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Jockeying for Tradition: The Checkered History of Korean Ch'anggk

Opera

Killick, Andrew P. (Andrew Peter)

Asian Theatre Journal, Volume 20, Number 1, Spring 2003, pp.

43-70 (Article)

Published by University of Hawai'i Press

DOI: 10.1353/atj.2003.0006

For additional information about this article

Access Provided by Brown University at 04/05/12 6:09PM GMT

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Jockeying for Tradition:The Checkered History ofKorean Changguk OperaAndrew P. Killick

The perception that Korea does not have a traditional theatre form comparable to thoseof other Asian countries has been widely accepted by Koreans as well as internationalobservers. The last hundred years have seen a sustained effort to fill this gap with a genrecalledchangguka type of opera using the singing style, and often the actual reper-toire, of the older musical storytelling form pansori. But admission to the hallowedranks of the traditional has not come easily, andchangguk still awaits the marks ofinstitutional recognition bestowed onpansori and other designated cultural assets.This article traces the complex and unfinished history ofchangguks efforts to positionitself relative to the traditional against the backdrop of Koreas turbulent transition

from Confucian dynastic rule through colonization, partition, and nation building.In the process, we see how a genre that seeks to associate itself with tradition has hadto address issues of historical truth, modernity, nationalism, gender, and the colonialencounter.

Andrew Killick is lecturer in ethnomusicology at the University of Sheffield, U.K.,and past president of the Association for Korean Music Research. He received his Ph.D.in ethnomusicology from the University of Washington in 1998 and served as associ-ate editor and contributing author to the East Asia volume of theGarland Encyclo-pedia of World Music (2002). His research interest in musical theatre extends fromKorean opera to Broadway and Hollywood.

Given the enormous amount of attention, scholarly and other-wise, that the theatrical traditions of Asia have attracted both at homeand abroad, one might not expect to find a whole country whose mainform of indigenous professional indoor theatre remains virtuallyunknown outside its borders and largely neglected even within them.

Yet such a country is Korea, long regarded as a land without theatreby domestic and international observers alike. William Elliott Griffiss

Asian Theatre Journal,vol. 20, no. 1 ( Spring 2003). 2003 by University of Hawaii Press. All rights reserved.

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remark that the theatre, proper, does not seem to exist in Corea(Griffis 1907, 291) was echoed almost a century later in a program noteby director Yi Chinsun: Our country originally had no theatre and nostage. As a result, it could not have its own dramatic form. . . . It is thisthat we are now trying to create for the first time.1 From the frequency

with which such statements are encountered, one might be forgivenfor supposing that theatre was unknown to Korea before the Westerninfluences of the twentieth centuryand that a distinctively Koreanstyle of theatre was left for modern directors like Yi Chinsun to create,having no basis in traditional performing arts. But in fact the effort todevelop such a style within the setting of the modern theatre has beenmarked throughout its hundred-year history by constant maneuvering

for an advantageous position relative to the traditionalby, if you will,jockeying for tradition.Moreover, we must be careful to distinguish theatre from the

theatre or theatres. While it is true that the commercial indoor the-atre with separate stage and auditorium (Griffiss theatre proper)came to the peninsula only with the dawn of the twentieth century,Korea, like the rest of the world, had always had performing arts that

were theatrical or dramatic insofar as they involved acting and thedepiction of fictional characters and events. Ever since these traditionalart forms were brought into the type of performance space that the

world calls a theatre, Koreans have been striving to create an indige-nous, traditional theatre form to show the world as a home-grownequivalent of Chinasjingju(Peking opera) or Japans kabuki.

The most likely candidate to fill this role is changguk, a type ofopera that began to develop when the musical storytelling tradition of

pansoriwas brought into the new public theatres in the early 1900s.Borrowing a phrase from Hobsbawm and Rangers much-cited book(1983), I have elsewhere described this process as the invention oftraditional Korean opera (Killick 1998a). But while Hobsbawm andRangers invented traditions are generally accepted as traditional

within a few years (1983, 1), changguk is still struggling for recognitionas traditional Korean opera after nearly a century. Its unresolvedprocess of tradition formation opens a fascinating window, not just onKorean theatre history, but on the broad social and political issues thatsurround it: issues of nation, gender, tradition, modernity, and thecolonial encounter.

