Miyal Performance at Pungryu Theatre

July 28^th, 2011

We had class with a little extra Bongsan Talchum practice for the students.

July 29^th, 2011

My friend from K-Arts, 기영 Giyeong, helped me find someone to teach the students Korean court dance, the very nice이은솔 Yi Eunsol. The students were sort of amazed how difficult what looked like simple motions actually was to do.

The last performance in the series of mask dance drama performances was on "Miyal" (the old grandmother). I went directly to Pungryu Theatre after class, talking with the Bongsan Talchum performers a bit (although the focus for the evening was Eunyul Talchum). The show was good, but again, it was awkward to be combining the different dramas (Eunyul, Gangnyeong, Bongsan) into one show. I was surprised that Abigail and Amada came. After the show I took them and Sumi out for jeon and makgeolli. I think I'm converting my students to a big love of Korean arts! 

In Fact I -Do- Have a Husband

March 17th, 2011
On Thursday I had a very social day of research. I went to meet 백은실 Baek Eunshil from 강령탈춤 Gangnyeong Talchum and interviewed her. Then I headed straight to the intangible culture training center and went to see the people from 북청사자놀음 Bukcheon Saja Noleum. They have rehearsal on Thursday starting at 6, so there was the tail end of a meeting and in addition a bunch of people just hanging around waiting for things to start up. I just hung out and we had a wide-ranging mostly arts-related conversation until it was time for them to go practice (they start at 6). I headed up one flight of stairs to 봉산탈춤 Bongsan Talchum where 현석 Hyeonseok had just signed up. He and I went to eat dinner (of course I bought it) and then I came back and got the entire roster of Bongsan Talchum's job area explained to me by 장용일 Jang Yongil which was really awesome.

Practice was pretty darn good, although Thursday is indeed smaller with no 연식 or 하연 among others.

March 18th, 2011
I went to meet 경진 Gyeongjin in the first Starbucks in Korea where we studied until around 1:30, then ate lunch. I met 현경 Hyeon-gyeong for dinner and met Hengyi Shr a Buddhist nun studying for her Ph.D. in Buddhist Studies at UCLA and her mother at the terminus of the airport railroad, brought them home and set them up for the night.

March 19th, 2011
송파산대놀이 Songpa Sandae Noli was cancelled because the teaching folks needed to be in a meeting at the same time. Instead I spent until 3 with 지수 Jisoo working in a coffee shop. When I got home I was disappointed Karjam wasn't there, but he showed up an hour later. We went to the Tibetan Film Festival and saw two films (and met two Tibetans who live in Korea).

