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xv Introduction The stage is suffused with a watery blue light. The set looks exotic, not just to Western eyes, but from any human perspective; and so do the characters. Great coral-like rocks loom up at the rear, and long strands of aquatic vegetation hang from the top of the proscenium arch. Evidently we are in the location referred to in the title of the show, The Song of the Underwater Palace (Sugung-ga). The lord of the palace, the Dragon King, is too magnificent to be represented by a mere costume: his body is constructed as part of the set, coiled around the rocks and culminating in a towering head where the actor portraying him stands. He speaks and sings in the characteristic husky voice of the p’ansori narrative singer; but while p’ansori is accompanied only by a drum, this operatic version features a whole orchestra of Korean instruments: reedy bamboo flutes and oboes, perky fiddles, and gentle zithers as well as drums and gongs. The courtiers and attendants of the Dragon King are also sea creatures, their bodies represented by fantastic costumes of green and gold and high headgear shaped like antennae. They also sing in p’ansori style and sway in time to the music, suggesting the motion of waves. A turtle arrives, walking on its hind legs and accompanied by an animal more unexpected in this setting: a rabbit, played by a woman in a white furry costume with raised “bunny ears.” The rabbit is immediately seized by a colossal giant squid, each of its tentacles operated by several dancers whose legs protrude beneath it. For the Dragon King is unwell and needs the liver of a rabbit as medicine, and it is for this purpose that the turtle has tricked the rabbit into accompanying him to the Underwater Palace. But as we might guess from the cheeky hopping figure on the fiddle that regularly accompanies her movements, the rabbit turns out to be the greater trickster of the two. Claiming that she has left her liver on the land, she bends down to show the Dragon King the three holes in her rear end: one for urine, one for dung, and one for taking her liver out and putting it back in. In the rest of the show, we watch the turtle accompany the rabbit back to the land, where she easily eludes him. In the process, the spectacular underwater set changes to an equally elaborate one representing a rural landscape. Warm sunlight replaces the rippling blue light of the underwater scenes. The xvi Introduction characters continue to sing in p’ansori style over an instrumental accompaniment , their voices amplified via wireless microphones. Other genres of music and dance are also invoked, as when a dance of birds alludes to the “crane dance” (hangmu) from the Korean court tradition. In costuming, lighting, sound reinforcement, and the construction and movement of scenery, the full resources of a modern theater are deployed to make the performance aurally and visually accessible to everyone in the 1,500-seat auditorium. During the interval, a Korean man in the audience opens a conversation with me by asking, in English, “What do you think of Korean traditional opera?” This was the March 1995 production of The Song of the Underwater Palace by the National Changgeuk Company of Korea (Kungnip Ch’anggŭktan; hereafter, NCCK) in the Main Hall of the National Theater of Korea. I had recently returned to Korea to begin my doctoral research on ch’anggŭk, an idea that had been growing on me since I saw my first ch’anggŭk opera seven years before. In the course of that research, I would keep coming back to that apparently innocent question—“What do you think of Korean traditional opera?”—as one laden with far more significance than the speaker can have intended. Fifteen years later, this book is my attempt to answer it. Discourses of Tradition As an opening gambit, my conversational partner could just as well have said something like, “How are you enjoying the show?” By asking, instead, “What do you think of Korean traditional opera?” he was doing two things that I had often experienced during my previous two years of living in Korea. First, he was drawing immediate attention to the difference in our nationalities (for he would hardly have posed the question in the same form to a Korean person). Second, he was showing a concern with how Korean...

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