play on sleep, death and torture under the authoritarian regime. In each of these instances, the artists investigate the theme of life and death. In so doing, this essay shows, the artists recuperate the concept of theatricality to challenge the lines between death and living, theatrical and quotidian performance and formal documentation and informal memories of the urban space.

Notes

1 OLTA’s several works show actors covered in an assemblage of found objects specific to the performance site. For example, DOGU Man (2012–13), DOKI Man (2013) and KOGI Man (2014, presented as part of Camp) specifically feature actors covered in pieces of bones, soil, earthenware, fish, fruit and vegetables. The accumulation of found materials is also apparent in OLTA’s earlier works, such as Soil Shrine (2011), in which the artists collected and offered soil, straws, wood and bamboo to ‘the deities as sacrifices at the shrine’ (‘Soil Shrine’ n.d.).

2 This essay follows Korean naming conventions, in which the family name comes first.

3 The word praxis in these instances is already suggestive of the Marxist theory and practice of teaching and learning embedded in Jeon Ki-ju’s theatre making. Jeon’s Marxist orientation was neither unusual nor revolutionary, as Korean theatre makers under the anti-communist authoritarian regime of the 1980s often adopted Marxist theories to raise awareness of labour rights and working conditions among workers.

4 Here, in the original Korean script, Sumi radically shifts her tone and attitude by speaking in a commanding voice with fi rm words, instead of adopting the honorifi cs used in the earlier part of her conversation with Jun. This may not be apparent in translation, although what is still clear, at least from Sumi’s interrogating questions, is Jun’s visual hallucination caused by his insomnia, which creates a double vision of a wife-interrogator fi gure.

5 Representations of Chinese immigrants of Korean ethnicity on stage and screen warrant an in-depth analysis that is beyond the scope of this article. Korean-Chinese returnees centrally figure as criminals involved in contract killing, organized crime, phishing scams, kidnapping and organ trafficking in recent South Korean blockbuster hits, including The Yellow Sea (2010), Traffickers (2012), New World (2013), Midnight Runners (2017) and The Outlaws (2017). Racially abjected Korean-Chinese characters are symptomatic of South Koreans’ growing anxiety of internal heterogeneity, which is thoroughly revealed through the alterity of Korean-Chineseness that puts pressure on the seeming coherence and homogeneity of Koreanness (Lee 2014: 30–1).