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

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Jockeying for Tradition: The Checkered History of Korean Changguk Opera

Andrew P. Killick

The perception that Korea does not have a traditional theatre form comparable to those of other Asian countries has been widely accepted by Koreans as well as international observers. The last hundred years have seen a sustained effort to ll this gap with a genre called changguka type of opera using the singing style, and often the actual reper toire, of the older musical storytelling form pansori. But admission to the hallowed ranks of the traditional has not come easily, and changguk still awaits the marks of institutional recognition bestowed on pansori and other designated cultural assets. This article traces the complex and unnished history of changguks efforts to position itself 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 had to address issues of historical truth, modernity, nationalism, gender, and the colonial encounter. Andrew Killick is lecturer in ethnomusicology at the University of Shefeld, 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 associate editor and contributing author to the East Asia volume of the Garland Encyclopedia of World Music (2002). His research interest in musical theatre extends from Korean opera to Broadway and Hollywood.

Given the enormous amount of attention, scholarly and otherwise, that the theatrical traditions of Asia have attracted both at home and abroad, one might not expect to nd a whole country whose main form of indigenous professional indoor theatre remains virtually unknown outside its borders and largely neglected even within them. Yet such a country is Korea, long regarded as a land without theatre by domestic and international observers alike. William Elliott Grifss
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 (Grifs 1907, 291) was echoed almost a century later in a program note by director Yi Chinsun: Our country originally had no theatre and no stage. As a result, it could not have its own dramatic form. . . . It is this that we are now trying to create for the rst time. 1 From the frequency with which such statements are encountered, one might be forgiven for supposing that theatre was unknown to Korea before the Western inuences of the twentieth centuryand that a distinctively Korean style of theatre was left for modern directors like Yi Chinsun to create, having no basis in traditional performing arts. But in fact the effort to develop such a style within the setting of the modern theatre has been marked 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 theatre with separate stage and auditorium (Grifss 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 the depiction of ctional characters and events. Ever since these traditional art forms were brought into the type of performance space that the world calls a theatre, Koreans have been striving to create an indigenous, traditional theatre form to show the world as a home-grown equivalent of Chinas jingju (Peking opera) or Japans kabuki. The most likely candidate to ll this role is changguk, a type of opera that began to develop when the musical storytelling tradition of pansori was 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 of traditional Korean opera (Killick 1998a). But while Hobsbawm and Rangers invented traditions are generally accepted as traditional within a few years (1983, 1), changguk is still struggling for recognition as traditional Korean opera after nearly a century. Its unresolved process of tradition formation opens a fascinating window, not just on Korean theatre history, but on the broad social and political issues that surround it: issues of nation, gender, tradition, modernity, and the colonial encounter. I have dealt with specic aspects of changguk in greater depth elsewhere (Killick 1998b; 2001a; 2001b; 2002b; forthcoming). My aim here is to provide the best general introduction available in English (against thin enough competition, to be sure) to this little-known genre and its somewhat checkered history. 2 This history extends from

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

Origin Myths
Perhaps the rst question to ask is why Korea at the dawn of the twentieth century lacked a theatrical tradition to compare with those of China or Japan. The most convincing explanation is probably that Korea had never developed the kind of substantial moneyed merchant class that supported professional indoor theatre in neighboring countries (Pihl 1994, 21). It did, however, have certain amateur or outdoor entertainments of a broadly theatrical nature, such as masked dancedramas (talchum), puppet plays (kkoktu kaksi), and the motley crew of stock characters (chapsaek) who performed as a sideshow with farmers percussion bands (pungmulpae or nongaktan).3 Korea also had an elaborate form of musical storytelling, pansori, that today holds an honored place among South Koreas ofcially designated Intangible Cultural Assets (muhyong munhwajae). Pansori may be familiar to some Western readers through Im Kwontaeks lm Chun hyang (2000), now available on video with English subtitles (New Yorker Video, ASIN: B00005O5K6), in which a dramatization of a traditional pansori story is framed with excerpts from the original pansori narrative sung by the great Cho Sanghyon. In pansori a single vocalist, originally a male but now more often a female, delivers an entire story, or more commonly an episode from one, taking on the roles of the various characters in turn and also acting as a third-person narrator. 4 Pansori performance is said to involve three distinct techniques: singing (chang) with a distinctive husky and emotionally intense vocal timbre; stylized speech (aniri); and mimetic or expressive movement (pallim or norum sae). The music of pansori is organized both by melodic modes (cho) and by rhythmic cycles (changdan), the latter outlined by an accompanist who strikes both the head and the wooden body of the small barrel 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,

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though he (drummers are invariably male) does not himself act in the role of a character. When theatres came to Korea, all of these resources, as well as a small repertoire of pansori stories and much of their actual words and music, became part of a new theatrical genre that gradually absorbed imported concepts of acting, costumes, and stage scenery (Color Plate 1). Eventuallywith the addition of an accompanying orchestra, a chorus of extras, other kinds of music besides pansori, various styles of dance, and the technical capabilities of the modern theatrethe genre would approach the proportions of grand opera. This type of opera with pansori -style singing has gone by various names but is now generally known as changguk, literally meaning sung drama and frequently glossed in English-language publicity materials as traditional Korean opera. The historical origins of this transformation from pansori into changguk remain a subject of debate, though it has been established at least to my satisfaction that the most widely believed story is a fabrication.5 The story is traceable to what was for two decades the only published book on changguk, Pak Hwangs Changguksa yongu (Study of the History of Changguk, 1976), which quotes veteran pansori singer Yi Tongbaek (1866 1947) as having recollected:
The Chinese [community in Seoul] had an opera house where Chinese singing actors performed operas every day. . . . In addition to Chinese, many Koreans also attended. . . . Korean singers who happened to be in Seoul at the time would visit out of interest and curiosity . . . and the master singer Kang Yonghwan would attend the theatre whenever he had a chance, practically making it his home. Kang Yonghwan developed the pansori Song of Chunhyang into a changguk on the model of these Chinese operas. [Pak Hwang 1976, 17; translation abridged from Pihl 1994, 4546]

Pak Hwang (1976) surmises that this production took place in the autumn of 1903 at the Wongaksa, Koreas rst purpose-built theatre, which had opened the previous year (pp. 2123). He goes on to recount that the Wongaksa, as a venue for performing arts expressing the Korean national spirit, was closed down by the Japanese shortly after they established a protectorate over Korea in 1905. The performers of this early changguk, he states, then formed touring companies to seek their fortunes in the provinces, but even these wandering troupes were dispersed in 1910 when Korea was annexed by Japan (pp. 45 67 ). Although Pak Hwang describes a fair amount of changguk activity dur ing the rst two decades of the colonial period (pp. 6784), most scholars (such as Pihl 1994, 50) assumed that all changguk disappeared