A Performance in Honor of Yang Soeun

October 23rd, 2010
I had a hard time deciding which performance to go to on Saturday, at last I settled on the performance honoring 양소은 Yang Soeun, one of the modern masters of traditional arts. The performance was in 인천 Incheon, at their Arts and Culture Center small hall and began at 7. Despite leaving at 5, I barely arrived in time to use the facilities before the show began. The hall, seating around 300, was about 70% occupied. I made extremely detailed written notes of the entire show (because I was prohibited from other forms of documentation) but for research purposes I will just confine my observations to the points below:
1) The announcers (a man and woman, both in their 20s) did not wear traditional clothes (odd, since everything else going on was in traditional clothes). They announced a lot, but the info they gave was designed for an audience that was already well acquainted with the traditional arts, but the announcers themselves seemed to not really know how to engage with what they were talking about so the delivery was very dull.
2) The performances included three scenes from mask dance dramas, one each from 봉산탈춤 Bongsan Talchum, 은율탈춤 Eunyul Talchum and 강령탈춤 Gangnyeong Talchum. All three are from the same part of North Korea (which is why Yang Soeun was involved with all three, she was from that area and a key part of the effort to resurrect and strengthen what were (or some would say nearly) lost arts from that region. The performances included four performers from Eunyul, two from Gangnyeong and one from Bongsan Talchum, the music was provided by the same group of musicians throughout (all three use the basic arrangement of 장구 janggu, 피리 piri, 대금 daegeum, 해금 haegeum with or without other instruments such as 북 buk, 징jing and 꽹과리 ggwaenggwari). This actually seems (to me) to be a very effective way to create a new performance line up or tour a show. The musicians could perform musical numbers, the small number of dancers could perform some of the flashiest scenes and an audience could feel quite pleased.
3) The show was much too long. The first piece, the singing style native to that part of North Korea, was excellent. After the mask dance dramas a type of shamanic ceremony dragged on far too long, then a performance of 해주검무Haeju Geommu (Haeju Sword/Knife Dance) turned out to be the longest and most protractedly boring Geommu I’ve ever seen. The most excitement during this piece was the constant stream of people leaving the theatre having trouble to get past me (I was on the aisle, but the seating was so tight my knees almost touched the seats in front of me making it hard for people to get by). The last piece was just odd. I needed more contextualization and information than we were given. The piece, apparently developed by Yang Soeun, used the many performing arts of Buddhist monks in a new way, but the two dancers were shaky, particularly one of them, and the way he kept trying to look at the other dancer to know what to do was driving me crazy. This was the first time the performance had been staged, and again, it dragged on until the remaining audience heaved a sigh of relief when it finally ended.
4) Perhaps to take advantage of the facilities the presentation was designed to use PPT with video and photos of Yang Soeun performing and practicing showed during the announcements in particular, but the projector took too long to warm up each time, and then if we could hear the audio on the video we couldn’t hear the announcers, so it sort of fought for attention with the rest of the show.

Fusion Music in Karjam's Future and Sangmo Class

October 19th, 2010
In the morning Karjam and I went to meet our friend 조은정 Jo Eunjeong, who was formerly a 가야금 gayageum instructor at UCLA (I took her class for a quarter, but I must admit I’m hopeless on the instrument). She and Karjam have rehearsed together and even performed, unfortunately due to a lack of follow through by others who promised to get us the performance footage we only have this little video of them rehearsing together. They sounded much better than this after rehearsing more. They will start rehearsing together from next week and we have various plans that after they become more fixed we will share with everyone.

Back home I worked on slap dash video editing on the crappy (but easy) video editing program we know how to use (as opposed to the really fancy program we cannot figure out how to do almost anything with yet and we’re pretty frustrated with). I just made up a little something out of some clips on a digital camera (not a video camera) from the 강령탈춤 Gangnyeong Talchum performance the other night. Due to frustrations with Youtube’s compliance with the Korean Real Name Internet Verification Law, I have not been able to upload this yet (I'll link it here when I do- working now!).

Tuesday is 상모 sangmo day, so of course I went to the 임실필봉서울전수관 Imshil Pilbong Seoul Training Center. It’s still midterm period, so there was only one more student than last week (and he was only absent last week because of his great grandmother’s funeral), he’s one of the two high schoolers in the class, both of them want to go to Korea National University of the Arts. 이현석 Yi Hyeonseok, the one I included a photo of last week, is a first year high school student (out of three years), the other is a second year student (I haven’t learned his name yet). At first I was having a bad day because I felt that I was almost making negative progress, I was even more frustrated when 태원 Taewon (again he was our only instructor) had me practice 반대사위 (not sure on the spelling, but backwards or clockwise spins). It was incredibly frustrating that I couldn’t get into a spin rhythm, but I felt much better when second-year couldn’t do it either. The second hour of class I worked on 양사위 (spinning on one side for 1.75 spins, then switching directions and spinning to the other side for 1.75 spins) together with the other students! Taewon said we had to do it 400 times (and the count is 1,2,3,4=1, 1,2,3,4=2, 1,2,3,4=3 and so on), I am not sure if we did or not, at any rate we spun for forty minutes and I was able to keep at it, although of course my spin stopped and had to be restarted quite a lot more than the spins of the others. After our intense exercise we sat down and had a very serious conversation about Korean education and the future of students who go into the arts (like the two that were there with us). That was a bit depressing.