I have dealt with specific aspects ofchangguk in greater depthelsewhere (Killick 1998b; 2001a; 2001b; 2002b; forthcoming). My aimhere is to provide the best general introduction available in English

(against thin enough competition, to be sure) to this little-knowngenre and its somewhat checkered history.2 This history extends from

44 Killick

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the period of Koreas forcible incorporation into the modern interna-tional world orderthrough its colonization by Japanto liberation,partition, and the growth of two hostile and ideologically divergentnation-states. (Since changguk did not in the long run survive in theDemocratic Peoples Republic of [North] Korea, however, my com-ments on the period since partition refer only to the Republic of[South] Korea.) It is a history of intersecting and sometimes conflict-ing interests that continue to be played out in changguk and in the con-testing discourses around itincluding contestation over that historyitself. There has been a great deal at stake in the invention, and thecontinual reinvention, of traditional Korean opera.

Origin Myths

Perhaps the first question to ask is why Korea at the dawn of thetwentieth century lacked a theatrical tradition to compare with thoseof China or Japan. The most convincing explanation is probably thatKorea had never developed the kind of substantial moneyed merchantclass that supported professional indoor theatre in neighboring coun-tries (Pihl 1994, 21). It did, however, have certain amateur or outdoorentertainments of a broadly theatrical nature, such as masked dance-dramas (talchum), puppet plays (kkoktu kaksi), and the motley crew ofstock characters (chapsaek)who performed as a sideshow with farmers

percussion bands (pungmulpaeor nongaktan).3Korea also had an elaborate form of musical storytelling, pan-

sori, that today holds an honored place among South Koreas officiallydesignated Intangible Cultural Assets (muhyong munhwajae). Pansorimaybe familiar to some Western readers through Im Kwontaeks film Chun-hyang(2000), now available on video with English subtitles (New Yorker

Video, ASIN: B00005O5K6), in which a dramatization of a traditionalpansoristory is framed with excerpts from the originalpansorinarrativesung by the great Cho Sanghyon. Inpansoria single vocalist, originallya male but now more often a female, delivers an entire story, or morecommonly an episode from one, taking on the roles of the various char-acters in turn and also acting as a third-person narrator.4 Pansoriper-formance is said to involve three distinct techniques: singing (chang)

with a distinctive husky and emotionally intense vocal timbre; stylizedspeech (aniri);and mimetic or expressive movement (pallimor norum-sae). The music ofpansori is organized both by melodic modes (cho)and by rhythmic cycles (changdan), the latter outlined by an accompa-nist who strikes both the head and the wooden body of the small bar-rel drum (puk). The drummer also gives shouts of encouragement and

appreciation called chuimsae, helps establish rapport with the audience,and may be addressed as if he were one of the characters in a scene,

CHANGGUK Opera 45

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

When theatres came to Korea, all of these resources, as well as asmall repertoire ofpansoristories and much of their actual words andmusic, became part of a new theatrical genre that gradually absorbedimported concepts of acting, costumes, and stage scenery (Color Plate1). Eventuallywith the addition of an accompanying orchestra, achorus of extras, other kinds of music besidespansori,various styles ofdance, and the technical capabilities of the modern theatrethe genre

would approach the proportions of grand opera. This type of operawithpansori-style singing has gone by various names but is now gener-ally known as changguk, literally meaning sung drama and frequently

glossed in English-language publicity materials as traditional Koreanopera.The historical origins of this transformation frompansori into

changguk remain a subject of debate, though it has been established atleast to my satisfaction that the most widely believed story is a fabrica-tion.5 The story is traceable to what was for two decades the only pub-lished book on changguk, Pak Hwangs Changguksa yongu(Study of theHistory ofChangguk, 1976), which quotes veteran pansori singer YiTongbaek (1866 1947) as having recollected:

