Performing the Nation in Global Korea: Transnational Theatre by Hyunjung Lee (review)

Even before the South Korean singer PSY’s music video for the song “Gangnam Style” caught the attention of billions in 2012, Hallyu, or the Korean Wave, carried flows of Korean popular culture into Asia and beyond. In recent years, many academic publications have reported on and analyzed the success of Korean popular culture on the global stage. Whereas most of these studies focus on pop music and television dramas, Hyunjung Lee’s new publication elucidates South Korean theatre, focusing specifically on productions that aimed at traveling outside of Korea, or what she calls “transnational theatre.” Lee demonstrates that there are conflicts in desires for modernization, westernization, and nationalism that manifest in the export of theatrical cultural products.

As many analysts of the Korean Wave hold, Lee posits that the global aspirations of Korean theatre-makers were brewed in the 1990s through a government-led globalization and modernization campaign called segyehwa. In her informative and concise history of South Korean theatre and performing arts, Lee documents the influences of the West in cultural changes in various sectors throughout the twentieth century. Western theatre was received as advanced and modern, and an imagined America became a global standard that the makers of transnational theatre pursued in the 1990s. At the same time, Korean theatre was busy appropriating and defining national traditions. This harked back to the military regimes of the 1970s and ’80s, when the government reinvented tradition and promoted national culture to justify its authenticity. During these same decades, resistance groups had employed folk traditions in their political demonstrations and social-outreach programs. The global and the national both influenced development of the transnational theatre of South Korea during the 1990s and up to the present.

To illustrate the complexity and contradiction of Korean theatre, Lee launches a theoretical frame of “global fetishism,” drawing on Marxist commodity fetishism. Genres like musical theatre fetishize the global, postulating Broadway as an ideal arena. The Western Canon is widely translated and Shakespeare is reified as an emblem of advanced literary aesthetics. Lee figures ballet as an emblem of elitist culture in which actors’ and dancers’ body types are molded to conform to an ideal (Western) type. Drawing on Xiaomei Chen’s theory of Occidentalism, Lee highlights theatricalized shamanic rituals and traditional costume as a manifestation of self-orientalism. The core of this book carefully examines the contradictory entanglement embodied in various productions of musicals, theatre, and ballet during the 1990s and the first decade of the new millennium.

The Last Empress (1995), the first large-scale musical produced by a Korean company, is her most exemplary production. The life of the musical’s heroine, Queen Min, embodies the contradictions of the global and national. Based on the real story of Korea’s forward-looking queen who attempted to establish diplomatic relationships with the West, the musical enacts her brutal assassination by Japan to get her out of the way for its annexation of Chosun. The story evokes and stokes anti-Japanese sentiments in Korea. With major support from both governmental and commercial sectors in Korea, this lavishly staged and costumed production, with its highly nationalistic theme, had its New York premiere at the Lincoln Center. Regardless of its lukewarm international responses and financial setbacks, The Last Empress is now proudly known as “‘the first Korean musical’s export’ on Broadway” (33).

In preparation for its global advancement, the musical’s makers added a uniquely Korean element: a scene in which the queen, under pressure to produce a son, commissions a “primitive” shamanic ritual (gut). Such self-orientalistic/nationalistic tactics appear in many of Lee’s examples. In her discussion of a 1996 adaptation of Hamlet by Street Theatre Troupe that depicts Hamlet as a shaman conducting a gut, Lee points out with irony that the inclusion of traditional elements was influenced by the US avant-garde theatre movement of the 1960s. At the same time, such moves alienate Korean audiences, who are generally more familiar with Western...