Archaeology, Emotional Storytelling, and Performance

Abstract

Archaeologists tell stories about the past through the interpretation of material remains, frequently an emotional pursuit. Even so, the profession is often represented simplistically, dispassionately, or problematically, according to perspectives on practice that have little to do with the actuality. The South Korean stage musical Return: The Promise of the Day is an example of how the representation of archaeology and archaeological fieldwork specifically have been incorporated into staging and storytelling to tell difficult stories about the past to both domestic and international audiences. The practice of conflict archaeology is represented as a means of facilitating the understanding of violent conflict across generations. This paper accounts for how Return makes use of archaeology, further showcasing the potential for representations of archaeology and archaeological practice to tell emotional stories and expand heritage audiences.

Keywords:

• archaeology
• fieldwork
• media
• conflict archaeology
• representations

Introduction

This paper is about stories, and the way that archaeology facilitates storytelling. Archaeologists are storytellers, and archaeology itself is an effective medium of communication. Archaeological methodologies involve systems of record-keeping and specialized techniques for recording, excavation, analysis, and interpretation. Fictionalized representations of archaeological work, therefore, are surprisingly light on detail. Recent attempts to incorporate the practice as a storytelling device have been met with mixed reactions from the profession and the public, ranging from light-hearted derision in the case of BBC’s one-season series Bonekickers (2008) to nostalgic delight in the case of the Netflix film The Dig (2021). Archaeology can be more than just an activity to tell a story around, however, and there is significant potential in the ways in which the representation of the practice of archaeology can facilitate storytelling. 귀환 그날의 약속 (translated as Return: The Promise of the Day, henceforth referred to as Return) (2019) is a South Korean stage musical which showcases the potential in making use of the representation of archaeological fieldwork and record-keeping in telling emotional stories. This paper discusses the representation of archaeology as a means of facilitating the telling of difficult or uncomfortable narratives, and the way the representation of archaeology can communicate across language barriers to diverse audiences.

Return is about a traumatized veteran of the Korean War, and his grandson who works to exhume war dead through archaeology as an active-duty soldier in the army of the Republic of Korea. The story is told through non-linear flashbacks and contemporary episodes during which the veteran’s grandson comes to understand the reality of war and his grandfather’s personal history. Material culture and human remains play a key role in the stage design, and as characters engage with items in both the past and present, the practice of archaeology is represented as a medium through which people in the present may come to understand and sympathize with the past. Ultimately, the musical is an emotional memorial to lost youth, and a critical take on the popular representation of war, with archaeology as an active element of the staging and storytelling process. As a non-Korean, I can only represent the view of an outsider in this paper, and thus the focus of this study is to consider how the representation of archaeology effectively communicates the emotional and charged history of the Korean War, in a way that is accessible to a non-Korean audience.

An additional element for consideration in this paper is how the participation of performers known outside of South Korea in the September 2020 staging of the musical facilitated wider engagement with this story, making the need for communication across language barriers necessary in this instance. The musical was produced with both professional musical actors and soldiers of the Republic of Korea, crucially starring several popular ‘idol’ singers and famous actors throughout its performance history, while these men were undergoing their mandatory periods of military service. The 2020 performances of Return were also impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic and were thus streamed online rather than performed to live audiences, as with previous staging. As such, the high-profile castings and the online streaming of the performances meant that Return had significant international engagement. Streamed with subtitles for accessibility, Return tells an emotional story of one soldier’s war to both a domestic and international audience in an interesting and nuanced way.

The first part of this paper will offer an overview of the musical and the context in which it is set. The second part will focus on the representation of archaeology and storytelling in Return and how this representation informs broader scholarship on archaeology as a storytelling medium. The final part will briefly account for the staging of Return as an opportunity to engage non-traditional audiences in difficult histories through the representation of archaeology. Overall, my paper considers how archaeology is deployed as a kind of common grammar through which broad, transnational audiences may engage with difficult histories and the enduring legacy of twentieth-century conflict.

