Gulag, the Musical: Performing Trauma in North Korea through Yoduk Story

Yoduk Story is the first known North Korean dissident musical, staging a fictional account of the authors’ traumatic memories and experiences in a gulag. Despite the creators’ indictment of North Korea as a human rights violator and Yoduk Story’s efforts to subvert everything that the North Korean state represents, the musical borrows from North Korean propaganda techniques, including propagandist revolutionary operas.