Taroo’s “Pansori Hamlet Project” at the Intersection of Music and Theatre, between Past and Present (#ASA2020 Conference Paper)

This post provides some additional resources for my paper “Taroo’s ‘Pansori Hamlet Project’ at the Intersection of Music and Theatre, between Past and Present”, (to be) presented at this year’s conference of the Asian Shakespeare Association (ASA).

The ASA is holding biannual conferences since 2014, so far in Taiwan, India, and the Philippines, and this time at Sejong University in Seoul (November 5–7, 2020, see the conference website) The theme is “Intersections in Shakespeare” and it’s a hybrid conference, so I assume many scholars from abroad will participate online. Given the relatively controlled Corona situation here in Korea, I hope to be able to attend in person. I will talk about the “Pansori Hamlet Project” by Gugak Musical Collective Taroo (국악뮤지컬집단 타루, 판소리 햄릿 프로젝트), an ongoing long-term project that I’ve been interested in since its inception in 2012 (links to earlier posts are below). I’m looking forward to hear what Shakespeare specialists from Korea and abroad will think about my ideas!

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First, the abstract of my paper (I slightly changed the title for my final presentation):

Jan Creutzenberg (Ewha Womans University)

Renewing Korean Tradition with Shakespeare:

Taroo’s “Pansori Hamlet Project” at the Intersection of Traditional Music and Theatre, East and West

Introduced in the early 20th century, Shakespeare has sparked all kinds of creative experiments on South Korean stages. Today, a variety of productions co-exist, canonical or Koreanized, from monodrama to musical. Scholars have repeatedly drawn comparisons between structure and motives of Shakespeare’s plays and the stories of pansori, traditional epic singing. But theatre makers remain relatively reluctant to employ this national heritage art in their adaptations, possibly because different conventions and expectations associated with these cultural monoliths would restrict their freedom of artistic appropriation.

Ensemble Taroo’s “Pansori Hamlet Project”, a full-fledged pansori-style adaptation, offers an opportunity to reconsider the discourses and logistics that inform theatremaking in Korea today. The 2014 premiere was preceded by two showcases that rendered the process of conceptualization public. Since then, the production has been shown in various venues with different casts. In order to relate to contemporary audiences, the singers of Taroo collaborate with actors, update Hamlet’s struggles, and combine traditional-style singing with modern musical. At the same time, they employ funding schemes dedicated to spoken drama, blurring boundaries between the worlds of (traditional) music and theatre.

From a theoretical perspective, the “Pansori Hamlet Project” is located at the intersection of traditional performance and Western dramatic art. From a practical perspective, the staged production process presents an approach that mediates between the recreation, adaptation, and appropriation of Hamlet. The productions shows how a global icon can resonate with local issues as well as a cosmopolitan everyday.

Second, some information on the “Pansori Hamlet Project”.

This timeline shows how the project developed from showcases to a full-fledged production, which then was shown in several different incarnations. The future of the project remains to be seen.

Now some videos that give some impressions of the “Pansori Hamlet Project”:

First, a clip about the 2015 version:

A short teaser for the 2017 production:

And another one, this time Christmas-themed:

Finally, one of the two songs I discuss in my paper: the “Song of Life” (인생가), here performed by Song Bora, Jeong Ji-hye, Seo Eo-jin, and Choe Ji-suk (송보라, 정지혜, 서어진, 최지숙) who play the four “Hamlets” in the 2017 version. In my paper I mainly draw on the 2014/15 version (with Lee Won-gyeong 이원경 and Jo Ella 조엘라 preceding Jeong and Seo), so find the differences!

Third, something to read…

These are earlier texts I wrote on Taroo’s “Pansori Hamlet Project”, available here on the blog:

• On the first showcase (2012)
• On the second showcase (2013)
• On the (first) final production (2014)

Taroo is one of the major producers of pansori theatre, a topic on which I talked at a conference by the Association for Asian Performance this summer. Their productions and activities are quite diverse, ranging from adaptations of plays and operas, original musicals, and children’s theatre to traditional pansori performances and experimental cross-over works that feature electronic music, Korean mask dance drama, or pop songs.