Return and the archaeology of the Korean War

Reading and writing about the Korean War from the perspective of a non-Korean has been an illuminating, sometimes discomfiting experience. Many of the major English-language works on the conflict tell the story of the UN troops deployed there, and the Korean experience (on either side), if it is represented at all, is frequently reduced to how soldiers and civilians engaged with allies and enemies. Koreans, whether combatants or civilians, frequently read in this scholarship as outsiders in their own civil war. The memory of that war in the imagination of the Americans, whose troops comprised the majority of the UN Forces fighting on the South Korean side between 1950 and 1953, has come to dominate much of the English-language scholarship on the subject. In Embattled Memories, a study of the memorialization and memory of the Korean War, Suhi Choi talks about the ‘collective memory’ of the Korean War in the American imagination as a narrative of heroism and altruism, while counter-narratives are often forgotten (2014: 13). In Return, storytelling elements disrupt this Westernized perspective on the Korean War even as the musical acknowledges the dominance of that narrative in the popular imagination, not only to a foreign audience but also to young people in South Korea.

War divides populations and communities, and the ideological conflict often lives on long after the ceasefires or treaties have been agreed. The memory of the Korean War in the West is fragmentary and transnational, often described in dissociative terms; in many cases the memory of the war is dominated by its aftermath and the domestic political fallout for its foreign combatants. The American experience of the war has come to dominate the international narrative, and Bruce Cumings sums up a particular twentieth-century genre of American perspectives on the war as being, in large part, lacking in ‘knowledge of Korea or its history’ (2010: 71). As neither an heroic victory nor a catastrophic failure for the American military, the Korean War became designated as a ‘Forgotten War’ amongst the American public (Lee, 2013: 347). In America and beyond, the memory of the war has been used as a tool, its temporality or periodization frequently obscured for political effect or provocation (Hong, 2015: 601). And yet, on the Korean peninsula, the legacy of that war is ever-present in the physical landscape of the country. The 250 km long Demilitarized Zone (DMZ) separates the two Koreas cuts through the peninsula, sealing the south off from approaches by land and creating a hard terrestrial line across which the north of the peninsula can only be glimpsed from the south. The memory of the war transcends individual memory to become a ‘collective experience’ (Kim, 2015), ever-present.

The setting of Return within the memory of a veteran highlights the way in which the war continues to define landscapes and relationships even seventy years after the imposition of the border. The narrative of Return as a reflection on the tragedy of war fits with this later approach. The most compelling feature of this setting is the lack of Western voices in it, and the omission of any political positioning by the characters. While there is a long tradition of South Korean cinema focused on the war itself, particularly in the decades which followed the war, the cinematic representation of the war has in many cases explicitly anti-communist narratives, underlining a state-supported ideology which reinforced (often conservative) social values (An, 2015: 788–90), reflecting a tightly controlled dominant narrative and memory of the war in South Korea during the 1960s and 1970s (Lee, 2013: 344, 347). In the wake of the Sunshine Policy — the South Korean policy of cooperation with North Korea initiated in the late 1990s — new narrative approaches highlighting the tragic elements of the war without the overt political agenda of the Cold War period were produced for film and television (Yi, 2018: 119), though the dominance of that Cold War narrative in early Hallyu (Korean Cultural Wave) films has been noted as a factor in the initial decline in popularity of Korean cinema in the 2000s (Kim, 2011). More recently, engagements with the war by artists and performers, including events like DMZ2000, attempt to resituate the conflict in the landscape, though as Kim points out representations of the war cannot communicate the trauma of the event (2011: 385–86). The performance considered here is thus part of a long tradition of attempting to represent the trauma of the war and its legacy and memory across various media.

Return: The Promise of the Day centres around the story of two protagonists, Hyunmin and his grandfather Seungho. Hyunmin, an underachieving cultural anthropology student, lives with his grandfather, who he affectionately admonishes for wandering the hills in his spare time. Seungho’s story is told in two parts, in the present day where Seungho is an eccentric old man, and in the past where he is a carefree student before the outbreak of war. The story follows both men and the theme of ‘finding’ or ‘seeking’ runs through the performance. Seungho finds friends in his youth, and after the war dedicates himself to ‘seeking’ his lost friends throughout his life. Hyunmin looks for purpose and joins the military, where his job involves finding the remains of war dead. Hyunmin’s journey can be aligned with that of the audience member unfamiliar with the reality of war.