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from sight until the mid-1930s, when there was a large-scale revival. The consensus is that the nascent theatrical genre, created by pansori singers on the model of Chinese opera, was nipped in the bud by Japanese imperialism. Since Pak Hwangs book was written, however, meticulous research into contemporary newspaper reports and other primary sources has yielded little support for his account. (See, for example, Paek Hyonmi 1997, 29 90.) No denitive record has been found of a Chinese theatre in Seoul, nor of a visit by a Chinese opera troupe, before the rst recorded changguk productions. The earliest unambigu ous references to changguk describe performances at the Wongaksa theatre in 1908, some ve years after the Song of Chunhyang is said to have been dramatized (and after the changguk performers are said to have left for the provinces following the closing of the theatre). Moreover, it appears that the supposed founder of changguk, Kang Yong hwan, died in 1900 before the Wongaksa was built (Paek Hyesuk 1992, 7779). And yet Pak Hwangs story remains unquestioned except among a handful of scholars. While the documentary record is too thin to admit of any nal and authoritative account of changguks origins and early history, the picture that emerges from the primary sources is one of Japanese and American inuences rather than Chinese. Although there is no record of a Chinese theatre in Seoul before the emergence of changguk, we do know that the American-owned Seoul Electric Company, which opened a streetcar line in Seoul around 1900, also operated a theatre of sorts at its generating station near the East Gate, where silent movies were shown as well as live performances (Yi Kyu-tae 1970, 222). It was to this theatre that American diplomat William Franklin Sands brought a performance troupe he had observed somewhere in the Korean countryside, which presented a dramatization of the popular story of Chunhyang in a form that may have anticipated some aspects of changguk (Sands 1987, 179 181). We also know that several Japanese theatres were opened in Seoul after Korea became a Japanese protectorate in 1905 and that Korean students had been studying in Japan and witnessing 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 rst brought a group of pansori singers together to perform a drama that we would now recognize as changguk. Yi Injiks role 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 preconceptions concerning the colonial relationship with Japan and the ear-

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lier tributary relationship with China. Koreans generally acknowledge China as the source of much Korean high culture, while the Japanese colonization of 19101945 continues to be blamed for many of the countrys contemporary ills. Pak Hwangs story may not t comfortably with the documentary record, but it ts extremely comfortably with the received idea that China has contributed positively to Korean culture while Japanese imperialism merely uprooted and suppressed any Korean aspiration toward progress. The idea of a productive Japanese inuence has been virtually unthinkable within this view of history. Yi Tongbaeks testimony derives from interviews conducted in the late colonial and early postliberation years, more than three decades after the time to which he referred. Even if he was aware of Yi Injiks role and motives and remembered the circumstances accurately, he would have had every reason to downplay any Japanese connections. The colonial regime became increasingly harsh and demanding during its last ten years as Japan stepped up its military program in various parts of Asia, and the colonists must have been more unpopular than ever in Korea. And after liberation, to tell the story I have told would have 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 inuence 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 an enemy of Japan in the recent war. The accepted story thus emerges as an origin myth that confers legitimacy on the genre. One of the archetypes of postcolonial consciousness is represented by the protagonist of Salman Rushdies novel Midnights Children, Saleem Sinai, born at the exact moment of Indias independence, to an Indian mother and a British father. The baby Saleem is switched at birth with a child of purely Indian parents who raise him in the belief that he is their own son. In telling the story, the adult Saleem comments: My inheritance includes this gift, the gift of inventing new parents for myself whenever necessary (Rushdie 1980, 125). Changguk, too, seems to have invented new parents for itself in response to the postcolonial predicament. The newly liberated nation needed to assert its right to political independence through symbols that would express its cultural independence from its former colonists. One such symbol might be the possession of a traditional musical theatre form that could be held up as the equal of, though distinct from, kabuki or 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 of changguk might suggest that the creation of such origin myths is simply a reaction to the colonial experiencea cover-up operation to hide the skeleton of a colonial origin in the closet of a genres forgotten past. But a couple of parallel examples will show that similarly implausible claims of continuity with venerated Chinese sources have been part of the discourse on Korean performing arts since long before the colonial period. Intangible Cultural Asset 1, for instance, is the aak: Confucian ceremonial music and dance that originated with two huge gifts of instruments from Song-dynasty China in 1114 and 1116. The prevailing Korean view of aak was well expressed in 1973 by Song Kyong-rin, who made the same claim for aak that Japa nese writers have made for the distantly related genre gagaku:
[Aak] probably represents the most ancient tradition alive in the Orient. It is only in Korea that the tradition has been maintained continuously since the introduction of the music from China in the twelfth century, and it is this music alone of all the music received from China which has not been transformed totally beyond recognition at the hands of Korean musicians and has been preserved, presumably, in essentially unaltered form. [Song Kyong-rin 1973, 142]

But as Robert Provine (1980) has shown, the idea that this music has been preserved . . . in essentially unaltered form is wishful thinking at best. The tradition of aak was anything but continuous: almost all the instruments of the original gift were destroyed when the Korean capital was sacked in the Red Turban invasion of 1361, and the subsequent fteenth-century Korean effort to restore the ancient Confucian tradition resulted in what was essentially the creation of a new Korean genre. Since then, however, aak has been faithfully preservedprecisely because it was believed to represent an older Chinese practice. Provine concludes that while Koreans have for centuries considered a-ak to be Chinese in origin, style, and spirit, in reality Korean a-ak . . . is no more Chinese than seventeenth-century opera is Greek or all piano music is Italian (p. 23). He adds that his ndings might not be welcomed by those who consider Korea a cultural dependency of China and who like to think that it is authentic Chinese ya-yueh which now survives in Korea (ibid.). But as late as the 1970s, when both Song Kyong-rins article on aak and Pak Hwangs book on changguk were published, to claim a Chinese origin for something was to enhance its image in Korean eyes. This attitude clearly reects the traditional Korean deference to

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the Middle Kingdom, a principle known as sadae (serving the great ) or, more pejoratively, sadae-juui (sometimes translated as unkeyism). Hwang Byung-ki (2002) uses the latter term in a paper that traces the Korean habit of claiming Chinese origins back at least to the time of the original gift of aak instruments. Hwang reexamines an account of the origins of the Korean zithers kayagum and komungo from the oldest extant Korean source on music, Kim Pusiks History of the Three Kingdoms. Dated to 1145, this work cites a still earlier but no longer extant volume, the Silla kogi (Old Record of the Silla Kingdom), which is said to have stated that the komungo was modeled on the Chinese qin (Song Bang-song 1980, 26). But as Hwang points out, the two instruments resemble each other only in the most supercial way. While both are of the long zither type, the komungo has raised frets, movable bridges, and a pencil-like plectrum, none of which is found on the qin. Similar raised frets are, however, found on the ja-khe of Thailand (Miller 1998, 239) and the m jan of Myanmar (Burma; Becker and Garas 2001, 571572), which are much more likely relatives according to organological evidence. 7 Intriguingly, Hwang suggests that Kim Pusik associated the komungo with the qin because of its function rather than its form: both instruments were vehicles of self-cultivation for the literati. The logic is the 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 to translate qin as lute, though aware that it is technically a zither, because of his view that the qin held a position in traditional Chinese culture equivalent to that held by the lute in Renaissance Europe. Kim Pusiks objective, similarly, was perhaps to show that Korea had an instrument equivalent to the qin, revered as a symbol of cultivation and renement among the ruling class. Here again we nd a Chinese antecedent invoked to legitimize a Korean cultural product, and the origin myth of changguk begins to reveal itself as just one instance of a deeply rooted Korean discursive practice. In placing the origins of changguk in a more proper context than the origin myth provides, we will need to range beyond the Korean peninsula to the Asian continent and its broad history of encounters between indigenous performing arts and the encroachments of colonialism.