The Chinese [community in Seoul] had an opera house where Chi-nese singing actors performed operas every day. . . . In addition to Chi-nese, many Koreans also attended. . . . Korean singers who happenedto be in Seoul at the time would visit out of interest and curiosity . . .and the master singer Kang Yonghwan would attend the theatre when-ever he had a chance, practically making it his home. Kang Yonghwandeveloped thepansori Song of Chunhyang into a changguk on themodel of these Chinese operas. [Pak Hwang 1976, 17; translationabridged from Pihl 1994, 4546]

Pak Hwang (1976) surmises that this production took place in theautumn of 1903 at the Wongaksa, Koreas first purpose-built theatre,

which had opened the previous year (pp. 2123). He goes on to recountthat the Wongaksa, as a venue for performing arts expressing theKorean national spirit, was closed down by the Japanese shortly afterthey established a protectorate over Korea in 1905. The performers ofthis earlychangguk, he states, then formed touring companies to seektheir fortunes in the provinces, but even these wandering troupes weredispersed in 1910 when Korea was annexed by Japan (pp. 4567).

Although Pak Hwang describes a fair amount ofchangguk activity dur-

ing the first two decades of the colonial period (pp. 6784), mostscholars (such as Pihl 1994, 50) assumed that all changguk disappeared

46 Killick

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from sight until the mid-1930s, when there was a large-scale revival. Theconsensus is that the nascent theatrical genre, created bypansorising-ers on the model of Chinese opera, was nipped in the bud by Japaneseimperialism.

Since Pak Hwangs book was written, however, meticulousresearch into contemporary newspaper reports and other primarysources has yielded little support for his account. (See, for example,Paek Hyonmi 1997, 29 90.) No definitive record has been found of aChinese theatre in Seoul, nor of a visit by a Chinese opera troupe,before the first recorded changgukproductions. The earliest unambigu-ous references to changguk describe performances at the Wongaksatheatre in 1908, some five years after the Song of Chunhyangis said to

have been dramatized (and after the changguk performers are said tohave left for the provinces following the closing of the theatre). More-over, it appears that the supposed founder ofchangguk, Kang Yong-hwan, died in 1900 before the Wongaksa was built (Paek Hyesuk 1992,7779). And yet Pak Hwangs story remains unquestioned exceptamong a handful of scholars.

While the documentary record is too thin to admit of any finaland authoritative account ofchangguks origins and early history, thepicture that emerges from the primary sources is one of Japanese and

American influences rather than Chinese. Although there is no record

of a Chinese theatre in Seoul before the emergence ofchangguk,we doknow that the American-owned Seoul Electric Company, which openeda streetcar line in Seoul around 1900, also operated a theatre of sortsat its generating station near the East Gate, where silent movies wereshown as well as live performances (Y i Kyu-tae 1970, 222). It was to thistheatre that American diplomat William Franklin Sands brought a per-formance troupe he had observed somewhere in the Korean country-side, which presented a dramatization of the popular story of Chun-hyang in a form that may have anticipated some aspects ofchangguk(Sands 1987, 179181). We also know that several Japanese theatres

were opened in Seoul after Korea became a Japanese protectorate in1905 and that Korean students had been studying in Japan and witness-ing the new school (shinpa) plays that were popular there at the time(Paek Hyonmi 1997, 64 69). It appears to have been one of these stu-dents, Yi Injik, who first brought a group ofpansorisingers together toperform a drama that we would now recognize as changguk.Yi Injiksrole is well authenticated in contemporary newspaper accounts, but

pansori singer Kang Yonghwan is not mentioned at all.6

Why, then, has a story that does not square with the sources

come to be so widely believed? The answer, I suggest, lies in precon-ceptions concerning the colonial relationship with Japan and the ear-

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lier tributary relationship with China. Koreans generally acknowledgeChina as the source of much Korean high culture, while the Japanesecolonization of 19101945 continues to be blamed for many of thecountrys contemporary ills. Pak Hwangs story may not fit comfortably

with the documentary record, but it fits extremely comfortably withthe received idea that China has contributed positively to Korean cul-ture while Japanese imperialism merely uprooted and suppressed anyKorean aspiration toward progress. The idea of aproductiveJapaneseinfluence has been virtually unthinkable within this view of history.