Towards the end of Act 1 Hyunmin creatively constructs an imagined past for his grandfather which is far removed from the war Seungho experienced. As Hyunmin sings about the war, he reclines in a chair while a burning cityscape rises around him. He wears 3D glasses and holds a box of popcorn, reacting to the dramatic war he imagines. The cityscape is populated by well-equipped soldiers in clean uniforms, and his grandfather (an old man in Hyunmin’s memory) is amongst them brandishing a gun. It is key to the story that Hyunmin never imagines his grandfather as a young man until later in the performance. The war is presented by Hyunmin as a heroic filmscape, in which Seungho — his grandfather — covers himself in glory through valiant deeds. Hyunmin continues to engage in this fantasy for the rest of the scene, until the reality of war as seen through the excavation project begins to permeate his sunny disposition.

Materially, this scene communicates the naïveté of a youth who has never experienced conflict. It also suggests the lack of substantive communication between Hyunmin and Seungho about the latter’s youth in general, and his experience of the war in particular. This can be read as a generational divide that is not immediately apparent to an outsider. Seeing his now-elderly grandfather as a tragic figure who roams the hills searching for the friends he lost in the war, Hyunmin creates a disconnect between who his grandfather is and was. He imagines a glorious youth for his grandfather constructed through a cinematic lens, materially reinforced with the Americanized paraphernalia of a film-war: machine guns, explosions, crumbling cityscapes. Interestingly, the representation of the war that is recalled in this scene is interchangeable with any of the American films about the Second World War produced in the second half of the twentieth century. This is interesting, considering the proliferation of Korean-made films produced in the first decades of the twenty-first century which explore the difficult memory and unreconciled geography of the Korean War in more nuanced ways (Yi, 2018: 139). These narratives, and Hyunmin’s own personal journey of discovery in Return, cut through the UN Forces-focused narrative of the war which is more familiar to a global audience. Indeed, Hyunmin’s imagined war borders on the pastiche, making this interpretation of the war vaguely ridiculous in the eyes of the audience.

The cultural memory of the Korean War beyond the Korean peninsula is, arguably, dominated by an American recollection of the war in retrospect and mixed with American domestic discomfort with the Vietnam War decades later. Historian Max Hastings has argued that, by virtue of the fact that television was not yet widespread during the Korean War, the conflict was ‘less real’ in the Western public imagination than the later conflict in Vietnam (1987: 331). The prominence of the UN Forces in the popular narrative of the war and specifically the overwhelmingly American elements of them in their pursuit to ‘save’ South Korea, has been maintained in the official discourse of memory surrounding the war (Choi, 2014: 4). Though American involvement in the Korean War was the driver behind the proliferation of an American military presence globally, it is often overshadowed in its importance and centrality to US domestic politics by preceding and successive wars (Cumings, 2010: 172–73). The Korean War has often been used as a cipher for discomfort surrounding the memory of the Vietnam War in screen media (the clear example of this being the film M*A*S*H [1970]). In Return, Hyunmin’s cinematic imagining of the Korean War, materially synonymous with representations of the Second World War or Vietnam, is seen in the recollection of ‘Dirty faces, white teeth, zippo lighters, photos of lovers’ (Return, 2019). As Hyunmin’s later experience on the archaeological excavation gives him a keener sense of the war as it happened, he matures and becomes more serious. His manner towards his grandfather by the end is one of respectful reverence. Archaeology acts as a catalyst to his maturity, offering a material ‘experience’ which brings him closer to his and his family’s past.