Gangnyeong Talchum Performance

October 15th, 2010
I will spare you my general range of frustrations with Korean medical practice (don’t worry, nothing is really wrong except my knees being so aggravated by all the mask dance and sangmo practices) but I will at least point out one really annoying thing: Why does Fulbright require me to get insurance that is only accepted at THREE hospitals in Korea? (Or other places I could apply to be reimbursed I suppose). My 1,000 USD insurance for the year is ultimately much less useful than the less than 100,000 (less than 100 USD) insurance I got Karjam (which is honored EVERYWHERE).

I picked up Georgy’s business/name cards, went to the 아현시장 Ahyeon Shijang for 반찬 banchan (side dishes) and some vegetables after my frustrations with the hospital.
Cell phone photo of my favorite banchan making ajumma:


At 4:00 I headed to the 국악원 gukakwon to watch a performance “추셔요” (Chushyeoyo) by one member from 봉산탈춤 Bongsan Talchum and two other mask dancers. Normally I don’t enjoy the neo-traditional performances very much, but I’m curious about them from a research standpoint and due to the Bongsan connection I thought it’d be nice to attend. Fortunately since the performance started so early the traditional music shop attached to the Korean Musical Instrument Museum was open and I slipped in for two CDs, one of 가곡 gagok since I suddenly find it so fascinating, and one a group 산조 sanjo production with solo and ensemble pieces on it. I admit I partially liked the packaging on the sanjo CD (which is a double box set and features one sanjo piece for each of the standard sanjo instruments, plus 시나위합주 shi-na-ui ensemble and 산조합주 sanjo ensemble) but the gagok CD was the shopkeeper’s favorite female gagok recording (but didn't have such nice packaging, it's from the mid-90s).



The performance featured four musicians who each played multiple instruments (sometimes as sound effects, sometimes as musical instruments and they also sang). In some cases I found what the musicians were doing more interesting than the three mask dancers. All their instruments were traditional, but to make sound effects to accompany the drama they used them in some interesting/unconventional ways at times. The musicians did a great job moving the story along, too. For example at one point the characters are traveling and one man sang 아리랑 arirang (a folk song) from different regions of Korea to illustrate their journey from one place to another. The three mask dancers were all young (late 20s approximately) and they entered in traditional masks and 민복 (white peasant style traditional cotton clothes) with large containers (chests and a rice cooking pot) which contained clothes and masks which they changed (humorously) into at a certain point in the story. Much of the story was slapstick and the dialogue, though delivered in a mask dance style (aurally similar) was in modern Korean and easy to understand. The jokes were things like peeing on the audience (a particularly suave college kid held out a paper cup, caught the pee and drank it to even more comic effect than if the "peeing" had included only audience avoidance), or when the blind man tries to identify the animal and finds a tail in the back and then finds another “tail” in the front. The movements were consistently from the mask dance dramas the three represented throughout the drama, even after they’d changed into the non-traditional masks. It was interesting, but also outdoors with the wind blowing and I hadn’t worn enough clothing.

I met Georgy at the train station and we hurried as fast as public transportation would allow to the 무형문화전수회관 Intangible Cultural Properties Training Center and the 풍류극장 Pungryu Theatre for the performance of 강령탈춤 Gangnyeong Talchum. We were a tad late, but like last week the tiny theatre was practically empty because people are so unused to having to (gasp!) pay for traditional performances (again, it was the paltry sum of 5,000 which for the quality of performers is a HUGE bargain). I was sorry to miss the initial introduction, throughout one of the members of the troupe introduced each act (and wrapped up the previous act) in a very engaging fashion including pointing out the special facets “this next act contains all of our basic dance movements” another time “Gangnyeong Talchum is particularly known for having more singing than other mask dance dramas” etc. The performance was quite good, I like how most of the masks are worn on top of the heads for Gangnyeong Talchum so you can see the performer’s faces.

--a short Youtube video of highlights from the performance shot on Karjam's camera, not the video camera--

Georgy and I met Karjam for a snack near our house after the show. She has a conference this weekend in Seoul.