Yi Tongbaeks testimony derives from interviews conducted inthe late colonial and early postliberation years, more than three decadesafter the time to which he referred. Even if he was aware of Yi Injiks

role and motives and remembered the circumstances accurately, hewould have had every reason to downplay any Japanese connections.The colonial regime became increasingly harsh and demanding duringits last ten years as Japan stepped up its military program in variousparts of Asia, and the colonists must have been more unpopular thanever in Korea. And after liberation, to tell the story I have told wouldhave been to lay the changguk performers open to the charge of collab-orationisma charge that some of them did, in fact, have to face (Suh

Yon-Ho 1994, 99). An influence from China was much more acceptable,for China had been recognized for centuries as the legitimate source of

a civilization that Korea was proud to shareand China had been anenemy of Japan in the recent war. The accepted story thus emerges asan origin myth that confers legitimacy on the genre.

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

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

myth.

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Serving the Great

By itself, the case ofchangguk might suggest that the creation of

such origin myths is simply a reaction to the colonial experienceacover-up operation to hide the skeleton of a colonial origin in thecloset of a genres forgotten past. But a couple of parallel examples willshow that similarly implausible claims of continuity with venerated Chi-nese sources have been part of the discourse on Korean performingarts since long before the colonial period. Intangible Cultural Asset 1,for instance, is the aak:Confucian ceremonial music and dance thatoriginated with two huge gifts of instruments from Song-dynasty Chinain 1114 and 1116. The prevailing Korean view ofaakwas well expressedin 1973 by Song Kyong-rin, who made the same claim for aakthat Japa-

nese writers have made for the distantly related genre gagaku:

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

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

Provine concludes that while Koreans have for centuries con-

sidered a-akto be Chinese in origin, style, and spirit, in reality Koreana-ak. . . is no more Chinese than seventeenth-century opera is Greekor all piano music is Italian (p. 23). He adds that his findings mightnot be welcomed by those who consider Korea a cultural dependencyof China and who like to think that it is authentic Chineseya-yuehwhichnow survives in Korea (ibid.). But as late as the 1970s, when both SongKyong-rins article on aakand Pak Hwangs book on changgukwerepublished, to claim a Chinese origin for something was to enhance itsimage in Korean eyes.

This attitude clearly reflects the traditional Korean deference to

CHANGGUK Opera 49

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the Middle Kingdom, a principle known as sadae(serving the great)or, more pejoratively, sadae -juui(sometimes translated as flunkeyism).Hwang Byung-ki (2002) uses the latter term in a paper that traces theKorean habit of claiming Chinese origins back at least to the time ofthe original gift ofaakinstruments. Hwang reexamines an account ofthe origins of the Korean zithers kayagum and komungofrom the oldestextant Korean source on music, Kim Pusiks History of the Three Kingdoms.Dated to 1145, this work cites a still earlier but no longer extant vol-ume, the Silla kogi(Old Record of the Silla Kingdom), which is said tohave stated that the komungowas modeled on the Chinese qin(SongBang-song 1980, 26). But as Hwang points out, the two instrumentsresemble each other only in the most superficial way. While both are

of the long zither type, thekomungohas raised frets, movable bridges,and a pencil-like plectrum, none of which is found on the qin. Similarraised frets are, however, found on theja-kheof Thailand (Miller 1998,239) and the m jan of Myanmar (Burma; Becker and Garfias 2001,571572), which are much more likely relatives according to organo-logical evidence.7

Intriguingly, Hwang suggests that Kim Pusik associated thekomungowith the qinbecause of its function rather than its form: bothinstruments were vehicles of self-cultivation for the literati. The logic isthe same as that of Robert Van Gulik in his celebrated book on the qin,

The Lore of the Chinese Lute(Van Gulik 1969, ix), where he chooses totranslate qin as lute, though aware that it is technically a zither,because of his view that the qinheld a position in traditional Chineseculture equivalent to that held by the lute in Renaissance Europe. KimPusiks objective, similarly, was perhaps to show that Korea had aninstrument equivalent to the qin, revered as a symbol of cultivation andrefinement among the ruling class.