The reality of warfare begins to settle on Hyunmin as he participates in the archaeology project. This deliberate and somewhat jarring shift in the character’s tone halfway through the performance is poignant. The audience member is now presented with a juxtaposition to their own assumptions about what was important in the past. It is key that the story does not discuss the idea of a divided Korean peninsula, which is only mentioned in passing in a single scene. Indeed, the musical is curiously un-regional, with only a few cities referred to by name. A Western news-orientated perspective on the two Koreas as defined by division is not present and the current political situation is only referred to vaguely. Interestingly, the Second World War — the great conflict of Western powers in the mid-twentieth century — is referred to in just one song (as the Pacific War), though the backdrop for the movie version of the war as imagined by Hyunmin overtly recalls urban warfare amongst European-style buildings. The wider global geopolitical implications of the conflict which have come to dominate narratives on the Korean War, especially from an American perspective (Choi, 2014: 14), are not part of the story.

Throughout Return, the audience member is gradually introduced to discomfort surrounding the discussion of the war. The older generation is represented in the character of the older Seungho, who clearly remembers both the tragic and happy aspects of his youth but who finds his ebullient and immature grandson a difficult audience to communicate with. His grandson is similar in manner to a childhood friend, and the two Seunghos with their serious attitudes towards both study and war act as a foil to Hyunmin and the childhood friend’s more bombastic personalities. Archaeology becomes the medium through which the two Seunghos — the still-grieving older man and the traumatized youth — reconcile with their friends. Through collaborative participation in the excavation project, Seungho finally has a means by which to ‘find’ his friends and communicate his past to his grandson without having to talk about it, while the excavation process catalyses Hyunmin’s emerging maturity. The audience, too, is invited to gain new insight into the conflict. An understanding of the issues surrounding memory and the Korean War may lend an international visitor an understanding of the complexities of how the war is remembered, and thus make for more tactful tourists to sensitive sites.

Archaeology and storytelling

The following section will address the representation of archaeology as a means of storytelling in the performance. There is an established scholarship on archaeological representations, on which this paper draws. In his work on archaeology and popular culture, Archaeology is a Brand!, Holtorf (2007) recalls the link between emotion and physicality in the popular understanding of archaeology. In the popular imagination, archaeology ‘is about the hardship of fieldwork, the longing for treasures and the joys of discovery’, and in the public imagination, archaeology is inexorably tied to fieldwork and discovery, to doing (2007: 131). This interpretation certainly chimes with my experience as an archaeologist, of communicating archaeology in the field, in the classroom, and in village halls in the United Kingdom. Archaeologists engaging with media companies to support work on the recovery of the remains of soldiers lost in war is a feature of archaeological practice in the West, and occasionally a funding stream for necessary work as outlined by Jon Price in the case of recovering Great War dead in Northern Europe (2007: 183). The representation of archaeological practice in Return is stage-based and appears to communicate recording and excavation practices well enough to carry the meaning of their work — the doing — to the audience. How accurate the practice is does not distract from the story. Simulacra or representations are tools for engagement that do not rely on authenticity but rather on audience engagement with meaning. Studies on video game representations of places of historical significance such as Douglas Dow’s work on Assassins Creed II and engagement with historical Florence underscore this. Dow argues that authenticity or the fact of something being a simulation matters less than the meanings that those simulations evoke, and that games like Assassins Creed II can facilitate imagination and engagement with historical sites (2013: 227–28). The fictional representation of this practice is less common, though even in documentaries the narrative of discovery is still prevalent in representations of the profession. The theme of discovery alongside excitement formed the impression of who archaeologists are in John Gale’s study on representations of archaeologists in science fiction media (2002: 5), where the representation of archaeologists in television programmes like Star Trek drives exciting, adventure-filled plots that often commentate on contemporary political or social issues. Return rather challenges this view of the archaeologist as an adventurer, though the trope of archaeologist as mediator between the past and the present is deployed, highlighting the mundanity and process of archaeological fieldwork as a means of reasserting reality into the worldview of a fanciful man. In this way, archaeology is represented here as a kind of catharsis or journey of personal discovery, as well as national and archaeological discovery. Archaeology is increasingly associated with catharsis, with the process of healing.

