Illusive Utopia: Theater, Film, and Everyday Performance in North Korea

Appendix: Notes on Sources

it springs out of a recuperative gesture allowing both producers and spectators to have a glimpse of what lies beyond the morbid violence. In a way, comic moments, in the same way as the incorporation of Christianity, provide a safe zone where the producers can disengage from the original violence —the raw material of their storytelling, which has yet to be fully processed. Laughter marks that inconclusive ›uidity between reality and illusion , but rather than successfully masking trauma, laughter reveals it and demonstrates the painful passage to survival. Yoduk Story, then, becomes a performance repetitively addressing and readdressing the messy encounter between the real and the invented, fear and laughter, death and survival by eclectically clashing most unlikely cultural texts. By choosing to simulate trauma on stage, Yoduk Story not only consumes the available narratives about trauma, but also adds a new entry to the archives of trauma. Diana Taylor writes: “Performance . . . works in the transmission of traumatic memory, drawing from and transforming a shared archive and repertoire of cultural images. These performance protests function as a “symptom of history” (i.e., acting out), part and parcel of trauma. They also assert a critical distance to make a claim, af‹rming ties and connections while denouncing attacks on social contracts.”96 Taylor’s statement scrupulously reminds us of the very basic yet powerful function of performance as a transmitter of traumatic memory, which, in my view, is essentially tied to expanding the parameters of historical memory . Yoduk Story achieves this goal by constantly shifting the boundaries between politics and arts, propaganda and counterpropaganda, religion and human rights, which serves as both creative and destructive force: creative in the sense that it becomes a polyglot performance experimenting with a variety of styles to address an overwhelmingly tragic issue; destructive in the sense that it offers the same kind of monolithic, totalitarian vision it tries to oppose. The many contradictions it embodies extend an invitation to future debates on the theatrical nature of staging trauma. Although the regurgitation of of‹cial North Korean performance structures and the ideological dogmatization of trauma impede the original commitment to subverting the oppressive order, Yoduk Story nonetheless marks its place in theater history as the ‹rst performance to catalog and perform this unclaimed experience. The of‹cial historiography of North Korea will never render this experience visible, and this is why torture sings and trauma dances in Yoduk Story: to resist the tyrannical impulse to erase traumatic memory from history. 308 • ILLUSIVE UTOPIA Conclusion: Looking Back, Moving Forward If we were to look back from a distant future, North Korea in the early twenty-‹rst century will most likely be remembered as having traversed a crossroads where dark nightmares of the past intersected with cautious dreams for the future. Although no stranger to hardship, the North Korean people at the turn of the millennium went through suffering of such magnitude that it can only be fathomed through fragmented stories told by defectors and travelers. Even the overwhelmingly optimistic North Korean propaganda machinery, in a rarely honest moment of self-re›ection, dubbed the harsh times as the “arduous march”1 —an expression previously reserved for the time when Kim Il-sung had to march through a Manchurian blizzard in de‹ance of the Japanese imperial army. As the world is becoming a closely-knit community with exponentially increasing mobility and communication, North Korea attempts to engage the outside world through limited yet intriguing channels, such as the Pyongyang International Film Festival (hereafter PIFF) and tourism projects open to westerners. The PIFF, in particular, is an intriguing venue for Pyongyangites who want to have a glimpse at the world beyond national boundaries. A biennial festival that began in 1987 and was reinvented in 1990, it has been introducing North Koreans to a wide variety of ‹lms from around the world— from Egyptian action ‹lms to the British comedy Mr. Bean. By all indications , the ‹lm festival has been consistently successful, with one participant recalling that 12,000 tickets were sold for the 2008 festival alone.2 According to German journalist Malte Herwig, who traveled to attend the 2008 309 Figure 55. Pyongyang International Cinema House during the Pyongyang International Film Festival. Mid 2000s. (Photo courtesy of an anonymous donor.) Figure 56. Audiences for the 2008 Pyongyang International Film Festival. (Copyright Malte Herwig, 2008.) PIFF, there were even some spontaneous and uncontrolled moments on site, such...