Between Indeterminacy and Radical Critique: Madang-guk, Ritual, and Protest

The French Revolution is sometimes said to have really begun with the opening night of Beaumarchais's Marriage of Figaro, when the audience reacted angrily to its depiction of aristocratic life.¹ Throughout the 1970s and 1980s in South Korea, many of the "rehearsals" for the much-hoped-for revolution were staged by performances of madang-guk, a dramatic form that was a synthesis and amalgamation of dramaturgical and aesthetic elements of the traditional folk dramas such as mask dance (t'alch'um) and puppet drama.2 After emerging in the 1970s as a social protest and a new form of drama, madang-guk by the 1980s had assumed an alternative, even utopian, form of cultural and political expression. It became a meeting ground of avant-garde art, social movement, and expressions of new subjectivities.

In particular, madang-guk swept through university campuses from the early 1970s. By the 1980s there were few universities without their own madang-guk groups and few university festivals and events without madang-guk performances. Madang-guk was not limited to university campuses; factories, village squares, public halls, Protestant and Catholic churches, and outdoor markets were often sites of madang-guk performances. Traditional recreational activities of commoners—which reputedly originated in their everyday lives but had disappeared during the vicissitudes of the modern period and were revived initially with government-sponsored folk contests—would draw thousands of students on university campuses. Contemporary professional theaters attempted to infuse traditional folk arts and folklore elements with Western forms, and a few Protestant churches even incorporated shamanistic rituals in their worship services.

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In its richness as drama and as social critique, madang-guk renders itself open to a variety of conceptual free plays. Scholars from various disciplines have conceptualized madang-guk as a case of people's theater and resistance theater, as well as a unique expression of Korean spirit.

4 Chungmoo Choi, who has eloquently presented the case of madang-guk in the context of a decolonization project, problematizes the role of intellectuals. Choi argues that the act of representing and constructing "the people" by intellectuals amounts to the process of "othering." That is, intellectuals classified, appropriated, and, at the same time, subordinated minjung (people) in their representation of minjung.⁵

My aim here is to situate madang-guk in the historical trajectory of Korea's modernity. In the context of Korea's modernity, which was experienced and articulated as "negative" by the majority of Koreans, madang-guk is the discursive construction of minjung as a modern subjectivity that resists overdetermination from without. Rather than an unambiguous case of intellectuals appropriating minjung for their own purposes of self-representation or a case of intellectuals expropriating historical displacement, madang-guk in this context emerges as a social narrative that tells a different tale of Korea's modernity and capitalist development. After tracing the trajectory of modernity experienced and narrated in South Korea, I show how the sense of modernity as negative has shaped postcolonial consciousness and how this sense permeates and structures contemporary practices and representations. I then situate madang-guk in the context of the politics of the invention of tradition in general and the revival of folk culture engineered by the Korean state in particular. Later in the essay I discuss the dramaturgical and aesthetic structure of mask dance drama, madang-guk's precursor, and argue that madang-guk as a meeting ground of new aesthetics and political efficacy took on the characteristics of ritual—ritual practiced in the realm of everyday politics and the politics of culture. After surveying madang-guk performances in the 1970s and 1980s, I close the essay with some concluding remarks.

Madang-guk, Modernity, and Postcolonial Consciousness

The story of Korea's modernity is still being written from the perspective of a global narrative of transformation, one that locates the origins of modernity in Japanese colonial rule and represents Korea's...