Though not a ‘pageant’ performance such as that described by Shaw and Richardson in their discussion of the English heritage performance Kynren, Return does share some traits with pageantry and national narratives, specifically the use of ‘atmosphere’ to communicate emotion; like the performance in that study, Return manages to ‘impress rather than to tell’ (2022: 364). The healing power of ‘finding’ communicated through archaeology does not need to be explained. Rather, the use of song and the communication of emotion through material culture and archaeological practice on the stage effectively impresses the depth of emotion. Well-being and mental health are key considerations in funding for archaeology projects. Well-being has come to be articulated in policy and institutional approaches as part of the public benefit of archaeology. Well-being and the benefits of engaging in archaeology for community and place-making as well as personal growth are driving strategies and considerations for heritage in Historic England, for example (see Monckton, 2021). Programmes like Operation Nightingale (see Everill, et al., 2020) reflect how conflict archaeology can have a transformative and cathartic impact on those who engage in it. Return also reflects this and goes further to demonstrate the opportunities inherent in coproducing research with interested communities and stakeholders towards addressing personal and national trauma. Return represents archaeology variously on-stage as an act contemporaneous with and alongside the actions of war: while soldiers fight and die, present-day soldiers record their remains and the landscape around them. The recovery of fallen soldiers is central to the plot, and a key feature of the staging. The excavation and identification of human remains after conflict is ongoing around the world. Often carried out in collaboration with military bodies, with political groups, or charities, the excavation of human remains from conflict is a controversial topic. However, the process of recovering the remains of lost persons can be therapeutic and aid in the healing of social and political wounds in the aftermath of conflict. The physical exposure of human remains can humanize and individualize a narrative and reinforce familial or relationship bonds between grieving relatives and their dead loved ones (Renshaw, 2011: 123–24). These activities are never apolitical, however, and the political overtones of the process are a theme in Return; a song which concludes the performance includes the line ‘When the last soldier returns home, the war will be over’. The subtext of these lyrics cannot be lost on the audience, whether domestic or international. In the following section, I will account for how Return deploys archaeological fieldwork as a narrative device to communicate personal growth and grief, and also as a means of evidencing the benefit of real-world recovery excavations at conflict sites.

Archaeological apparatuses form a central part of the staging of Return. Methods for excavation and recording on archaeological sites are clearly identifiable in the hands of modern-day soldiers. Clipboards, binders, and cameras carried by soldiers vouch for the practice of identifying and recording evidence. Brushes and shovels are wielded by soldiers around the stage to illustrate the active excavation process. The veteran informants occupy the same timeline as the modern-day soldier-excavators, old men who advise the soldiers on landscape features where they may find remains. A clip of these scenes is included in a sampler video on the production company’s YouTube channel; at 03.30 in the video, the younger and older versions of Seungho share the stage as a soldier is identified (YouTube, 2020). On the stage, when human remains are discovered, they are cordoned off with yellow tape (marked, in this case, with the name of the project and the numbers 6.25 — a shorthand for the Korean War indicating the first day of the war, 25 June 1950). The tape itself is the kind of stay back furniture of excavation familiar to any archaeologist. It was interesting to reflect, as a viewer, on how non-archaeologists interpret the furniture and artefacts of archaeological practice. Their use in the staging suggests that these objects are familiar enough to be visual shorthand for good archaeological practice to a non-specialist. The artefacts themselves underscore both the mundanity and the reality of the situation. One of the key excavation scenes is accompanied by a song in which Hyunmin reflects that real life is not like a movie or a photograph, evidencing his loss of naïveté as the human remains instil in him a sense of the reality of conflict, recalling earlier songs sung by Seungho about the loss of boyhood through war.

One aspect of archaeological practice used to good effect in this performance and reflecting interpretation and identification practice in archaeology is the use of personal artefacts as identifying markers. An odd pair of boots belonging to one of the soldiers, for example, is notably identified by the older Seungho as belonging to one of his friends. The circumstances under which the boots come to be where they are is explained in flashbacks, foregrounding the object’s biography as a major plot point. The object and the character become analogous in the memory of the veteran. The musical does this several times, notably with a bottle of pills belonging to a character who finds themselves, for various reasons, invisible in the bureaucratic record of the war. The use of artefacts to tell stories in the context of conflict archaeology is well grounded. In her work on the exhumation of remains from the Spanish Civil War, Layla Renshaw discusses the importance of objects — suits, pocket watches, rings – in the identification process for human remains (2011: 92). The stories which emerge around objects as they are exhumed reflect how identity is communicated through objects and dress. Additionally, the objects come to embody both the spirit of the person in the memory of survivors and family members, and a material link to a version of the past which the survivors or family recall. This is clearly represented in Return.