The Pan-Asian Context

Theatre forms in many ways analogous to changguk were taking shape under parallel circumstances all over Asia in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Such dramas formed the subject of a series 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 de Bruin, suggested the term hybrid-popular theatres as a name for these novel forms of drama that arose in various parts of South and Southeast Asia as a result of direct and indirect contacts between indigenous expressive genres and Western, melodramatic performance conventions and proscenium stage techniques, which were imported into Asia during colonial times. 8 She further noted: The emergence and rise to popularity of the hybrid-popular theatres appear to have been stimulated by the demand among local audiences for novelty.. . . For their revenues, the hybrid-popular theatres depended on the new convention of ticket sales and on the exploitation of a newly emerging performance market. Their grounding in a commercial base distinguished them from earlier theatres, which depended on community or royal patronage. It was immediately clear to me that according to this denition, Korean changguk would be a good example of hybrid-popular theatre. I also noticed that Northeast Asia had not been mentionedno doubt because the region was not extensively colonized by European powers and had its own well-established theatrical traditions long before Western-style drama came on the scene. But Korea was the exception: it had never developed its own forms of commercial indoor theatre like those of China and Japan, and it did undergo colonization, not by a European power, but by a highly westernized Japan. It was largely through the increasing Japanese presence in the years preceding annexation in 1910 that Korea came to develop a form of drama closely matching de Bruins description of hybrid-popular theatre. Though this art form arose without the direct inuence of the broad hybrid-popular theatre movement in South and Southeast Asia, much less of Western theatre itself, it reproduced the dening characteristics of that movement in a separate but parallel development. In the most general terms, all parts of Asia had some form of drama before coming under the inuence of the West. Except in China and Japan, however, these dramas were not performed in public theatres but in the private courts of the elite or the open communal spaces of the folk, often as part of a religious festival. Typically, mythical stories of supernatural beings were conveyed through song, dance, and mime, and everything was stylized and exaggerated. What distinguishes hybrid-popular theatre is that elements of these local narrative and dramatic 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 subject matter is more human; and the presentation is more realistic.

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The rst Asians to perform theatre of this type appear to have been members of the Parsi community in Bombay around 1850. Many Parsis had become wealthy by trading with the British East India Company and were eager to send their children to the recently opened Elphinstone College, where British-style amateur theatricals became fashionable among students. From these emerged professional Parsi theatre troupes that enlivened the spoken dramas with songs and spectacle to appeal to a diverse audience and help them cross linguistic barriers when they began to tour widely in India and abroad in the 1870s (Hansen 1992, 79 85; 2002). By the end of the century, traveling Parsi troupes had performed in Singapore, the Malay Straits, Penang, Burma, and the Netherlands East Indies. And wherever they went, their popularity inspired the formation of local troupes following their example. In British Malaya, for instance, the hybrid-popular theatre genre that later became known as bangsawan rst emerged in the 1870s under the name of tiruan wayang Parsi or imitation Parsi theatre (Tan 1989, 231). In Java the visiting Parsi troupes inspired not one but several local forms of hybrid-popular theatre: the short-lived komedie Jawa and wayang cerita of the 1870s and the more intensively commercialized and inuential komedie Stamboel of the 1890s (Cohen 2001, 315 330). In India they spawned innumerable 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 latenineteenth-century Asia was not simply a response to the Parsi theatre and its widespread inuence. Even within India, the extensive touring of the Parsi troupes was not the only factor promoting the emergence of more or less westernized theatre styles outside the Bombay area. A rsthand account of the origins of the modern Bengali theatre by musicologist and composer Sourindro Mohun Tagore (1963, 84) does not mention the Parsi troupes at all but gives the impression of a separate and almost contemporaneous development. Such genres could arise without the inuence of the Parsi theatre if the social and political conditions were propitious, and these conditions were generally brought about by colonization. In Calcutta as in Bombay, the social and economic transformations wrought by British colonization had spawned a prosperous merchant class with the leisure and disposable income to support professional theatre, while visiting European troupes and British amateur theatricals had provided models for a style of performance that was perceived as up-to-date and cosmopolitan. Similar transformations accompanied Dutch colonization in Java, where wayang wong drama changed from a royal court entertainment to a commercial art form without emulating the Parsi model (Cohen 2001,

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323 325), and French colonization in Vietnam, where drama adopted Western conventions such as spoken dialogue without ever being exposed to the Parsi theatre or its derivatives (Gibbs 2000). Evidently, hybrid-popular theatre in Asia is a phenomenon of polygenesis rather than pure diffusion. Without direct inuence, similar conditions in different places led to the repetition of the same pattern: colonization brings economic change, of which one symptom is the commercial indoor theatre with its ticket sales, proscenium arch, and realist conventions. New forms of theatre are inspired by the desire to emulate the colonist and to meet audience demand for novelty. But familiar local elements, frequently musical, are retained to avoid challenging the audience too much. Seen in this comparative context, the origin of changguk need not be explained through stories like that of the Korean pansori singer inspired by Chinese opera; the genre was a predictable response to conditions that were producing similar responses elsewhere.

