UNIVERSITY of CALIFORNIA Los Angeles
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UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA Los Angeles Performing Colonial Imagination A dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree Doctor of Philosophy in Theater and Performance Studies by Areum Jeong 2015 ABSTRACT OF THE DISSERTATION Performing Colonial Imagi-nation by Areum Jeong Doctor of Philosophy in Theater and Performance Studies University of California, Los Angeles, 2015 Professor Sue-Ellen Case, Chair This dissertation examines representations of national identity in live performance in Korea and the United States from the early twentieth century to the present. My research focuses on how intermedial performance strategies—performances that incorporate pre-filmed elements, often by projecting film or images into the background of a performance—deploy local cultural and political motifs of South Korean national identity. This work encompasses both early and contemporary performances and reveals that the combination of performance and screen has served as a mode of the postmodern movement of cultural translation. The productions I examine—the pyŏnsa (“film narrator”) performances during the Japanese Colonial Rule, the Korean musical The Last Empress (1995) and Hero (2009), YMAP’s dance piece Madame Freedom (2013), and Ping Chong’s Deshima (1990) and Chinoiserie (1995)—address cultural differences, constructing a space in which Korean audiences can both learn the culture of the Western “Other” and imagine themselves as part of a nation. Using critical readings of selected ii Korean performances, the research shows that the changing cultural and political climate of the South Korean nation-state creates an urgency for artists to express a particular national identity. By illustrating the shifting rhetoric of the relationship between the individual and the state, such works endeavor to challenge the status quo. iii The dissertation of Areum Jeong is approved. Sean Aaron Metzger Namhee Lee Sue-Ellen Case, Committee Chair University of California, Los Angeles 2015 iv TABLE OF CONTENTS Introduction Chapter 1 Reflecting and Staging National Identities: The Performance of the Korean Silent Film Narrators Chapter 2 Performing Glocalized “Koreanness” in The Last Empress (1995) and Hero (2009) Chapter 3 Performing a Gendered Mise En Scène in YMAP’s Madame Freedom (2013) and Split Britches’ Lesbians Who Kill (1994) Chapter 4 (Un)Positioning Transnational Identities in Ping Chong’s Chinoiserie (1995) and Deshima (1990) v VITA EDUCATION M.A., Performance Studies, New York University, May 2008 B.A., English Language and Literature, Ewha W. University, February 2006 AWARDS AND HONORS 2015 Fellow, Mellon School of Theater and Performance Research, Harvard University 2015 Hugh Downs Graduate Research Fellowship, University of California, Los Angeles 2014-2015 Dissertation Year Fellowship, University of California, Los Angeles 2014 Fellow, Interdisciplinarity and Theatre Studies Research Workshop, Ruhr University Bochum 2014 Fine Arts Trust Award, University of California, Los Angeles 2013 Executive Board Award, University of California, Los Angeles 2012 Fellow, Global Theatre and Performance Studies Research Workshop, University of California, Santa Barbara 2012 Georgia Frontiere Scholarship, University of California, Los Angeles CONFERENCE PRESENTATIONS 2015 “Performing Border Crossing in Jiehae Park’s Hannah and the Dread Gazebo (2013),” Association for Asian American Studies (AAAS), Evanston, IL 2014 “Performing Gendered Intermediality,” Association for Theatre in Higher Education (ATHE), Scottsdale, AZ vi 2014 “Performing, Reenacting, and Re-membering Colonial Imagi-nation,” American Comparative Literature Association (ACLA), New York, NY 2014 “Performing Colonial Imagi-nation,” Society for Cinema and Media Studies (SCMS), Seattle, WA 2013 “(Un)Positioning Transnational Identities in Ping Chong’s Chinoiserie (1995) and Deshima (1990),” Concurrent Paper Panel, American Society for Theatre Research (ASTR), Dallas, TX 2013 “Performing Colonial (Imagi)nation,” Performance Studies international (PSi), Stanford, CA 2013 “Who is the Traitor?: Performing Koreanness in Hero (2009),” Association for Asian Studies (AAS), San Diego, CA 2013 “How the Pyŏnsa Stole the Show,” Society for Cinema and Media Studies (SCMS), Chicago, IL 2012 “Political Performance, Dramatic History, and the Construction of Representation of Korean Identity,” Plenary Panel, American Society for Theatre Research (ASTR), Nashville, TN ACADEMIC APPOINTMENTS AND TEACHING EXPERIENCE 2013-2014 Teaching Assistant, University of California, Los Angeles Introduction to Theater (Summer Session A, C 2014) Deconstructing Theater (Spring 2014) History of American Musical Theater (Winter 2014) Introduction to