I wrote a review of the “Pansori Hamlet Project”, comparing it with ensemble Tuida’s Hamlet Cantabile (2005–), another adaptation that uses music. The following essay is available online:

• Jan Creutzenberg, “Hamlet Redux: Two Korean Productions that Re-stage Shakespeare’s Play between Tradition and Today”, Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation X.1 (spring/summer 2016), eds. Maurizio Calbi and Stephen O’Neill. [LINK]

There isn’t much research literature directly concerned with the “Pansori Hamlet Project”, even in Korean, except for (as far as I’m aware) a recent paper by Seokhun Choi, in English nonetheless. These are the details:

• Seokhun Choi, “Pansori Hamlet Project: Taroo’s New Pansori Shakespeare for the Local Audience”, Asian Theatre Journal 36.2 (Fall 2019): 349–369. [LINK]

Abstract: This essay focuses on the South Korean performance group Taroo’s locally-oriented aesthetics in Pansori Hamlet Project (2014) as an alternative model to the notion of “Global Shakespeare” which presupposes intercultural spectatorship as well as intercultural practice. A natural corollary of this “global” discourse is overlooking small- scale productions and verbal genres such as pansori despite their artistic merit and cultural significance for the local audience. Taroo’s pansori Shakespeare features four Hamlets who tell the story of the Danish prince with reference to Korean popular culture in local dialects. The pluralization and localization of the Shakespeare’s melancholic hero transform Hamlet into a play of contemporary Korean young adults going through a difficult time together while recreating the traditional form of pansori as a popular genre they call “gugak musical.” Taroo’s pansori adaptation showcases a local Shakespeare that is not motivated by “bardolatry” or universalism underlying many intercultural Shakespeares but relies on indigenous language and music as a powerful vehicle of sympathy and renewal of tradition for the local audience.

Fourth, some more general literature of interest:

On this page, I’ve written a few blogposts on Shakespeare in Korea, some of which read a bit dated (here in reverse chronological order):

• Ten Years Hamlet the Music (May 2017)
• The Bard in Korea, a Celebration of #ShakespeareWeek (March 2017)
• Hamlet in Korean Translation (November 2016, part 1 of a series TBC)
• Celebrating Shakespeare on Stage and on Air (May 2016, on his 400th day of death)
• Shakespeare Readings in 19th Century Korea (June 2015, an interesting archival find)
• Some More Shakespeare in Korea (October 2011, bibliographics)
• Shakespeare in Korea, Two Years Later (September 2011, more bibliographics, as an addendum to an earlier paper)

To extend the bibliographic information in the last two posts mentioned, I list here a few selected recent papers, for the sake of brevity only those published in English (when of interest, I also include abstracts), with the exception of two particularly relevant texts for starters:

Of further interest might be this “Study on Productions of ‘Hamlet’ in Korea” (in Korean), the MA thesis by Park Sun-hee, director of the “Pansori Hamlet Project”. In her thesis from 2007, Park discusses three productions: the tradition-based Prince Hamyul by Dong-Rang Repertory (동랑레포터리, 함열태자, 1976); Theatre Company Nottle’s Hamlet from the East (극단 노뜰, 동방의 햄릿, 2001), which uses non-verbal means to “find the global universality”; and the aforementioned Hamlet Catabile by Tuida (노래하듯이 햄릿, 공연창작집단 뛰다, 2005), which she considers a an accessible musical drama, an attempt to reach wider audiences. In the appendix, she provides a list of Hamlet productions in Korea from a 1938 (a performance of the graveyard scene) to 2005, featuring sixty-one in total.