Inventing a Tradition
Insofar as there was a single originator of changguk, the evidence suggests that it was not a pansori singer at all but a gure much less palatable to Korean nationalist sensibilities: the pro-Japanese writer and politician Yi Injik (18621916). While studying in Japan around the turn of the century, Yi Injik had become familiar with the popular Japanese interpretation of Western melodrama, shinpa geki or new school theatre (Kim and Pak 1995, 553). At that time shinpa still bore traces of its earlier incarnationthe late-nineteenth-century political dramas (sshi geki) that were used for campaigning in the early days of Japanese democracyand this may have led Yi Injik to see the stage as a suitable platform for his political ideas. 9 With this in mind, in 1908 Yi Injik brought together a group of pansori singers to perform a drama of his own composition. He must have realized that these singers were the only available performers with dramatic skills that would be relevant to his objectives. For his part, he knew pansori well, having earlier translated one of the stories into Japanese, and thus was capable of writing in the pansori style. Accordingly he wrote a novella called Unsegye (Silver World), the rst half of which was made to resemble the style of a pansori text so that it could be performed as a drama by a group of pansori singers. The story exposed the hopeless corruption (as Yi saw it) of Koreas social order and thus, by implication, advocated the need for external intervention. Borrowing another idea from shinpa, Yi Injik advertised the production as an example of sinyonguk (new drama) in contrast to the kuyonguk (old drama) of traditional arts like pansori. ( The Japanese

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termshinpa had been coined in 1897 to contrast with the kyha or old school of kabuki; Leiter 1997, 588.) He began instructing the pansori singers in the new dramatic techniques that would be needed to present Silver World on the stage. Meanwhile, to defray expenses, the pansori singers performed episodes from their existing repertoire, gradually adopting the new theatrical mode of presentation they were learning. These fundraising performances became the earliest presentations in changguk format of which any contemporary record survives. We are fortunate to have a detailed account of one of these performances, written by one Major Herbert H. Austin, who happened to visit the Wongaksa (which he called the Theatre Royal) during a weeks trip to Korea in October 1908:
Desirous of seeing Korean life in all its different aspects, we paid a visit after dinner to the Theatre Royal, close by, and derived no little entertainment from watching several acts of a Korean play, performed mainly by men and boys. The building in which it took place was one of some size, the seats in the body of the hall being raised in steps until they reached the level of the gallery or promenade, on which we had our seats in a private box on the right-hand side. There were four or ve boxes on each side of the hall; those on the left, reserved for Korean ladies, being all full. Not understanding a word of the language, we were, of course, unable to fathom the plotif there was one at allthough a gigantic paper or cardboard pumpkin, which was repeatedly being cut, seemed to be the chief cause of interest in this highly sensational drama. Most of the dialogue was chanted to the accompaniment of a drum played by a man on the stage, and from time to time supers strolled across the scene as though they regarded themselves as invisible for theatrical purposes. The music was by no means discordant, and the high falsetto voice so commonly heard in India appeared to be considered worthy of commendation in Korea, as applause occasionally broke out when a peculiarly high note had been successfully grappled with. At the end of each scene a red-andwhite curtain, running along a wire, was pulled across the stage from one side, and a member of the company would come before the footlights and hold forth to the audience, whom he was apparently informing what might be expected in the scene about to follow. [Austin 1910, 196 197 ]

Though Austin showed no awareness that he was witnessing something new 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 singing style of pansori, while indicating that the performance was given by multiple singing actors in dialogue format and that some degree of

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visual presentation was attempted. The reference to a pumpkin, which was repeatedly being cut identies the story as that of Hungbo, one of the popular heroes of the pansori repertoire, and the drum that accompanies the singing is presumably the barrel drum (puk) that provides the sole instrumental accompaniment in pansori. The member of the company who would hold forth between the dramatized scenes is evidently the narrator (tochang), a device that probably arose when dialogue passages from existing pansori texts were performed by two pansori singers taking the roles of the characters while a third was needed to deliver the third-person narration. Later, when stage scenery was added, the narrator became a convenient device for holding the audiences attention while the set was changeda practice still seen in changguk today. Although we have no comparable account of Unsegye itself, we know that it created a sensation and proved a hard act to follow. Yi Injik moved on to other interests, and no one was ready to step into his shoes. With the advent of actual shinpa dramas performed by Korean troupes, as well as imported silent movies with live interpreters (pyonsa), changguk was unable to compete for novelty value. Its exponents tried to appeal to the sense of tradition instead and changed its name from new drama to kupa (old school) or kuyonguk (old drama) before it was in fact even ve years old (Paek Hyonmi 1997, 91116). Thus began the project of inventing traditional Korean opera.

National Drama
If progressive-minded Koreans could nd their entertainment in lms and spoken plays, those who wanted something traditional could still hear pansori and other indigenous performing arts. Falling between these two stools, changguk was unable to nd a fruitful niche in the performance market and became mainly a matter of dramatized highlights from the pansori stories performed with minimal theatrical equipment by struggling itinerant variety troupes. Changguk limped on in this form through most of the colonial period until its vigorous revival in the mid-1930s through the activities of an organization called the Choson Songak Yonguhoe (Korean Vocal Music Association). 10 The background to this revival goes back to the March 1 Independence Movement of 1919, which convinced the Japanese authorities of the necessity to allow a safe outlet for Korean nationalist aspirations. The safety valve took the form of a limited cultural movement that would promote Korean national culture to the point where, at some remote and indenitely postponed future date, the colony would be sufciently advanced to stand alone as an independent nation (Robinson 1988). By the early 1930s, the movement had

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inspired a growing intereston the part of Japanese as well as Korean scholars in Korean folk culture as an expression of national identity. Meanwhile the popular media began to publicize the idea that this identity might be expressed in cultural forms such as the performing arts. Thus on March 29, 1931, the newspaper Tonga Ilbo stated: Our Korea, which has had its own culture from ancient times, has also had its own [way of ] singing. The joy expressed in that singing was our joy, and the sadness expressed in that singing was our sadness, so that this [singing] was the mouthpiece of our lives. Such statements laid a foundation for the idea, taken for granted in the postcolonial period, that the affective life of Korean people was different from that of other nations and, moreover, that distinctive styles in the performing arts captured this difference. It was during this period that the genre name changguk came to be used for the rst time, and in other respects as well the Choson Son gak Yonguhoe created a new form of changguk with most of the fea tures we would recognize in the genre today. The performance of complete dramas, rather than separate episodes, became standard; spoken dialogue was added in the process of dramatization; an orchestra of traditional instruments supplemented the puk barrel drum of pansori; and visual appeal was enhanced with more elaborate costumes, scenery, and dancing. The scale of most productions, however, remained modest by todays standards, especially when the shows were taken on tour. The nal years of the colonial period, as mentioned earlier in connection with Yi Tongbaeks retelling of the origins of changguk, witnessed an increasingly harsh regime in which the public expression of a separate Korean identity was no longer tolerated. While the authorities believed that the theatre could become a powerful vehicle of state propaganda in Korea as it had been in Japan, they strove for a compromise between allowing it to retain enough familiar elements to attract a Korean audience and insisting that every performance be given at least partly in the Japanese language. With liberation from Japanese rule in 1945 came the partition of the Korean peninsula into Soviet and American occupation zones, each of which established itself as a republic in 1948. Communist North Korearegarding traditional culture as, at best, material for improvement and at worst a hangover of a stratied feudal societyeventually replaced changguk with its own version of revolutionary opera (Suh Yon-Ho 1991). The South, by contrast, developed an ideology of preservation that maintained the colonial-era view of traditional music as an expression of the unique Korean national identity. In the South the performing arts were brought into the agenda of nation building as all forms of traditional Korean music came to be known by the generic

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term kugak (national music) while changguk took the name kukkuk (national drama) (Paek Hyonmi 1997, 334 339). The stage would appear to have been set for at least one part of Korea to assert itself as a distinct nation with a theatre form of its own. But from the beginning, the nature of the new nation and the right to represent it in performance were hotly contested.