Here again we find a Chinese antecedent invoked to legitimizea Korean cultural product, and the origin myth ofchangguk begins toreveal itself as just one instance of a deeply rooted Korean discursivepractice. In placing the origins ofchangguk in a more proper contextthan the origin myth provides, we will need to range beyond the Koreanpeninsula to the Asian continent and its broad history of encountersbetween indigenous performing arts and the encroachments of colo-nialism.

The Pan-Asian Context

Theatre forms in many ways analogous to changgukwere takingshape under parallel circumstances all over Asia in the late nineteenth

and early twentieth centuries. Such dramas formed the subject of aseries of panels in the conference Audiences, Patrons, and Performers

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in the Performing Arts of Asia at Leiden University, the Netherlands,in August 2000. In the call for proposals, the panel convener, Hanne deBruin, suggested the term hybrid-popular theatres as a name for thesenovel forms of drama that arose in various parts of South and South-east Asia as a result of direct and indirect contacts between indigenousexpressive genres and Western, melodramatic performance conven-tions and proscenium stage techniques, which were imported into Asiaduring colonial times. 8 She further noted: The emergence and riseto popularity of the hybrid-popular theatres appear to have been stim-ulated by the demand among local audiences for novelty.. . . For theirrevenues, the hybrid-popular theatres depended on the new conventionof ticket sales and on the exploitation of a newly emerging perfor-

mance market. Their grounding in a commercial base distinguishedthem from earlier theatres, which depended on community or royalpatronage.

It was immediately clear to me that according to this definition,Korean changgukwould be a good example of hybrid-popular theatre.I also noticed that Northeast Asia had not been mentionedno doubtbecause the region was not extensively colonized by European powersand had its own well-established theatrical traditions long before West-ern-style drama came on the scene. But Korea was the exception: it hadnever developed its own forms of commercial indoor theatre like those

of China and Japan, and it did undergo colonization, not by a Euro-pean power, but by a highly westernized Japan. It was largely throughthe increasing Japanese presence in the years preceding annexation in1910 that Korea came to develop a form of drama closely matching deBruins description of hybrid-popular theatre. Though this art formarose without the direct influence of the broad hybrid-popular theatremovement in South and Southeast Asia, much less of Western theatreitself, it reproduced the defining characteristics of that movement in aseparate but parallel development.

In the most general terms, all parts of Asia had some form ofdrama before coming under the influence of the West. Except in Chinaand Japan, however, these dramas were not performed in public the-atres but in the private courts of the elite or the open communal spacesof the folk, often as part of a religious festival. Typically, mythical sto-ries of supernatural beings were conveyed through song, dance, andmime, and everything was stylized and exaggerated. What distinguisheshybrid-popular theatre is that elements of these local narrative and dra-matic traditions are brought together with conventions deriving from

Western theatre: performances are given in an enclosed space open to

all those, and only those, who will pay the price of admission; the sub-ject matter is more human; and the presentation is more realistic.

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The first Asians to perform theatre of this type appear to havebeen members of the Parsi community in Bombay around 1850. ManyParsis had become wealthy by trading with the British East India Com-pany and were eager to send their children to the recently openedElphinstone College, where British-style amateur theatricals becamefashionable among students. From these emerged professional Parsitheatre troupes that enlivened the spoken dramas with songs and spec-tacle to appeal to a diverse audience and help them cross linguistic bar-riers when they began to tour widely in India and abroad in the 1870s(Hansen 1992, 7985; 2002).

By the end of the century, traveling Parsi troupes had performedin Singapore, the Malay Straits, Penang, Burma, and the Netherlands

