'Hyomyeong' loses the art it set out to celebrate

A steeply raked stage rises like a 3.4-meter stone mountain. At its summit stands the crown prince, symbol of royal dignity — yet above him, in every practical sense, looms the clan minister whose grip on power has swallowed the throne. His voice thunders down like divine rebuke.

"Why do you dance? Why perform a dance fit only for lowly gisaeng?"

Hyomyeong, who dreamed of ruling through culture, can only answer: "Because I love it."

He was the grandson of King Jeongjo and the son of King Sunjo — a crown prince whose portrait was half-consumed by fire during the Korean War, leaving his face lost to history. Said to share Jeongjo's straight brow and "dragon eyes," he governed as regent for three years in his father's place. The story of Joseon's young crown prince Hyomyeong (1809–1830) has now come to the changgeuk stage.

The National Changgeuk Company's "Hyomyeong" was a worthwhile attempt. Changgeuk has reinvented itself continuously over the past decade or more, expanding far beyond the five canonical pansori repertoires to take in Shakespeare, Brecht, Greek and Roman tragedy, and even webtoons.

Experimentation grew bolder over the past three years. The company explored shamanism in "Mansin: Paper Shaman" and merged with traditional folk performance in "Inalchi," pursuing genre fusion on both occasions. "Hyomyeong" was the third entry in that series, this time incorporating court dance — "jeongjae." Translating traditional art into a contemporary theatrical language is, after all, part of the National Changgeuk Company's mandate.

No stage production had ever placed Crown Prince Hyomyeong at its center, and the choice was inspired. A statesman who sought to restore royal authority through ritual music and dance during Joseon's late-period "cultural renaissance," Hyomyeong is precisely the kind of historical figure ripe for reexamination in the age of the Korean Wave.

"Hyomyeong," however, fails as changgeuk, as theater and as a showcase of court dance. A thin narrative and unfocused direction never unify Hyomyeong's vision of governance through ritual arts into a coherent theatrical language. The production treats him as an artist rather than a statesman and never makes a convincing case for the political philosophy at his core. Genre fusion is present; a center is not. On a dazzling stage, changgeuk itself remains invisible.

The fate of Joseon rested on the shoulders of a 19-year-old. In an era when powerful clan factions had hollowed out the monarchy, King Sunjo entrusted his son Hyomyeong with the regency as a last resort. The National Changgeuk Company's "Hyomyeong" is set in that period — a recalling of the "cultural monarch" who spent three years as regent trying to right a failing kingdom before dying young.

The production begins with Hyomyeong's identity as "the crown prince who loved dance." Hollow dialogue fills the air while an ensemble crowds the raked stage, performing movements whose meaning remains opaque.

The production misfires from its very first scene and never recovers the central argument it needed to make: the political necessity of governance through ritual arts. The opening exchange — "Why do you dance?" — already misses the point, because the show frames Hyomyeong as a prince who loved dance and art, which is the historical record's conclusion, not its explanation.

What the production erases is the true shape of Hyomyeong's political vision. About a month into his regency, he summoned the royal music bureau and announced his program of governance through ritual arts. He was a reformer who turned court dance into a political instrument, using it to rebuild the royal authority that clan politics had eroded. Dance was not his hobby — it was a tool of governance. The Yeongyeongdang pavilion was not a performance venue but a political stage. Ritual arts were not an aesthetic flourish but a state philosophy for restoring order. To understand Hyomyeong is not to understand dance; it is to understand politics.

Joseon was a Confucian state that had governed through ritual music and propriety for generations. Royal banquets were not mere entertainment — they were political ceremonies that elevated the king's authority and reinforced the hierarchy of ruler and subject. Ministers bowed their heads in loyalty, recited prayers for the king's long life, and reaffirmed the bonds of the court. A royal banquet was where the king's dignity was displayed and the relationship between sovereign and official was confirmed.

Hyomyeong does not declare his intention to govern through ritual arts until midway through the first act. Even then, the production fails to convey what that means or what he intends by it. A minister's line glosses the concept — "propriety means etiquette and order; music means song" — but the crown prince's political philosophy is never actually articulated.

Just as his grandfather Jeongjo had mobilized his personal guard for the Hwaseong royal procession banquet, Hyomyeong arranged for his own loyalists to organize King Sunjo's 40th-birthday celebration — a deliberate move to consolidate military authority and strengthen the crown. Because the production never reveals this essence of his program — restoring royal authority internally while projecting a unified Joseon outward — Hyomyeong remains merely "the crown prince who loved dance," and the work's message is never fully delivered.

"Hyomyeong" is unlike any other dramatic work — changgeuk or otherwise. It strings episodes side by side with no overarching narrative spine. That spine should have been Hyomyeong's campaign to restore royal authority through ritual arts in the face of clan domination. Without it, the production becomes a mere sequence of scenes. The plot does not move forward; it only spreads sideways. Worse, even the individual episodes fail to justify their own existence.