Nation and Gender

The rst female pansori singers, trained in the late nineteenth century, had been kisaeng entertainers, the Korean equivalent of the Japanese geisha. During the colonial period, pansori came to be more and more the province of this profession to the point where what had once been an all-male art form came to be dominated numerically by women. Groups of kisaeng had performed scenes from changguk, taking the male as well as the female roles, as early as the 1910s. But it was not until after liberation that they developed a fully edged all-female opera form inspired by Japans Takarazuka Revue but using traditional rather than Western- style music (Color Plates 23). Since the usual name for changguk at the time was kukkuk, the all-female version was dubbed yosong kukkuk (womens national drama). 11 But for some in Koreas patriarchal society, womens national drama seemed almost a contradiction in terms or at least a threat to the assumption that whatever is national ought to be dened and controlled by men. This point of view was expressed by Pak Hwang, whom we encountered earlier as the author of the rst published history of changguk. Pak saw the new subgenre as inimical both to artistic standards in changguk and to proper gender relations in society. The audience for yosong kukkuk, like that of Takarazuka, has always been predominantly female, and the advent of the new theatrical sensation drew crowds of married women whose lives (as Pak rather wistfully observed) had been largely restricted to the home (Pak Hwang 1976, 189). For these women to identify with female actors, cast in the roles of brash and vigorous male heroes, seemed dangerous enough to provoke Pak into some remarkable rhetorical ights. After quoting a Korean proverb, When the hen crows, the house is ruined, he compared the all-female troupes with the mythical creatures called pulgasari that were said to eat metal and tried to overthrow the ancient kingdom of Koryo (p. 229). To Pak, himself a librettist of mixed- cast changguk, yosong kukkuk represented a threat not just to the traditions of pansori and changguk but to the Korean nation itself. As Korean fem inist writers are now starting to show (Kim and Choi 1998), one part of the postcolonial project of nation building has been the scramble to ensure that the nation is structured along patriarchal lines.

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Changguk has participated in this patriarchal agendanot least through its constant and approving display of the self-sacrice of women. The established repertoire of changguk consists of only four stories, all derived from pansori, of which the most frequently performed are the stories of Sim Chong and Chunhyang, both paragons of female devotion to men. Sim Chong, the lial daughter, sells herself to a crew of sailorsas a human sacrice to ensure safe passage across a treacherous seain exchange for a donation to a Buddhist temple that will result in the miraculous restoration of her blind fathers eyesight. Chunhyang, the virtuous wife, remains faithful to her absent husband in the face of a brutal beating and the threat of death. Some of the musical and literary highlights of both stories are expressions of the heroines grief. Since about the 1970s, this grief has been given a name, han, and represented as an emotion peculiar to Koreans and arising from their national history of invasion and repression (Park-Miller 1995, 183). This special instance of the older idea that Korean affect is different from that of other nationalities has come to be so widely accepted that many people assume it has a much longer history than it does. Im Kwontaeks popular 1993 lm Sopyonje, for instance, contains much discussion of han, although it is set in an earlier period when, as far as we know from contemporary sources, no one was talking about han in this way. 12 Today the concept of han forms a link between the suffering of women like Chunhyang and the grim history of the Korean nation itself feminized as a territory under the constant threat of penetration by more powerful neighbors and in need of protection by strong masculine institutions such as the armed forces and an authoritarian government (Moon Seungsook 1998). The Western imagination has long been captivated by narratives of penetration in which a hero overcomes a formidable obstacle to enter an alien territory that is both feared and desired and in so doing achieves a renewal of self. With its heterosexual and patriarchal symbolism, the structure governs the tales of difcult seduction that recur in novels like Dangerous Liaisons and plays from The Taming of the Shrew to Guys and Dolls, as well as adventure stories ( Journey to the Center of the Earth or the Indiana Jones series) and the eldwork narratives of anthropologists and other cultural explorers. 13 But in the Chunhyang story it is precisely the resistance to penetration that is celebrated. That such a story could become the most often told tale in Korea is probably not because patriarchal values hold less sway there than in the West but because Koreans have learned to see their national history in terms of foreign penetration and native resistance. Korean historians have compiled lists of over nine hundred invasions, large and small, in the

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nations history; representative national heroes are colonial-era resistance ghters and the sixteenth-century naval commander Yi Sunsin who fought off an earlier Japanese attack with his impenetrable iron-clad turtle ships. 14 Today, while the inltration of Western ways and ideas into almost every sphere of Korean life is undeniable, the need to preserve some corner of national identity that resists this penetration is often keenly felt. It is perhaps partly this need that keeps Korean audiences showing up again and again for adaptations of the story of Chunhyang in whatever guise: for them, there is more at stake than one womans refusal to yield to aggression.

State Sponsorship
Historically, the discourse of han appears to have taken shape under the authoritarian regime of President Park Chung Hee, who seized power in a military coup in 1961 and remained in ofce until his assassination in 1979. It may well have helped to bolster that regime by forming part of what Louis Althusser (1971) would have called the ideological state apparatus. That is: a workforce suffering under the harsh demands of rapid industrialization while largely excluded from its economic rewards might be less inclined to make trouble if taught to believe that suffering and resentment are an intrinsic part of their national character and that to remove the suffering and its causes would make them somehow less authentically Korean. The point is perhaps a speculative one, but there is no doubt that ideological legitimation was a pressing concern for Parks government. Not only had Park and his henchmen seized power by undemocratic means, but during the colonial period they had been trained in the Japanese military academy and served as ofcers in the Japanese army, rendering them subject to the stigma of collusion with the colonial authorities. Park seems to have addressed this concern by representing his government as a patron and supporter of those symbols of Korean national identity, the traditional performing arts, in which he had never previously shown the slightest interest. In 1962, the year after he came to power, he passed a Cultural Assets Protection Act, itself ironically modeled on legislation that the Japanese government had adopted in 1950 (Yang Jongsung 1994, 4951). Under this law, genres judged to express the Korean national culture were ofcially designated Intangible Cultural Assets (muhyong munhwajae) and lead ing exponents, unofcially known as human national treasures, were appointed on a modest stipend to maintain and transmit these genres in what was considered their authentic form (wonhyong). 15 One of the rst art forms to be so designated was pansori. Changguk also received government support, but outside the