East Indies. And wherever they went, their popularity inspired the for-mation of local troupes following their example. In British Malaya, forinstance, the hybrid-popular theatre genre that later became known asbangsawanfirst emerged in the 1870s under the name oftiruan wayangParsi or imitation Parsi theatre (Tan 1989, 231). In Java the visitingParsi troupes inspired not one but several local forms of hybrid-popu-lar theatre: the short-lived komedie Jawaand wayang cerita of the 1870sand the more intensively commercialized and influential komedie Stam-boelof the 1890s (Cohen 2001, 315330). In India they spawned innu-merable local derivatives such as the Special Drama (special natakam)

and Boys Companies of Tamilnadu (Seizer 1997, 66).But the burgeoning of hybrid-popular theatre forms in late-

nineteenth-century Asia was not simply a response to the Parsi theatreand its widespread influence. Even within India, the extensive touringof the Parsi troupes was not the only factor promoting the emergenceof more or less westernized theatre styles outside the Bombay area. Afirsthand account of the origins of the modern Bengali theatre by musi-cologist and composer Sourindro Mohun Tagore (1963, 84) does notmention the Parsi troupes at all but gives the impression of a separateand almost contemporaneous development. Such genres could arise

without the influence of the Parsi theatre if the social and politicalconditions were propitious, and these conditions were generallybrought about by colonization. In Calcutta as in Bombay, the socialand economic transformations wrought by British colonization hadspawned a prosperous merchant class with the leisure and disposableincome to support professional theatre, while visiting Europeantroupes and British amateur theatricals had provided models for a styleof performance that was perceived as up-to-date and cosmopolitan. Sim-ilar transformations accompanied Dutch colonization in Java, where

wayang wong drama changed from a royal court entertainment to acommercial art form without emulating the Parsi model (Cohen 2001,

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323325), and French colonization in Vietnam, where drama adoptedWestern conventions such as spoken dialogue without ever beingexposed to the Parsi theatre or its derivatives (Gibbs 2000).

Evidently, hybrid-popular theatre in Asia is a phenomenon ofpolygenesis rather than pure diffusion. Without direct influence, sim-ilar conditions in different places led to the repetition of the same pat-tern: colonization brings economic change, of which one symptom isthe commercial indoor theatre with its ticket sales, proscenium arch,and realist conventions. New forms of theatre are inspired by thedesire to emulate the colonist and to meet audience demand for nov-elty. But familiar local elements, frequently musical, are retained toavoid challenging the audience too much. Seen in this comparative

context, the origin ofchangguk need not be explained through storieslike that of the Koreanpansori singer inspired by Chinese opera; thegenre was a predictable response to conditions that were producingsimilar responses elsewhere.

Inventing a Tradition

Insofar as there was a single originator ofchangguk, the evidencesuggests that it was not apansorisinger at all but a figure much less pal-atable to Korean nationalist sensibilities: the pro-Japanese writer andpoliticianYi Injik (18621916). While studying in Japan around the turn

of the century, Yi Injik had become familiar with the popular Japaneseinterpretation of Western melodrama, shinpa gekior new school the-atre (Kim and Pak 1995, 553). At that time shinpa still bore traces ofits earlier incarnationthe late-nineteenth-century political dramas(sshi geki) that were used for campaigning in the early days of Japanesedemocracyand this may have led Yi Injik to see the stage as a suit-able platform for his political ideas.9

With this in mind, in 1908 Yi Injik brought together a group ofpansori singers to perform a drama of his own composition. He musthave realized that these singers were the only available performers withdramatic skills that would be relevant to his objectives. For his part, heknewpansoriwell, having earlier translated one of the stories into Japa-nese, and thus was capable of writing in thepansori style. Accordinglyhe wrote a novella called Unsegye(Silver World), the first half of which

was made to resemble the style of apansoritext so that it could be per-formed as a drama by a group ofpansorisingers. The story exposed thehopeless corruption (as Yi saw it) of Koreas social order and thus, byimplication, advocated the need for external intervention.

Borrowing another idea from shinpa,Yi Injik advertised the pro-

duction as an example of sinyonguk (new drama) in contrast to thekuyonguk (old drama) of traditional arts likepansori. (The Japanese

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termshinpahad been coined in 1897 to contrast with thekyhaor oldschool ofkabuki;Leiter 1997, 588.) He began instructing thepansorisingers in the new dramatic techniques that would be needed to pre-sentSilver Worldon the stage. Meanwhile, to defray expenses, thepan-sorisingers performed episodes from their existing repertoire,graduallyadopting the new theatrical mode of presentation they were learning.These fundraising performances became the earliest presentations inchangguk format of which any contemporary record survives.

