When I attended the Hahn Moo-Sook Colloquium (“Staging Korea: Korean Theatre in Search of New Aesthetics”) in D.C., I was delighted that a number of talks were planned to discuss intercultural theatre, and Shakespeare adaptations in particular. As it happened, attendees of the conference were invited to a screening of Master Oh Tae-Suk’s Tempest a day before the actual colloquium. As the talks were given, however, I was increasingly disturbed by their post-colonial characterization of the “intercultural dialectic.”
One talk began by sketching the history of Korean theatre coupled with a brief account of Shakespeare’s inception in the peninsula, then finally arriving at a discussion of Master Oh: the foremost Korean director whose Shakespeare adaptations (Romeo and Juliet and The Tempest) were invited to perform at the Barbican Centre in London and the Edinburgh International Festival. The speaker dutifully pointed to the different marriages between Korean theatre and The Tempest in terms of plot, characters, staging, etc. I describe these intercultural joints as a marriage between Shakespeare and Korea because it seems a particularly useful metaphor, especially in light of a common Korean saying that ‘marriage is never between two individuals, but instead between two families.’ The talk, however, framed intercultural theatre simply as a marriage between two individuals—a simplification that reduces the complexities of two separate cultural strands that attempts to embody these in two persons. I walked away feeling disappointed and perhaps even slightly bored by the talk’s attempts to establish parallels between the “East” and the “West” that didn’t quite capture the frantic kinetic energy or the shape shifting borders of Oh’s The Tempest; in other words, the talk’s intercultural discourse was actually a reductionist dichotomy with only two characters on stage, or in this case a podium: Korea and Shakespeare. The speaker concluded, finally, with a not so subtle wish that future Korean adaptations would “include more Korea and Korean theatre and less Shakespeare.”
If I may extrapolate here, the proposed vision of intercultural theatre is a deeply suspicious and—at its core—reactionary model that is ultimately unsustainable. It understands globalization with a nationalist or post-colonial tilt and presents it as a different kind of cultural hegemony—one where once independent cultures are subsumed under a larger global culture and differences are smudged, eventually erased. This particular speaker’s vision of “more Korea and less Shakespeare” is a preemptive measure to first, guard, as it were, the borders of Korean culture and second, appropriate Shakespeare and use it him as a platform to put Korea on the global map—towards the center and away from the margin. The futility of guarding increasingly “porous” borders, as Feral puts it, has already been discussed (Feral xx). Certainly, this desire to establish Korea back on the map is understandable when Korea, only a hundred years ago, was almost literally erased from the map. Korea’s national history—in the 20th century alone, the Korean peninsula experienced Japanese colonization, the Korean War, a split between North and South, student riots, dictatorial regimes, the Kwangju massacre, and the 1997 IMF crisis—explains, in part, the tendency towards suspicion of any sort of assimilation or loss of national selfhood.
Nevertheless, the very act of “putting Korea back on the map” further enforces system of the central and marginal positions; as a result, “Korean Shakespeare” is pushed farther out and forever remains a niche, exotic Shakespeare. While I don’t usually agree with the common complaint of theatre critics that Asian productions of Shakespeare often visually exoticize itself to attract attention of the West, the point is well taken in this case. The fundamental mindset of appropriation only leads to a cyclical pattern of reinforcing the very power positions that the speaker ostensibly wishes to dismantle. With her logic, an emerging culture like Korea should appropriate an existing established product as a means to (perhaps) proudly showcase Korean culture. I mentioned earlier that this model was reactionary because this appropriation of Shakespeare seems to be borne out of a reaction against yet another possible forced assimilation (in this case, globalization). Unsurprisingly, the talk seemed intent on proudly identifying the distinct Koreanness in Oh’s The Tempest; what results from this, however, is only a reduction of Oh’s performances to mere insertions of Korean dances, costumes, and script in here, here, and there. Instead of engaging with the micro-border activities on the stage, her conclusion was that Oh’s appropriation wasn’t appropriative enough. But what is being appropriated here? Greenblatt cautions against this “risk of repetition” stating that “such groups may believe that they are appropriating traditional forms, but it may well be the forms that are appropriating them” (Greenblatt 58). Creativity cannot exist in a fundamentally reactionary framework; creative energy is, instead, devoted to forever reach an unreachable center—for in this logic, a Korean Shakespeare can never best an English Shakespeare. At best, it travels to the Barbican and is given a stamp of approval (a nod of recognition?) from an English audience.