Korean Cinema (Fall 2013) Reconstructing the Theatrical Past (Winter 2013) vii Performing Colonial Imagi-nation Since the 1990s, the South Korean government’s promotion of cultural and economic globalization encouraged theater and performance to stage Korean works that show Korean characteristics and identities in forms that would appeal to Western countries. As South Korea emerges as a global power in the age of transnational capital, it seeks to establish, through performance, an independent national identity on the global stage. This dissertation poses two leading questions regarding this cultural focus in regard to specifically South Korean performative strategies: how and why does performance offer compelling articulations of national identities? What are the political implications of staging the self, the social, and the nation in performance? In order to interpret this culturally specific phenomenon, the critic needs to regard more general theories that treat the relationship between nationalism and performance. Recent scholarship from scholars, for example, Jisha Menon reveals, individual subject-identities are constructed simultaneously as national subjects who submit to new rules of social relations, and are authorized by their national representations.1 Such studies focus not only on the staging of national identities, but also on their reception, or their address to the audience. In this context, a study of the performative structures that help to define one’s current national identity by examining national identity during a former colonial period can illustrate how performance can trigger the local audience’s identification through a form of suturing.2 Even more general critical theories beyond the studies of nationalist identities are theories 1. For a further reading of Jisha Menon’s performative approach to the study of the nation, see her book The Performance of Nationalism: India, Pakistan, and the Memory of the Partition. 2. Ibid., 12. 1 of identity and identification. Within the South Korean context, my engagement with formations of national identification in various performances is foremost invested in theories of identity and identification. The intersections I attempt to demonstrate in performance manifest in national and diasporic representations. These apparati address structures of identification pertaining to gender and sexuality, as well as those of class and race in previous scholarship. I aim to address these and other questions in national and subcultural contexts as I elaborate throughout this dissertation. I will discuss key strategies of identification that serve to construct a sense of national identities in performance and explicate the strategies within their theoretical context as well as within the context of a specific performance or performance genre. Located at the borders between aural, literary, and visual art forms, intermedial performances maintain a “self-conscious reflexivity” in the ways they blur generic and media boundaries.3 This intermedial form best serves a study of nationalist identity because it “acknowledges multiple acts of representation and makes them visible.”4 As theater and performance provide a “performative situation” in which film, television, and digital video may operate “not just as recordings on their own, but [operate] at the same time and above all [as] theatrical signs,”5 this study employs intermediality as a tool in order to understand the complex processes of nation formation in performance and the theoretical conversations that emerge from it. This dissertation examines representations of national identity in live performance in 3. Freda Chapple and Chiel Kattenbelt, Intermediality in Theatre and Performance (Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2006), 11. 4. Ibid., 38. 5. Ibid., 37. 2 Korea and the United States from the early twentieth century to the present. My work focuses on how intermedial performance strategies—performances that incorporate pre-filmed elements, often by projecting film or images into the background of a performance—deploy local cultural and political motifs of Korean national identity. This work encompasses both early and contemporary performances and reveals that the combination of performance and screen has served as a mode of the postmodern movement of cultural translation. The productions I examine—the pyŏnsa (“film narrator”) performances during the Japanese Colonial Rule (1910- 1945), the Korean musical The Last Empress (1995) and Hero (2009), YMAP’s dance piece Madame Freedom (2013), and Ping Chong’s Deshima (1990) and Chinoiserie (1995)—address cultural differences both spatially and temporally, constructing a space in which Korean audiences can learn the culture of the Western “Other” and imagine themselves as part of a Korean nation. Using critical