The practicalities of doing archaeology and the challenges of identifying specific individuals play a central role in the musical without being overstated. Archaeology is used as a storytelling device, another means of communicating one of the major themes of the performance, ‘finding’ and ‘being found’. When the soldiers in the past sing of how their fellow soldiers will not abandon them but come back for them, they are faced by the present-day soldier-archaeologists whose job is to exhume their remains. As one of the excavators, the former cultural anthropology student Hyunmin guides his grandfather and other veterans around former sites to identify features where human remains might lie. The excavators are seen recording sites and remains through photography and drawing and laying-out found remains according to rigorous fieldwork procedures. Some consultation with archaeologists clearly informed these scenes, which reflect real-world projects of this nature currently being undertaken. Legislation and a dedicated Commission were established to oversee the recovery of remains from the Korean War in the 2000s, for which projects are carefully legislated for and supported by the South Korean government (Tourigny, et al., 2020: 373). The recent excavation of remains within the DMZ at Arrowhead Ridge is ongoing. Arrowhead Ridge was a site of intense fighting during the Korean War and the excavation for South Korean remains on the site represents a significant agreement between the two Koreas and was part of the Comprehensive Military Agreement of 2018. Even before 2018, joint excavations between the South Korean army and the US Armed Forces were ongoing since 1996. The repatriation of remains is a key factor in US Foreign Policy, and the United States has negotiated with North Korea regarding the repatriation of their own dead (Kwon, 2020: 170). The representation of the excavation project in the musical invokes real-world projects. Indeed, the material detail in which the excavation is represented and the seriousness of the actors and actor-soldiers in their treatment of it invite the viewer to look up real projects (as I did). The final scene of the performance, in which soldiers and soldier-actors in dress uniform hold boxes draped in the taegeukgi (the flag of South Korea), invokes military memorial ceremonies and, at the time of viewing in autumn 2020, recalled the recent 70th-anniversary memorial of the war. This memorial took place in June 2020 and involved a ceremony in which the remains of 120 South Korean soldiers were repatriated. The ongoing recovery of remains forms part of the Authorized Heritage Discourse around the war in South Korea. For instance, a reconstruction of the archaeological site at Baekseok Mountain where the remains of Sergeant Lee Cheon Woo are preserved under a glass floor is one of the first displays visitors view, at the Korean War exhibit at the War Memorial of Korea in Seoul (Figure 1). As such the act of recovery is already in the national discourse surrounding the war and is communicated in the performance without foregrounding. For international viewers, the representation of archaeological fieldwork is a communicative tool to relay the ongoing practice in non-verbal ways. For the international viewer, this is an accessible means of understanding a complex practice.

Figure 1 Reconstructed recovery site of Sergeant Lee at the War Memorial of Korea.

Author, 2022

Hallyu as a cultural facilitator

In this final section, I will briefly account for international viewership. I will discuss the circumstances surrounding the popularity of this particular performance of Return, and the potential for these kinds of performances to represent difficult narratives about history to non-expert audiences. First of all, language was not a barrier to understanding the major themes in this performance. Indeed, as a remote, non-Korean audience member of Return, I was immediately struck by the ease by which I was able to consume and understand the nuances of the subject matter. The English language subtitles facilitated comprehension, while the subject of the musical — lost youth and acceptance of difficult pasts across a generational divide — was carefully communicated through music, set design, representations of archaeology (as described above), and choreography. However, it would be remiss of me not to mention that the main draw for much of the international audience to this autumn 2020 performance of Return were the K-pop ‘idol’ singers who were cast in the principal roles, as the international reach of this performance is what makes the use of archaeological fieldwork representations more powerful as a narrative device.