• 박선희, “햄릿의 한국적 수용 연구”, 석사학위논문, 한양대학교, 2007. [LINK]

Hyon-u Lee, organizer of this year’s ASA Conference, discusses the question of “How to Koreanize Shakespeares Dramatic Language”, also referencing Taroo’s “Pansori Hamlet Project”, but focusing mostly on Oh Tae-suk’s works and his own production of Hamlet (on which the next paper by Yi-Hsin Hsu goes more into detail):

• 이현우, “셰익스피어의 극 언어, 어떻게 한국화 할 것인가?”, Shakespeare Review 51.1 (2015): 27–65. [LINK]

Abstract: Shakespearean characters would say “hear a play” instead of “see a play.” Hearing is as important as seeing in Shakespearean plays. It is, of course, because Shakespeare’s language, represented by blank verses, couplets, sharing lines, and puns, plays essential parts in his plays. Incidentally, when Shakespearean plays are translated or performed in Korean, those poetic and dramatic qualities of Shakespearean language are usually ignored. As the linguistic structures and the poetic systems of Korean language are quite different from those of English, most of Korean Shakespeare translations and stage productions have used simple prose translations without such poetic and dramatic qualities so far. However, some Shakespearean scholars including Choi Jong-cheol and myself have tried to do poetic translations. Especially some Shakespearean productions such as Oh Tae-suk’s Romeo and Juliet, Macbeth, and The Tempest, Park Sung-hwan’s Changgeuk Romeo and Juliet, Park Sun-hee’s Pansori Hamlet Project have used Korean poetic language, and shown how Korean poetic rhythms can alternate Shakespearean poetic language. This paper discusses the possibilities that such poetic and dramatic qualities of Shakespearean language as blank verse, rhymes, couplets, and puns, can be translated into Korean.

• Yi-Hsin Hsu, “Lee Hyon-u’s Hamlet Q1 and Pedagogical Performance on the Korean Stage: Textual Identity in Intercultural Theatre”, Asian Theatre Journal 34.2 (Fall 2017): 435-454.[LINK]

After a while, there is a new dissertation on the history of Shakespeare in Korea, with a focus on intraculturalism. Seong-kwan Cho covers the post-war era, which he divides in three periods: the early years (1950–70), the transitional years (1970–90) and the contemporary period (1990–present). In the second part of the dissertation, he zooms in on three productions that “reinvent” traditional theatre with Shakespeare: King Uru, a mixture of King Lear and Korean legends (National Theater of Korea, 2001); Oh Tae-suk’s Romeo and Juliet (Ensemble Mokhwa, 2001); Yang Jung-ung’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream (Ensemble Yohangza, 2002). Finally, in part three, he discusses some other contemporary approaches, Ki Koo-seo’s Hamlet-series (1981, 1982, 1985, 1990), Seoul Metropolitan Theatre’s Hamlet directed by Park Geun-hyeong (2011), and Park Jae-wan’s Trans Sibiya, a trans-gender adaptation of Twelfth Night (2002).

• Seong-kwan Cho, “Shakespeare and the South Korean Stage”, PhD-dissertation, University of Warwick, 2014.[LINK]

Hyunjung Lee’s chapter on “Korean Shakespeare” is part of her larger argument on nationalist globalization in Korean performing arts and offers much food for thoughts, likewise. It is also a helpful contextualization of what might be called the “big three” Korean Shakespeare productions/producers, namely  of the early 2000s:

• Hyunjung Lee, “Conceptualizing Korean Shakespeare in the Era of Globalization”, Chapter 5 of Performing the Nation in Global Korea: Transnational Theatre, Palgrave 2015, 93–126.[LINK]

Abstract: This chapter demonstrates how significant Korean Shakespeare performances (Hamlet, Romeo and Juliet, A Midsummer Night’s Dream) have balanced the authenticity of Shakespeare with the desire to retain and refurbish the heritage of indigenous Korean performing arts. Using Hamlet as the central example, the questions explored here concern how “Shakespeare,” as a signifier of the Western Canon and as a global cultural capital, gets translated via various forms of Asian traditional performing arts devices; the extent to which the producers accommodate their current young audience in terms of archaic performing devices; and how one can deal with these issues in the context of cultural globalization amidst the lure of interculturalism.

