KTV at Songpa Sandae Noli

December 4th, 2010
Saturday was the day for KTV to come to 송파산대놀이 Songpa Sandae Noli but that didn’t work out as planned. 김영숙 Kim Yeongsuk had not told others they were coming and 함완식 Ham Wanshik and 안병인 Ahn Byeong’in did not find it appropriate for the TV camera to be suddenly there without going through channels. Principally they wanted Songpa to look better than we do when it’s only the 전수자 jeonsuja practice. They wanted to see more musicians and more people in the room. Before long Ham was planning for the TV station to come back the next Saturday and he’d call out to all the members of the preservation association to show up and we’d even wear the masks… which is exactly the sort of thing I’m trying to avoid. Kim Yeongsuk understood that, which is why just a regular jeonsuja practice was fine. Sure, Songpa Sandae Noli wanting to look great is understandable, but we’ve never worn masks in rehearsal –ever-. Who knows if the TV folks will come back or not. At any rate, Ham sat the jeonsuja down in front of the white board and gave us a mini-lecture on Songpa Sandae Noli, which was also fake. Any real lecture will go into depth that he didn’t touch, leaving aside the fact that he’s never used the white board for teaching before. Then we had to do the motions but with no teacher in front of us, with Ham just calling out the motion names (I’m used to getting the visual clue to be able to fall along, the motion names are usually hard to hear because they’re said by someone over the sound of several instruments on the far side of the room from me). It was kind of frustrating. After the TV guy and Ham left Kim Yeongsuk and I talked for awhile about what to do to improve Songpa Sandae Noli’s future direction.

December 5th, 2010
On Sunday I spent about 4 hours at Starbucks busting into article editing and working on the Chushyeoyo review. In the evening Karjam and I went shopping for envelopes and had dinner in a very authentic Japanese restaurant 지수 Jisu introduced me to.