We are fortunate to have a detailed account of one of these per-formances, written by one Major Herbert H. Austin, who happened to

visit the Wongaksa (which he called the Theatre Royal) during aweeks trip to Korea in October 1908:

Desirous of seeing Korean life in all its different aspects, we paid a visitafter dinner to the Theatre Royal, close by, and derived no little enter-tainment from watching several acts of a Korean play, performedmainly by men and boys. The building in which it took place was oneof some size, the seats in the body of the hall being raised in stepsuntil they reached the level of the gallery or promenade, on which wehad our seats in a private box on the right-hand side. There were fouror five boxes on each side of the hall; those on the left, reserved forKorean ladies, being all full. Not understanding a word of the lan-guage, we were, of course, unable to fathom the plotif there was one

at allthough a gigantic paper or cardboard pumpkin, which wasrepeatedly being cut, seemed to be the chief cause of interest in thishighly sensational drama. Most of the dialogue was chanted to theaccompaniment of a drum played by a man on the stage, and fromtime to time supers strolled across the scene as though they regardedthemselves as invisible for theatrical purposes. The music was by nomeans discordant, and the high falsetto voice so commonly heard inIndia appeared to be considered worthy of commendation in Korea,as applause occasionally broke out when a peculiarly high note hadbeen successfully grappled with. At the end of each scene a red-and-

white curtain, running along a wire, was pulled across the stage fromone side, and a member of the company would come before the foot-lights and hold forth to the audience, whom he was apparently inform-ing what might be expected in the scene about to follow. [Austin1910, 196197]

Though Austin showed no awareness that he was witnessing somethingnew to Korea, this passage is the earliest description of a changguk per-formance that has come to light, predating any surviving Korean source.It bears unmistakable references to both the repertoire and the sing-

ing style ofpansori,while indicating that the performance was given bymultiple singing actors in dialogue format and that some degree of

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visual presentation was attempted. The reference to a pumpkin, whichwas repeatedly being cut identifies the story as that of Hungbo, one ofthe popular heroes of thepansorirepertoire, and the drum that accom-panies the singing is presumably the barrel drum (puk) that providesthe sole instrumental accompaniment in pansori. The member of thecompany who would hold forth between the dramatized scenes isevidently the narrator (tochang), a device that probably arose when dia-logue passages from existingpansoritexts were performed by twopan-sori singers taking the roles of the characters while a third was neededto deliver the third-person narration. Later, when stage scenery wasadded, the narrator became a convenient device for holding the audi-ences attention while the set was changeda practice still seen in

changguk today.Although we have no comparable account ofUnsegye itself, weknow that it created a sensation and proved a hard act to follow. Yi Injikmoved on to other interests, and no one was ready to step into hisshoes. With the advent of actual shinpa dramas performed by Koreantroupes, as well as imported silent movies with live interpreters (pyonsa),changgukwas unable to compete for novelty value. Its exponents triedto appeal to the sense of tradition instead and changed its name fromnew drama to kupa(old school) or kuyonguk (old drama) before it

was in fact even five years old (Paek Hyonmi 1997, 91116). Thus began

the project of inventing traditional Korean opera.

National Drama

If progressive-minded Koreans could find their entertainmentin films and spoken plays, those who wanted something traditionalcould still hearpansoriand other indigenous performing arts. Fallingbetween these two stools, changgukwas unable to find a fruitful nichein the performance market and became mainly a matter of drama-tized highlights from thepansori stories performed with minimal the-atrical equipment by struggling itinerant variety troupes.

Changguk limped on in this form through most of the colonialperiod until its vigorous revival in the mid-1930s through the activitiesof an organization called the Choson Songak Yonguhoe (Korean VocalMusic Association).10 The background to this revival goes back to theMarch 1 Independence Movement of 1919, which convinced the Japa-nese authorities of the necessity to allow a safe outlet for Korean nation-alist aspirations. The safety valve took the form of a limited culturalmovement that would promote Korean national culture to the point

where, at some remote and indefinitely postponed future date, the

colony would be sufficiently advanced to stand alone as an indepen-dent nation (Robinson 1988). By the early 1930s, the movement had

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