Idol singers are popular singers associated with the Korean cultural or hallyu wave. The Korean Hallyu wave is a cultural movement originating in the late 1990s to promote Korean culture overseas. Hallyu content — films, television, music — has been significant in promoting a positive familiarity with South Korea overseas and has been a significant contributor to tourism to the country since the start of the twenty-first century. Within this discourse, the term ‘idol’ commonly refers to soloists or members of Korean boy or girl groups who have undergone specialized training to become singers under the management of a company, a process throughout which hopeful trainees are constantly assessed (Kang, 2017: 137). Idol singers usually begin their careers in their late teens or early twenties, meaning that male idols frequently defer their period of mandatory military enlistment so as to prolong their careers. At the time of writing, the Republic of Korea requires male citizens to enlist in the military at some point between the ages of 18 and 28 (Military Service Act, 2011: Article 3). Service lasts for a period of up to 24 months depending on the branch of the military they enlist in. As most idols are in their teens and twenties, undertaking mandatory military service while still a notable celebrity is common. At the time of the Return performance, three members of the popular boy group EXO were undertaking their military duties; EXO are a nine-member group managed by SM Entertainment and based in South Korea. Groups like EXO perform to massive international audiences. Their online following is one of the largest in K-Pop (Elberse and Woodham, 2020: 6, 18). In September 2020, two members were cast in the lead roles of Return, which they rotated with two other singers. Casting these singers in a military musical while enlisted is not uncommon and draws international interest to any public performances. The September 2020 staging of Return featured Do Kyung-soo and Kim Min-seok as the younger version of main characters Seungho, and his grandson Hyunmin, respectively. These roles alternated between Do and Kim, and two other performers (also celebrities) during the live-stream run of the musical, which consisted of four performances broadcast online on 25 and 26 September 2020. The third performance featured both Do and Kim in the lead roles. Significantly for their fans, this was the first time the idols had shared a stage since Kim enlisted in early 2019, so the performance was eagerly anticipated amongst a large international fanbase.

The urge to write about archaeological representations came about during the performance itself as I drew inferences between the performance and my own research interests. The audience for the performance comprised fans from across the world, not all of whom would normally engage with a heritage performance or historically based musical. This is not uncommon in K-Pop fandom, where fans will engage with multiple media forms associated with the focus of their fandom. For example, the Serpentine Gallery in London credited a massive uptick in social media engagement and visitor numbers in the first half of 2020 to their installation Cathersis by Jakob Kudsk Steensen, part of the free global art project Connect, BTS, in partnership South Korean boy band BTS (The Serpentine Trust, 2020). K-Pop fandom is an extensive, international mediascape (as defined by Arjun Appadurai) (1990: 9), an entangled web of music and video content, social media spaces, exhibitions, and products, comprising engagements with culture, but also with politics and society, mediated through a multi-lingual lexicon. The proliferation of K-Pop popularity around the world is facilitated by social media engagements, spearheaded for most of the last decade by streaming platforms (Oh and Lee, 2013: 34–58). Actively engaging in live events via the internet is a central part of K-Pop fandom, as fans tune in en masse to live television broadcasts; EXO’s appearance on Arirang TV’s After School Club in 2013, for instance, broke records for viewership, drawing nearly 45,000 live viewers from 114 countries (Kim, 2018: 81), speaking to both their popularity and the uptake of engagement with these platforms from well before the COVID-19 pandemic.

For a military musical like Return, fans engaged with the subject matter as much as the singers they admire and their specific roles within the narrative. Korean history in general has been a subject of growing interest to global audiences, as historical dramas and idol performance stages make use of traditional Korean hanboks, artwork, and even pansori, a form of musical storytelling which has been inscribed in the UNESCO register of Intangible Cultural Heritage since 2003 (2020). This engagement runs alongside a surge in Korean language-learning amongst fans, driven by an interest in closer engagement with the subject of their fandom. The language barrier between global fans and the content they consume is actively facilitated by both official and fan translators on social media platforms, just as Korean-speaking fans themselves facilitated the expansion of Hallyu content (Jin and Yoon, 2016: 1285). In the r/kpop subreddit (online community) after the September 2020 broadcasts of Return, users suggested that the musical be broadcast like any other online concert, suggesting that the high viewer figures could be furthered (Reddit, 2020). Many English-language responses to a Twitter post by Insight Entertainment announcing the broadcasts enquired about ticket-buying options for international audiences, some even suggesting platforms that fans were more familiar with for streaming (Twitter, 2020). Fans themselves are acutely aware of their potential as a market.