If Korean theatre truly is in “Search of New Aesthetics,” as the colloquium’s name suggests, it should “do more than put them on the map; [it] should transform the act of mapmaking” (Greenblatt 61). That is to say, the appropriative model of the talk to locate Korea on the map fundamentally misunderstands the nature of intercultural discourse. This transformative mapmaking, as Bosman suggests, begins with the recognition that “as migrants and media exchange [Shakespeare’s] works back and forth across national borders, a simple opposition between ‘domestic’ and ‘foreign’ Shakespeare grows ever less convincing, and to set down his fortunes country by country is to tour the empty pavilions of an abandoned world’s fair” (Bosman 286). If the increasingly permeable cultural borders make it difficult to claim that Shakespeare’s works as authentically English, it seems backwards and too deferential that “something of an essential original disappears,” as another professor—a Korean-American professor teaching in the West Coast—remarked during a separate talk; the problem seems to be a self-limiting mindset that desires to clearly mark Shakespeare as England’s and Korean culture as “ours.” In order to truly assess the merits of Oh’s The Tempest, or any other Shakespeare production for that matter, the first step is to leave the world fair and recognize that artistic work is built on “collective negotiations and exchanges” (Greenblatt vii).
The globalization model for Greenblatt isn’t a “mere return to the fantasy of featureless universality, not an erasure of difference, but a consequence of difference and the agent of a vital, ongoing creation of a particular literary identity” (Greenblatt 61). Our job is to negotiate these boundaries—anthropological, media-related, thematic—with a mindset of “engagement and detachment” and recognize that the marriage isn’t simply an assimilation of two individuals’ lives, but rather a complex, full-frontal engagement between two ‘families,’ or cultural strands embedded within larger connections (61). Just as artistic work is built on “collective negotiations and exchanges,” building a new cultural history within a global frame requires an account of these micro-histories instead of sweeping claims of an authentic, coherent Korean culture. Oh Tae-Suk’s Tempest is in fact an excellent example of this. Oh insists on incorporating different regional Korean dialects in his plays to challenge the notion of a standardized Seoul dialect as the proper pronunciation of Korean. South Korea’s own national homogenization is exposed in the process.
The position of “engagement and detachment” provides a means to do so because it doesn’t remain obligated to ostensible national or cultural borders or geographic loyalties; it offers a “wider field” to explore and ask the question, “What ish my nation?” in a better, more insightful manner (Greenblatt 61; King Henry V 3.2.124). David Schalkwyk in his opening remarks at the colloquium noted that “Shakespeare is too familiar and not familiar enough”; that without intercultural discourse, we “run the danger of pride, … of blind, dulling complacency.” In order to fully understand Shakespeare, we “have to have access to him in a different language and culture” and defamiliarize ourselves with works that have become all too familiar over the past 400 years. The goal, in Schalkwyk’s words, is to watch new performances and walk home thinking, “Why on Earth haven’t we seen that before in The Tempest?” In a similar vein, in order to better construct a global Koreanness, I would argue that we need Shakespeare and intercultural theatre to unfamiliarize the familiar—a transpiring national consciousness that Koreans have held so dearly (and might I add, admirably) in the face of foreign invasions—and renew it. To watch Shakespeare in the Korean language helps enrich a new Koreanness by exploring the yet unseen joints within Korean culture.