Another case study of Hamlet productions (Lee Yun-taek’s version from 1996 and Yang Jung-woong’s one from 2009) by  Yu Jin Ko:

• Yu Jin Ko, “The Site of Burial in Two Korean Hamlets”, The Shakespearean International Yearbook (2016): 27–45.

What is a “Korean Shakespeare”? A necessarily broad definition includes cases such as the Czech mega-musical Hamlet, a success story in Korea since 2007. Yeeyon Im , whose earlier paper on Interculturalism (see below) I like very much, has written on this production:

• Yeeyon Im, “To Love or Not to Be: Janek Ledecký’s Musical Hamlet and Shakespeare Negotiations in Korea”, Popular Entertainment Studies 7.1-2 (2016): 75–92. [LINK]

Thankfully, now some papers are out on the few changgeuk (창극) adaptations of Shakespeare. Younglim Han compares Han Tae-suk’s Lady Macbeth, shown 2016 at the National Gugak Center (국립국악원, 레이디 맥베스, 연출 한태숙, 2016) and based on her longseller play of the same name (see an earlier blogpost on a chance missed) with Tian Mansha’s Sinchuan opera-adaptation of Lady Macbeth from 2001. (There was another changgeuk version of Lady Macbeth in 2012, a one-time show in a visually more traditional style by the National Changgeuk Company, directed by Kim Su-jin and with Lee Yeon-ju in the lead role (국립창극단, 맥베스 부인, 연출 김수진, 출연 이연주, 2012).

• Younglim Han, “Retelling Lady Macbeth on Stage: Cases of Productions in Korea and China”, 현대 영미드라마 (Journal of Modern English Drama by the Modern English Drama Association of Korea), 31.3 (2018): 113–133. [LINK]

And Ken Takiguchi discusses Park Sung-hwan’s Koreanized version of Romeo and Juliet with the National Changgeuk Company from 2009 (국립창극단, 로미오와 줄리엣, 연출 박성환, 2009) as an “Inter-Asian Translation”:

• Ken Takiguchi, “Translating Erased History: Inter-Asian Translation of the National Changgeuk Company of Korea’s Romeo and Juliet”, Journal of World Languages 3.1 (2016): 22–36. [LINK]

And more papers by Shakespeareans, Eleine Ng on Yang Jung-woong’s Midsummer Night Dream, originally from 2002, that was  part of the Globe-to-Globe festival 2012; and  Kevin A. Quarmby on Yang’s Hamlet from 2009, shown again in London in 2014:

• Eleine Ng, “Performing Shakespeares: (Dis)locating the Authentic in a Korean Intercultural Dream”, Shakespeare 10.4 (2014): 428–442. [LINK]
• Kevin A. Quarmby, “Shamanistic Shakespeare: Korea’s Colonization of Hamlet”, in Local and Global Myths in Shakespearean Performance, edited by Aneta Mancewicz and Alexa Alice Joubin, Palgrave 2018, 57–73. [LINK]

Finally, bibliographic information on other research I cite in my presentation:

• Lee Hyon-u, “Shamanism in Korean Hamlets since 1990: Exorcising Han”, Asian Theatre Journal 28.1 (2011): 104–128. [LINK]
• Yeeyon Im, “The Location of Shakespeare in Korea: Lee Yountaek’s Hamlet and the Mirage of Interculturality”, Theatre Journal 60.2 (2008): 257–276. [LINK]
•  김병국, 『한국 고전문학의 비평적 이해』(Kim Byeong-guk, A Critical Understanding of Korean Classical Literature), 서울대학교출판부, 1995.

So much for now – may the show go on and the stuff that dreams are made of never run out!

— 5 Nov. 2020 (木)