Audiences for military musicals like Return vary considerably. For this musical, engagement extended beyond domestic Korean theatre audiences to take in global fans of Korean popular culture. While global audiences are not the primary audience for this performance, the provision of a streaming platform accessible worldwide with subtitles in English indicates that a global audience was planned for. The activities of idol singers while undergoing mandatory military service are closely watched by K-Pop fans worldwide so the audience for this musical would reasonably include a subset of viewers beyond expected demographics, a heterogenous, transnational viewership. The casting of two members of a single group, whose popularity since their debut in 2012 extends far beyond the Korean domestic music scene, meant that a significant international audience streamed the live musical. Any generalization of gender, race, sexuality, or age in this fandom would be reductive to a transnational audience. As such, I will not attempt to speculate here, without further data being made available. It is enough to say that fan communities make vibrant, transnational cultural audiences, and engagement with those audiences offers an opportunity for widening participation in more traditional forms of heritage and cultural engagement.

Conclusion

Archaeology is frequently called upon in media as a storytelling device. Archaeology is represented across visual media as an adventurer’s occupation, a plot device to facilitate discovery, or far more problematically as a cipher for perpetuating outdated, colonial readings of the past. What archaeologists actually do, and the potential for the practice of archaeology to contribute to healing – whether that be bodies or minds or difficult histories – is not often portrayed. As such, when the South Korean stage musical Return employed the practice of archaeology as a plot device and staging technique in telling stories about the past across generations, the staging was an opportunity to examine the potential for this kind of archaeology representation in storytelling. This is a good working example of how the representation of archaeology can be deployed in a way that is both nuanced and constructive. Return, through its use of staging and objects, demonstrates the value in archaeology as a means of telling stories about the past that are not possible or are uncomfortable in other media, both in representation and in reality. Furthermore, the story’s focus on finding as both a personal journey and the outcome of archaeological practice speaks to a broader idea of how the practice itself as well as the outcome or findings can contribute to wellbeing. The story of Return, about understanding a complex historical conflict across the generational divide, employs archaeology as a storytelling device, an actionable act of ‘finding’ to represent the journeys of self-discovery undertaken by the two principal characters.

An extra dimension to the performance is the casting of notable singers from Korean popular music. In addition, the COVID-19 pandemic meant that the performance was live-streamed through its entire September 2020 run, opening engagement to a much broader demographic beyond the domestic audience who would normally have been present for its staging. This is significant as these two elements of the performance in September 2020 meant that it was watched and engaged with beyond those who might normally watch, by a broader audience than would normally be drawn to a history-based performance. In this context, archaeology became a kind of non-verbal shorthand, a practice which transcends language so that the nuanced and emotional messages of the performance can be understood broadly.

The close material engagement inherent in the practice and representation of archaeology can communicate stories about the past in a nuanced and emotional way. The familiarity of archaeological practice to broad international audiences means that this communicative process is not laboured or overstated, but simply speaks for itself. Return showcases the potential for how archaeological practice can be portrayed to tell complex and emotional stories about the past without compromising on the integrity of the discipline or the serious nature of the subject matter in question.

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Katherine Fennelly

Katherine Fennelly (PhD, Manchester 2013) is an archaeologist based at the Department of Archaeology at the University of Sheffield, where she teaches cultural heritage management. She specializes in the architecture, built heritage, and material culture of improvement in the modern period. She has published on institutions, and the use of space in historic buildings. Her research interests include historical archaeology, improvement, and the role of the state in the past, cultural heritage issues, dark heritage, and built heritage, as well as the representations of the past.