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7. Interpreting the Historical Record: Using Images of Korean Dance for Understanding the Past
- University of Wisconsin Press
- Chapter
- Additional Information
When I began field research on Korean dance, I made a conscious decision to focus on the analysis of contemporary performances of older dances. As a dance ethnologist, I planned to use my specialized movement analysis skills as an entrée, and then branch out and deepen my understandings by digging into history and by learning about such other cultural manifestations and belief systems as religion, music, and philosophy. My research in Korea began in 1979 and since then has involved four extended periods of residence and numerous short visits.1 While learning to perform a number of dances, transcribing the dances into Labanotation, and trying to understand better the nature of the movements and choreography, I began to see how intricately interwoven were the ethnography of the present and the historical records of the past. Documenting the dances of the present was important, but a real understanding of the present could not ignore the impact of the past and a careful examination of its records. As I sought to understand contemporary performances, Korean colleagues and consultants continually referred me to the past.2 They identified events they believed contributed to the present, pointed me 153 7 Interpreting the Historical Record Using Images of Korean Dance for Understanding the Past to historical documents, and justified current practices on the basis of records of the past. When I began to study some of the historical records that were repeatedly referenced, however, I often became puzzled. I could not always see in them the validation of the present that my Korean associates espoused.3 My purpose here is to examine selected iconographic representations of Korean dance, one particular type of historical record, to show the interface between history and ethnography in researching the dances of this country.4 Along the way I comment on my discoveries and dilemmas, as well as on the responses of Korean colleagues and consultants to things that struck me as of particular significance. In doing so, I call into question the assumption that Korea’s iconographic representations of dance, even when commissioned by the royal court for the explicit purpose of documenting events, represent actual dance moments. This resonates with contemporary thinking on historical dance research. For example, Susan Manning tells us: “An event bound in space and time, a performance can be read only through its traces— on the page, in memory, on film, in the archive. Each of these traces marks, indeed, distorts, the event of performance, and so the scholar pursues what remains elusive as if moving through an endless series of distorting reflections. But this pursuit leaves its own sort of illumination, and that illumination is what the scholar records, in effect penning a journal of the process of inquiry.”5 Georgiana Gore states the belief that the “discovery of historical knowledge or disclosure of historical truth are no longer tenable research objectives,” but what is possible is “the mapping of a multiplicity of authorial voices through the deployment of interpretive strategies which acknowledge that all writing is situated.”6 And Joan Erdman advocates contextualizing historical events, examining them in relation to contemporaneous occurrences, in order to obtain the clearest understanding of them.7 The emphasis of these authors on the situatedness of writing, the use of interpretive strategies, and the value of establishing multiple “truths” applies equally to iconographic records and points to the importance of examining historical records, regardless of their format, from many points of view. I offer selected examples from my studies of Korean dance that reinforce the necessity of fully embracing multiple perspectives in order to comprehend historical documents and the relationship between history and ethnography. 154 Ch’ŏyongmu: Realistic Depiction of Performance Moments? The primary focus of my early research was Ch’ŏyongmu.8 The dance is performed today by five masked dancers, usually men, each wearing a different colored tunic. Written historical documents tell us the dance began in ritual contexts, and contemporary Korean dancers and scholars acknowledge this origin. The dance is now generally described by Koreans as a court dance, since that is the primary context in which it was performed for countless centuries prior to the demise of the court in the early 1900s.9 As I began to explore the history of Ch’ŏyongmu in order to understand the nature of today’s version of the dance, colleagues referred me to paintings and woodblock prints of the dance in addition to textual manuscripts. Fully cognizant of the many challenges...