The script is a succession of fragments. The regency period — with its tense political maneuvering between Hyomyeong and the Andong Kim clan and the royal family's struggle for survival — offered rich dramatic material. Yet the script never weaves the urgent political reality together with the crown prince's inner torment. Instead, the drama stitches together disconnected pieces: Hyomyeong composing court dances, the assassin Myomyo infiltrating the palace, King Sunjo's failing health, an exam-entry broker, gisaeng performers — all without any causal thread running through them.

The scene with the exam broker early in the first act should have illuminated Hyomyeong's belief in fair talent recruitment — a conviction so strong that he held as many as 50 civil service examinations in a single year. Instead, the creative team devotes considerable stage time to the scene while providing no connection to the world Hyomyeong was trying to build. It amounts to roughly ten minutes of unnecessary exam comedy at the very start of the show.

With a script that lacks internal logic, the actors' lines ring hollow. The text gives them no dramatic foundation from which to act; characters' dialogue and emotional arcs appear and vanish without context. The political situation of late Joseon is conveyed through lengthy exposition — not the kind of dramatic language that builds a character, but dry narration inferior to a history video online.

The protagonist himself only ever announces his intentions — "I will govern through ritual arts," "I will reform the civil examination," "talent must be recruited fairly" — without the production ever showing the reasons behind his convictions or the context for his reforms. The only line that echoes in his ears is "traitor's blood runs in your veins." The audience is given no way to experience Hyomyeong's genuine struggle or sincerity. What remains is not a resolute monarch trying to save a crumbling Joseon through ritual arts, but a dreamy, artistic crown prince who muses that "dance is a spiritual exchange between people."

"I want to feel the crown prince's breath, I want to smell his scent … "

This changgeuk is remarkable for the sheer volume of its dialogue. A large cast delivers an enormous number of lines, yet those lines neither build character nor drive the action — they accumulate like filler, affecting the narrative not at all.

A historical drama can absolutely use modern idiom. The problem here is that the contemporary quips and rapid-fire banter do not amount to sophisticated wit or clever reinterpretation that subverts solemnity — they instantly collapse the historical weight of the drama and corrode the genre's own dignity.

Inside a palace where cold conspiracies and the threat of assassination lurk, the gisaeng performers greet the assassin Myomyo with lines like "A whole new worldview has arrived" and "What a wild worldview — ignoring a prince's question just like that," tossing around internet slang and variety-show catchphrases. Lines that fit neither the context nor the relationships between characters actively break dramatic immersion.

Line by line, the language also loses its historical grounding. Every scene contains dialogue entirely devoid of period texture or artistic depth. The Noron faction of the clan-politics era is called "the yellows," and a character refers to the reigning king by his posthumous temple name "Sunjo" and the queen by her posthumous title "Queen Sunwon" — as in "Queen Sunwon, consort of Sunjo" — an error that applies names a living monarch and queen would never have borne in their own lifetimes.

This is not a trivial naming mistake. In a historical drama, language is the primary device that constructs the world. "Hyomyeong" fails to distinguish between the historical terminology used by modern scholars and the language characters would actually speak. The moment a line refers to a living king by his posthumous temple name and a living queen by her posthumous title, the audience is no longer watching Joseon — they are watching a modern history lecture. This rupture in linguistic sensibility goes beyond a research error; it reveals that the production has not built its world through the eyes of its historical characters but has simply transplanted a contemporary perspective onto the stage.

The scenes involving the gisaeng performers are among the production's most serious missteps. Hyomyeong summoned 85 female entertainers from across the country to Seoul for his court banquets. In the early Joseon period, such performers had been permanently stationed at the royal music bureau, but after King Injo's reign they were no longer resident there, returning only for two-month periods ahead of court banquets to learn the required dances and songs.

The script betrays a shallow gender sensibility throughout. Beyond the word "gisaeng" itself — which openly signals their low social status — their dialogue and storylines are handled with crude, embarrassing caricature. A line in which royal music bureau dancers say to the gisaeng, "Do you think this bureau is your establishment?" borders on shocking. It echoes the prejudice and contempt already heard in the opening scene, where a minister asks why anyone would perform "a dance fit only for lowly gisaeng" — and the production simply repeats that bias rather than interrogating it.

The female court entertainers are further reduced to something like idol fangirls, sighing that they want to feel the crown prince's breath and smell his scent. Even if the scene was intended as comic relief to break the solemnity and to amplify the impact these women later have on Hyomyeong's dance, the lines forfeit their function the moment they are spoken. These women should be collaborators and artists helping to realize Hyomyeong's vision of governance through ritual arts. Instead they are written as admirers whose only function is to reinforce every stereotype attached to the word "gisaeng." In doing so, the dialogue diminishes Hyomyeong himself.