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Cultural Assets system, and this says something of the concept of tradition that was adopted and the difference in its application to pansori and to changguk. Again in 1962, a National Changguk Troupe was established and given lavish funds for an opening production. Forty years later, this troupe continues to dene the state of the art for changguk though the genre has never been nominated for recognition as an Intangible Cultural Asset. The relatively short history of changguk and its obvious foreign inuences appear to have barred it from this honor, while by common consent the genre is still evolving and has yet to achieve an authentic form that would be worthy of preservation. Thus, instead of staging standardized dramas in an unchanging form, changguk directors are expected to innovate in each new production in search of a format that will be, paradoxically, more traditional than ever before. This complex relation to the notion of tradition has led me to suggest the term traditionesque for a category of cultural forms that hover on the margins of the traditional (Killick 1998a; 2001a). In this dichotomy, both traditional and traditionesque art forms base their appeal on the association with a tradition that embodies a valued community in this case what Benedict Anderson (1983) would have called the imagined community of the nation. But while a traditional repertoire is transmitted with some concern for protection from changes that would make it less authentic (McDonald 1996, 115), no such concern affects the transmission of the traditionesque, which must innovate in search of an authenticity that is not found in its past. To venture another speculative observation, it seems likely that traditionesque art forms will prove particularly characteristic of postcolonial societies like Korea, which typically feel a need to assert the uniqueness of their nations cultural traditions in justication of its political independence while simultaneously keeping pace with the world in modernity and cosmopolitanism.

Jockeying for Tradition

The failure to create an authentic form of changguk to ll the role of a traditional Korean opera has not been for want of trying. In 1967, a committee called the Changguk Chongnip Wiwonhoe (Com mittee for the Establishment of Changguk) was set up under the aus pices of the National Changguk Troupe. 16 For a concise formulation of its mission, we can do no better than return to the 1971 program note from which I quoted at the beginning of this essay:
Our country originally had no theatre and no stage. As a result, it could not have its own dramatic form. Taking the ancient drama of other countries for comparison, the Greek drama, Roman drama, and

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medieval drama of the West all had their own form [governing everything] from the design of the theatre to the [style of ] acting, while Chinas Peking opera and Japans kabuki and n bear their own excellent form transmitted through the ages. Our country, as mentioned above, had no theatre and no stage, so it did not have its own form of musical drama (changguk). It is this that we are now trying to create for the rst time. 17

There could hardly be a more explicit statement of the ambition to invent a traditional Korean opera. The committee, composed of senior exponents and professional scholars, was given the task of arranging texts for changguk productions and determining the manner of their performance in a way that would eliminate the earlier pandering to popular appeal and make changguk as faithful as possible to its pansori originals. Not only would the words and music of existing pansori material be incorporated, as far as possible intact, into these changguk productions, but even the style of speech and acting would follow pansori practices, while the visual presentation would reect the minimalism of pansori s physical resources. Once established, this authentic form of changguk would then be protected from changefor instance, by standardizing the texts and having each new production supervised by a leader (toyon) whose responsibility was to ensure that the established conventions were followed without the creative freedom usually assumed by a director (yonchul) (Song Kyong-rin 1980, 347352). Here again a pointed cross-cultural comparison reveals that the Korean case was not unique. Rather, Korean changguk conforms to a widespread Asian pattern, not only in its relationship to colonization, but also in its relationship to decolonization. The closest analogy here is perhaps the Malaysian hybrid-popular theatre form bangsawan. SooiBeng Tan (1989) has shown that in the early twentieth century, bangsawan was touted as modern and up-to-date and made a great virtue of its constant innovations as it responded to the changing taste of its ethnically diverse audience. Since the 1970s, however, says Tan, the Malaysian government has created a traditional past for bangsawan. Under state sponsorship, the popular type of theatre has been reshaped, Malayized, and institutionalized for new national purposes (p. 230). This reshaping has involved the elimination of non-Malay stories and musical features in order to promote an articial tradition for bangsawan as an expression of Malaysian national identity (p. 256). A similar process of traditionalizing can be seen at work in the history of changguk. At rst proclaimed as sinyonguk (new drama), by the 1970s changguk was supported by a National Changguk Troupe that was mak ing a determined bid for the genres recognition as traditional Korean

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opera while its colonial origins were being written out of its history (Pak Hwang 1976). In the end, the Changguk Chongnip Wiwonhoe did not succeed in establishing xed texts and performance practices, and its inuence rapidly declined. The jockeying for tradition, howeverthe effort to position changguk in an advantageous relation to the traditionalwas renewed by director Ho Kyu, who was responsible for most of the National Changguk Troupes productions throughout the 1980s. Ho sought to bring changguk closer to the spirit of pansori (rather than emphasizing the letter as the Changguk Chongnip Wiwonhoe had done) by negotiating a new contract (yaksok) between performers and audience (Ho Kyu 1991, 384). This contract sought to recapture, by means of such devices as direct audience address and a projecting stage, the free-and-easy interaction that characterized the madang or village square in which pansori would traditionally have been performed. Hence Hos approach came to be labeled the madanghwa (madang-iza tion) of the changguk stage (Song Hyejin 1987, 239). While many of Ho Kyus innovations have become standard practice in changguk, his madanghwa project was ultimately defeated by the physical properties of the proscenium-based performance spaces with which he had to work, as well as by the passive audience habits associated with them. 18 In the 1990s, therefore, the National Changguk Troupe largely embraced Western realist production values and returned to an unabashedly traditionesque approach. The continuing traditionesque status of changguk is nowhere more clearly revealed than in a development of the early 1990s when the new head of the National Changguk Troupe, literary scholar Kang Hanyong, decided to abolish the tochang (narrator). As we have seen, the tochang was a feature of the earliest changguk performances on record, and by the 1990s it had become perhaps the nearest thing changguk possessed to a venerable tradition of its own: it had an indig enous origin and a precedent of some eighty years behind it, as well as a history of performance by some of the most distinguished senior pansori singers of those years. Nevertheless, the tochang was not sacrosanct. Some newly composed changguk dramas had dispensed with the tochang, and during Kangs tenure one production adopted the experiment of having the tochang interact directly with the dramatis personae (Color Plate 4). More radically, when Kang himself arranged new texts for adaptations of the traditional pansori storieswhich had always been the most traditional part of changguks repertoirehe eliminated the tochang altogether, arguing that third-person narration held up the action and was out of place in the show, dont tell ethos of the theatre. 19

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Such a fundamental change of performance convention would have been unthinkable in a traditional art form. But since changguk itself was not recognized as traditional, its own would-be traditions have been accorded no guarantee of protection from change. Instead they have been readily sacriced in the pursuit of either entertainment value or traditional elements derived from recognized Cultural Assets such as pansori. While the tochang has been reinstated in a number of productions since Kangs retirement in 1995, its use is at the discretion of the directorand changguk seems no closer to achieving tradi tional status since its only recognized traditions (that is, its only practices protected from change) are those it has taken from pansori. A traditional art form, presumably, must possess traditions of its own.

