Korean Trojan Women: Performing Wartime Sexual Violence

Aida Karic’s The Trojan Women: An Asian Story (2007), an international collaboration between a Bosnian-born director and a Korean choreographer, a Korean composer, and a Korean theatre company, was first produced at the Schauspielhaus Wien in Austria and then toured to the United States and South Korea. Karic’s The Trojan Women interweaves the history of Japanese military sexual slavery, particularly of Korean survivors, with Euripides’s The Trojan Women. It relies on identifiable markers of Koreanness, such as the musical style of pansori and the visual imagery of shamanic ritual movement, to locate the narrative as a Korean tragedy. I argue that the re-visioning of these Korean cultural forms, such as the use of cloth in the ritual scene, offers a symbolic reclamation of violated bodies while providing a redressive space for the audience to witness the long history of wartime sexual violence against women.