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  • Illusive Utopia: Theater, Film, and Everyday Performance in North Korea
  • Joohee Park
Illusive Utopia: Theater, Film, and Everyday Performance in North Korea. By Suk-Young Kim. Theater: Theory/Text/Performance. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2010; pp. 400.

Suk-Young Kim's Illusive Utopia: Theater, Film, and Everyday Performance in North Korea is a groundbreaking book that provides a rare view of everyday [End Page 471] life in North Korea. Although North Korea frequently occupies international news headlines, the general public knows little about the actual lives of its citizens beyond reports of hunger and human rights abuses. The author of this book explains how North Korea became the first and only hereditary socialist state in the world by insisting upon ideological conformity among its citizens in even the most intimate details of daily life. According to Kim, nothing less than the color of one's shoes escapes the scrutiny of national leaders, who impose their opinions of ideal bodily practices upon their citizens, turning the personal body of each into a vehicle of state-supported propaganda.

Kim reveals, through meticulous research and well-crafted arguments, how North Korean leaders constructed an ideal nation based on socialist and Confucian principles, which were then represented through visual and performance media. North Koreans are encouraged to emulate the "utopian reality" propagated by their leaders in everyday life, reversing the process of mimesis, such that "everyday reality is in a position to imitate the represented reality" (14). The six main chapters of this book explore: how performance genres were hybridized, how performances use time and space, the ways performance created Kim Il-sung and his family as the patriarchs of the nation, how traditional family structures were transformed in line with the "family" of the nation, how the ideal woman was re-imagined accordingly, and how North Korea has restaged itself, after its iconic leader Kim Il-sung died in 1994, amid the beginnings of extreme economic hardship.

While each chapter is fascinating and well-supported by a solid theoretical framework, theatre scholars may find the first and last chapters most intriguing. Chapter 1, "Hybridization of Performance Genres," analyzes how North Korean leaders—mainly under the direction of Kim Jong-il—concocted a form of propaganda that is both artistic and efficient. Kim Jong-il is a well-known film aficionado, who aspires to elevate the quality of his country's films in order not only to entertain international audiences, but also to convert them to North Korean ideological aims. As a medium of propaganda, live theatre is regarded as inferior to film, which, through editing, can manipulate the spectator's gaze and sympathies to achieve its desired effect. The regime thus has given preferential treatment to film, but the state also supports the stage as when, in the 1970s, its performance conventions were hybridized with traditional music and dance to create "revolutionary opera." The new genre of revolutionary opera, however, has been typically circulated by means of film rather than live stage performances, since it can present the "three-dimensionality of stage characters" with the benefits of film editing (49). Kim observes that if such films are textbooks of official state ideology, then actors in North Korea are "political teachers," noting that they are encouraged to meet with ordinary citizens to discuss the heroic nature of their stage/film characters. At the same time, citizens are encouraged to create their own collaborative performances in which they can emulate the revolutionary characters seen in films and onstage. Consequently, the social and political utopia represented in performance is meant to become inscribed onto the bodies of North Koreans through repeated viewing and participation, blurring the boundaries between illusion and reality.

The sixth chapter, "Performing Paradoxes: Staging Utopia, Upstaging Dystopia," examines the changes in performance narratives over recent decades. It is well-known that North Korea has been in the midst of a dire food crisis since the 1990s. As a way to attract foreign capital into the country, North Korea opened its doors in a limited way to select tourists from South Korea and beyond. These tourists pay copious amounts of money to tour natural landscapes and/or national monuments in...

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