National Music
Changguk has always had trouble being taken seriously as an expression of Korean national culture. And yet, in at least one respect, its claim to represent the nation is arguably second to noneand that respect is its music. In a telling scene from a recent production of the Chunhyang story, the pansori -style singing of the tochang was interrupted by loud blasts on the straight trumpet (nabal) and conch shell (nagak) from the back of the auditorium. 20 A colorful parade led down the aisle playing the raucous royal processional music Taechwita. On reaching the stage, the music changed to the stately banquet version of the same rhythmic material, Chwita, and the procession entered an elaborate set representing the yamen of the governor of Namwon. The wicked governor took the seat of honor, his white-robed ofcials stood in attendance, and a group of female entertainers (kisaeng) lined up to solicit his favors. Such a mixture of theatrical presentation, pansori singing, and other varieties of Korean music is to be found only in changguk. The category of music that has come to be known in postcolonial Korea as kugak (national music) comprises a diverse collection of genres that would have been performed in quite different contexts and for different audiences before the twentieth century. Certainly pansori and Taechwita would have been worlds apart in their social setting as well as their musical sounds. But changguk directors have not hesitated to use any form of traditional music that seemed appropriate to the dramatic situation: a dirge for a funeral, a sea shanty for a shipboard scene, court music for a banquet. Antecedents for this musical eclecticism can be found in pansori narratives and in their presumed forebears, the mythic songs of shamans, both of which interpolated existing folk songs into their uid forms (Hahn Man-young 1975, 17 ). But the practice is taken to an extreme in changguk, where the principle that anything within

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the realm of kugak is fair game was perhaps nally established by director and dramatist Ho Kyu in the 1980s. In a work of his own composi tion, Yongmagol changsa (The Strong Man of Yongma Valley, 1986), Ho incorporated regional folk songs from Kangwon province, shaman songs, farmers songs, court music, and classical kagok singing and accompanied the movements of a lion with the music of talchum masked dance - drama (Paek Hyonmi 1997, 397398). This degree of eclecticism has made changguk the rst single genre to draw on the full range of kugak styles without regard to distinctions of region or class originand on this basis changguk could claim to represent the nation in a more comprehensive way than any of the established Cultural Assets. If this argument carries little weight with the gatekeepers of the traditional, it is probably because nationalist discourse has projected the modern monolithic view of kugak back onto the past and the disunity of Koreas traditional musical repertoire, as of its traditional society, has been downplayed.

A Tradition in the Making?

When I began my eldwork on changguk in 1995, many people involved with the genre in one way or another advised me to study pansori instead, pointing out that the performance conventions of changguk were still in ux and moving too fast to hold in focus. I replied that the process by which traditions were formed (or not) was precisely what interested me. To study this process is, of course, nothing new. Students of culture and the arts have long since jettisoned the idea that only pure, authentic, and stable traditions are worthy of study. But I believe the study of tradition formation is particularly revealing when the process has been long, conicted, and still unresolved, as has certainly been the case with changguk. As this essay goes to press, the National Changguk Troupe is pre paring a special performance to celebrate A Hundred Years of Changguk , scheduled for October 18 27, 2002. This seems somewhat pre mature. As we have seen, the earliest contemporary records of changguk performances date from 1908, and even Pak Hwang dates the rst production no earlier than 1903. True, the Wongaksa theatre was opened in 1902, and pansori singers performed there from the beginning (Paek Hyonmi 1997, 2939), but we can hardly assume that the tran sition to changguk was instantaneous. Thus the National Changguk Troupe appears to be in somewhat of a hurry to claim the sense of tradition and stability implied by a hundred-year history. But after reviewing that history, it should come as no surprise that a genre whose relation to the traditional has always been problematic should still be jockeying for tradition.

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NOTES 1. Yi Chinsun, directors note in program of the National Changguk Troupes production 16, Chunhyang-jon, SeptemberOctober 1971. Transla tions from Korean sources are my own unless otherwise credited. 2. Other than my own publications, the literature on changguk in Eng lish consists largely of chapters and occasional articles by authors whose main interest is in the parent genre, pansori. See Jang Yeonok (2000, 116122); Kim Woo Ok (1980, 186 222); Park-Miller (1995, 5875); Pihl (1991; 1994, 4154); Um Hae-kyung (1992, 8499). Understandably such studies tend to rely on the most accessible Korean secondary sources, and all of them, in my view, contain inaccuracies. 3. For an overview and bibliography of traditional theatre forms in Korea see Killick (2002a, 941944; 2002b). 4. The literary, musical, and performative aesthetics of pansori are discussed in countless studies; perhaps the most accessible in English is Pihl (1994, 69109). Detailed studies include Jang Yeonok (2000); Kim Woo Ok (1980); Park-Miller (1995); Um Hae-kyung (1992). 5. At least one writer, however, has sought to defend this story (Kim Jong-cheol 1997). 6. The origins of changguk are detailed in Killick (2002b). 7. Some signicant differences between the Korean and the Southeast Asian instruments should also be noted. Both the names and the morphology of the ja-khe (also spelled c hakh ) and the m jan (m-gyang) reference the crocodile, but no similar zoomorphism is associated with the komungo. While each instrument has three strings that pass over raised frets, the komungo has three additional strings that pass over movable bridges. 8. From the call for proposals for the conference Audiences, Patrons, and Performers in the Performing Arts of Asia, hosted by the European Foundation for Chinese Music Research (CHIME) and the International Institute of Asian Studies (IIAS) at Leiden University, the Netherlands, on August 23 27, 2000. 9. In tandem with shinpa, the inuential Japanese popular songs known as enka started out in the 1880s as political songs before acquiring the sentimental tone for which they are better known today (Fujie 2002, 371). On the new school and political dramas of Japan see Leiter (1997, 588 589) and Ortolani (1990, 233 242). 10. For more details on the Choson Songak Yonguhoe see Killick (1998b). 11. The only scholarly monograph on yosong kukkuk to date is Kim Pyongchol (1997). The only published article in English is Killick (1997). On Takarazuka see Berlin (1988) and Robertson (1998). 12. Heather Willoughby (2000, 2122) quotes some dialogue from So pyonje in analyzing the relationship between pansori and han, though she does not adopt my critical stance toward the concept. 13. I have analyzed the structure of these narratives of penetration and its implications for cross-cultural eldwork in an earlier article (Killick 1995).