The same problem surfaces when the gisaeng speak about their personal histories. A queer character is introduced not for any narrative purpose but as a source of humor — an attitude that further muddies the production's sense of language. That character is even given a line to the royal music bureau dancers — "You can ride me" — that ends up caricaturing both gisaeng and queer identity at once.

The dialogue surrounding Myomyo — the assassin who should embody the person Hyomyeong's vision of ritual-arts governance must ultimately persuade — is equally without meaning. Her name itself reflects a startling lack of imagination. Hyomyeong gives her the name "Myomyo," meaning "strange and strange," because people addressed her with the word "eoi," meaning "hey." The heroine's name is born in that moment, yet it carries no particular symbolism and reflects nothing about their relationship. The gisaeng's jokes that follow — "He's even giving her a name" and "Who would win if she went up against the crown prince?" — further hollow out the character's reason for existing.

Myomyo is introduced as the person who will help Hyomyeong build the court dance repertoire at the foundation of his political program, yet Hyomyeong never uses her to articulate any political message. The line "I love that I can feel the killing intent in your dance" — spoken during their dance together — only ensures that the world Hyomyeong is trying to create remains unconvincing even to the audience.

The production's most fundamental failure is its refusal to honor the basic requirements of changgeuk.

What is changgeuk? The National Changgeuk Company has been wrestling with that question for years, launching challenge after challenge in pursuit of a contemporary answer. It expanded its subject matter beyond the five pansori repertoires and broke down barriers by moving across countless genres. Beginning with the bold innovations of the Kim Seong-nyeo era as artistic director, the company kept reinventing itself until, from the 2020s onward, it was filling more than 90 percent of its seats and driving what observers called a "changgeuk boom."

Through all of it, the anchor was song — "sori." Even when productions were rough or uneven, the company members' extraordinary vocal performances held everything together and lifted the work.

"Hyomyeong" is a changgeuk without sori. Buried under an avalanche of dialogue, the lead characters — Crown Prince Hyomyeong and Myomyo — are not given a proper vocal showcase until well past the midpoint of the first act. It amounts to something close to a self-negation of the genre.

Across the full production, it is "Ppakse" — a supporting character in Myomyo's orbit — who delivers the first real sori. The bulk of the work is filled with expository dialogue, language stripped of historical texture, and joke-trading exchanges.

In place of sori, the production deploys large-scale ensemble choreography, video projections and EDM soundscapes — ostensibly in the name of genre fusion. These elements do not coexist with changgeuk or support it; they consume its identity entirely. This is not genre fusion. It is genre replacement.

The dance that takes center stage does not become a dramatic language that drives the story, either. Ensemble movement fills the stage without pause — formations shift, space is never left empty. Yet the denser the stage becomes, the more the eye scatters. The choreography in "Hyomyeong" obscures the performers rather than illuminating them, and neither the movement itself nor its execution consistently reaches the level of artistic quality the work demands.

The use of video and set design is equally bewildering. When the gisaeng sing, Hyomyeong's face floats against a yellow background on the rear screen, beaming with satisfaction. When dancers perform, the sun and moon — symbols that should carry the weight of royal authority — flash like a mirror ball. Effect is displayed; symbolism and aesthetic judgment are absent.

The National Changgeuk Company's standing today was built on years of work by performers who honed themselves as both sori singers and changgeuk actors. A company capable of resuscitating even the most troubled production found itself powerless before "Hyomyeong." With no narrative thread to follow, an endless parade of absurd lines and almost no space for vocal artistry or genuine acting, the performers had nowhere to go. It was also an irony that a stage belonging to sori singers gave its longest vocal passages to a young Hyomyeong played by a musical theater actor. The child actor's performance — singing and acting alike — was genuinely impressive, yet even that scene invites doubt, because the production had already betrayed the essence of changgeuk.

The National Changgeuk Company is one of the most important traditional arts organizations in Korean performance today. It can fail; it can experiment. But this production confirms once again that experimentation cannot become a license to erase what the art form fundamentally is.

Changgeuk can absorb any other genre. But if, when all the experimentation is done, the audience cannot be certain it has watched changgeuk, what remains is not an expansion of the genre — it is a question about the genre's identity. "Hyomyeong" embraced court dance but lost sori; it gained a spectacular stage but could not bring its performers to life. Late in the production, Lee So-yeon's solo as Myomyo, filling the Haeoreum Grand Theater, was at once a paradoxical proof of what the National Changgeuk Company's greatest asset truly is, and a demonstration of how wastefully this production had squandered it.

The deepest wound "Hyomyeong" leaves is not that of a single failed work, but that it has shaken the audience's trust — trust built painstakingly over many years. This production stands as the most painful misstep, and the starkest warning, to emerge from the National Changgeuk Company's otherwise luminous record of achievement.