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14. Thus the valorizing of resistance to penetration may also help to legitimize patriarchy, as when Koreas supposedly exceptional frequency of foreign invasion is made to suggest that the nation must be defended by men. See Moon Seungsook (1998, 42). 15. For in-depth analyses of the Intangible Cultural Assets system see Maliangkay (1999) and Yang Jongsung (1994). 16. The activities of the National Changguk Troupe and the Chang guk Chongnip Wiwonhoe are discussed in detail in Killick (2001b). 17. Yi Chinsun, directors note in program of the National Changguk Troupes production 16, Chunhyang-jon, SeptemberOctober 1971. 18. This obstacle was identied by drama critic Suh Yon-Ho in a review of Ho Kyus production of Karojigi (reprinted in Suh Yon-Ho 1988, 338 341). 19. Kang Hanyong explained his decision in a seminar (National Changguk Troupe 1995, 14). 20. Under the direction of Kim Kwangyu, on May 2930, 2000, the performance was given in the main hall of the National Center for Korean Traditional Performing Arts (Kungnip Kugagwon) in Seoul by a visiting troupe from the National Center for Korean Folk Performing Arts (Kungnip Minsok Kugagwon) in Namwon. REFERENCES Althusser, Louis. 1971. Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses (Notes Towards an Investigation). In Lenin and Philosophy, and Other Essays. Translated from the French by Ben Brewster. New York: Monthly Review Press. Anderson, Benedict. 1983. Imagined Communities: Reections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. London: Verso. Austin, Herbert H. 1910. A Scamper Through Korea. In Angus Hamilton, Herbert H. Austin, and Masatake Terauchi, Korea: Its History, Its People, and Its Commerce. Boston: J. B. Millet. Becker, Judith, and Robert Garas. 2001. Myanmar. In Stanley Sadie, ed., The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, vol. 17. London: Macmillan. Berlin, Zeke. 1988. Takarazuka: A History and Descriptive Analysis of the All-Female Japanese Performance Company. Ph.D. dissertation, New York University. Brandon, James R., ed. 1993. The Cambridge Guide to Asian Theatre. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Cohen, Matthew Isaac. 2001. On the Origin of the Komedie Stamboel: Popular Culture, Colonial Society, and the Parsi Theatre Movement. Bijdragen tot de Taal - , Land-, en Volkenkunde 157(2):313 357.

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Fujie, Linda. 2002. East Asia /Japan. In Jeff Todd Titon, ed., Worlds of Music: An Introduction to the Music of the Worlds Peoples. 4th ed. New York: Schirmer. Gibbs, Jason. 2000. Spoken Theater, La Scne Tonkinoise, and the First Modern Vietnamese Songs. Asian Music 31(1):133. Grifs, William Elliott. 1907. Corea: The Hermit Nation. 8th ed., revised and enlarged. New York: Scribner. First published in 1882. Hahn Man-young [Han Manyong]. 1975. Religious Origins of Korean Music. Korea Journal 15(7):1722. Hansen, Kathryn. 1992. Grounds for Play: The Nautanki Theatre of North India. Berkeley: University of California Press. . 2002. Parsi Theatre and the City: Locations, Patrons, Audiences. In Ravi Vasudevan et al., eds., Sarai Reader 2002: The Cities of Everyday Life. Delhi: Sarai. Ho Kyu. 1991. Minjok kuk-kwa chontong yesul: Yonguk 30 nyon yonchul chago p [Folk Drama and Traditional Arts: 30 Years of Directing]. Seoul: Munhak Segye-sa. Hobsbawm, Eric, and Terence Ranger. 1983. The Invention of Tradition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hwang Byung-ki [Hwang Pyonggi]. 2001. Korean Music and Its Chinese Inuences. Paper presented at the 8th Hahn Moo-Sook Colloquium in the Korean Humanities, George Washington University, Washington, D.C., October. Jang Yeonok [Chang Yonok]. 2000. Development and Change in Korean Narrative Song, Pansori. Ph.D. dissertation, SOAS, University of London. Killick, Andrew P. 1995. The Penetrating Intellect: On Being White, Straight, and Male in Korea. In Don Kulick and Margaret Willson, eds., Taboo: Sex, Identity, and Erotic Subjectivity in Anthropological Fieldwork. London: Routledge. . 1997. The Secret of Korean Womens Opera. Morning Calm 21(7):3238. . 1998a. The Invention of Traditional Korean Opera and the Problem of the Traditionesque: Changguk and Its Relation to Pansori Narratives. Ph.D. dissertation, University of Washington. . 1998b. The Choson Songak Yonguhoe and the Advent of Mature Changguk Opera. Review of Korean Studies 1:76 100. . 2001a. Changguk Opera and the Category of the Traditionesque. Korean Studies 25(1):5171.

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. 2001b. The Traditional Opera of the Future? Changguk s First Century. In Nathan Hesselink, ed., Contemporary Directions: Korean Folk Music Engaging the Twentieth Century and Beyond. Berkeley: Center for Korean Studies, University of California. . 2002a. Music and Theater in Korea. In Robert C. Provine, Yosihiko Tokumaru, and J. Lawrence Witzleben, eds., Garland Encyclopedia of World Music, vol. 7: East Asia. New York: Garland. . 2002b. Korean Changguk Opera: Its Origins and Its Origin Myth. Asian Music 33(2). . Forthcoming. Road Test for a New Model: Korean Musical Narrative and Theater in Comparative Context. Ethnomusicology 47(2). Kim, Elaine H., and Chungmoo Choi [Choe Chongmu], eds. 1998. Dangerous Women: Gender and Korean Nationalism. New York: Routledge. Kim Jong-cheol [Kim Chongchol]. 1997. Some Views on the Evolution of Changguk. Korea Journal 37(2): 8499. Kim Pyongchol. 1997. Hanguk yosong kukkuk-sa yongu [Study of the History of Korean Womens Drama]. M.A. thesis, Dongguk University. Kim Woo Ok [Kim Uok]. 1980. Pansori: An Indigenous Theatre of Korea. Unpublished Ph.D. diss., New York University. Kim Yunsik and Pak Wanso, eds. 1995. Sinsoso l. [Early Modern Novels]. Seoul: Tonga chulpansa. Leiter, Samuel L. 1997. New Kabuki Encyclopedia: A Revised Adaptation of Kabuki Jiten. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood. Maliangkay, Roald Heber. 1999. Handling the Intangible: The Protection of Folksong Traditions in Korea. Ph.D. dissertation, SOAS, University of London. McDonald, Barry. 1996. The Idea of Tradition Examined in the Light of Two Australian Musical Studies. Yearbook for Traditional Music 28:106 130. Miller, Terry E. 1998. Thailand. In Terry E. Miller and Sean Williams, eds., Garland Encyclopedia of World Music, vol. 4: Southeast Asia. New York: Garland. Moon Seungsook [Mun Sungsuk]. 1998. Begetting the Nation: The Androcentric Discourse of National History and Tradition in South Korea. In Elaine H. Kim and Chungmoo Choi, eds., Dangerous Women: Gender and Korean Nationalism. New York: Routledge. National Changguk Troupe [Kungnip Changguktan]. 1995. Sugung-ga mit Pak-ssi-jon-e taehan haksul yonchan [Seminar on The

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