'Siddhartha' rewritten in heavy metal and mask dance — a Generation Z band asks: whose enlightenment is it?

Siddhartha was arrogant. From the moment he believed he had attained enlightenment, he was.

"He came across as a bit unlikable," said Kim Jin-gyu, 22, bassist of the band baan. "He sacrifices his wife and child like offerings on the altar of his own awakening. Whose enlightenment is it, really?"

In recent years, Hermann Hesse's "Siddhartha" has improbably become a bestseller among Generation Z readers in Korea, riding the twin waves of "hip Buddhism" and the "text hip" trend that has young people returning to literary classics.

baan has an average age of 24.3 — squarely Generation Z. The band recently read the novel cover to cover, and for good reason: baan and traditional mask-dance troupe Cheonhaje Il Tal Gongjakso have joined forces to retell the story in the language of talchum and heavy metal.

The novel follows a young man named Siddhartha — not the founder of Buddhism, but a fictional youth who shares the name of Gautama Siddhartha — on an arduous journey in search of enlightenment.

Did Siddhartha truly awaken? Ban Jae-hyeon, baan's leader, recalled his first impression when reading the source material while working on the script. "The narration in the early chapters felt stuffy and a little off-putting," he said at a recent meeting at Sejong Center for the Performing Arts in Gwanghwamun, Seoul. "I kept thinking, 'What is this?'"

So why "Siddhartha"? Lee Ju-won, director of Cheonhaje Il Tal Gongjakso — a troupe that has long worked to express talchum in a contemporary idiom — laughed as he explained. "Three words came to mind: 'cheонtal' for our troupe, 'metal' for baan's genre, and 'haetal' — the Korean word for liberation or nirvana," he said. "It started as a pun, a rhyme: cheонtal, metal, haetal." The two groups will present their production of "Siddhartha" at Sync Next 26, the contemporary arts festival at Sejong Center for the Performing Arts, on Friday and Saturday.

As a spare guitar riff cuts through baan's churning metal sound and the band's track "Histrionic" kicks in, masked dancers in white pointed hats raise one arm and let it fall in a sweeping arc from head to shoulder. The distant melody ringing in the ear and the strangely familiar rhythm lock into the traditional dance movements like puzzle pieces.

"'Histrionic' had the same rhythm as the punori jangdan of the East Coast byeolsingut ritual," Lee said. "Listening to baan's music, I was struck by how much they use the triple-meter feel of jajinmori and gutgeori — the samunbak rhythmic pattern from Korean traditional music."

Ban Jae-hyeon said the observation came as a surprise to the band as well. "We were just using rhythms we liked," he said. "We made the music instinctively — it never occurred to us that it was rooted in traditional Korean music." baan's sound sits apart from the straight-ahead drive of conventional heavy metal. The band lets near-silence dissolve before detonating a massive beat, with a guitar riff dropping into the center of the explosion.

The band's music mirrors Siddhartha's journey. The narrative arc of growth and forward movement that runs through baan's work is not so different from Hesse's novel. The performance draws primarily from tracks on baan's second album "neumann" — the name means "new person" — with newly composed pieces, "River Theme" and "Love Theme," added to strengthen the dramatic thread. Eleven songs in total fill the stage, functioning as what the collaborators call a "smart device" — like the violin melody that swells at a pivotal moment in a drama series, stitching the narrative together.

The pairing of the two groups is striking. Two distant genres meet at a shared border and blend. The fluid, circular movements of talchum and baan's music — which resists the conventions of metal — each retain their own identity while seeping into the other. "We're doing what we've always done, but on top of baan's music," Lee said.

Cheonhaje Il Tal Gongjakso draws on authentic dance vocabularies from across Korea — the Hwanghae Province traditions of Bongsan, Gangnyeong and Eunyul talchum; the Seoul and Gyeonggi Province style of gyeonggi sinawi dance; and the South Gyeongsang Province traditions of Goseong and Tongyeong ogwangdae — adapting each fluidly to match the decibel level of the music. The heavy emotional weight of "Early Bird," used in the scene where Siddhartha's father grants him leave to depart, is carried by Goseong ogwangdae and Gangnyeong talchum; the Buddha scene draws on Tongyeong ogwangdae; "River Theme" features Bongsan talchum; and the scene in which the ferryman and Siddhartha dance together uses Goseong ogwangdae and deotboegi dance.

"We brought the album as it was, but leaving even the track order unchanged felt too lazy, so we restructured it and added new pieces," Ban Jae-hyeon said with a laugh.

In the production, the masks are not props but structural elements of the narrative. Every character who enters Siddhartha's life appears wearing a mask — not to conceal a face, but to embody the prejudice through which Siddhartha sees others. "The masked figures are people Siddhartha has reduced to a single dimension," Lee explained. "It is only in the final scene, when the masks rise above the river and then disappear, that Siddhartha finally comes to understand them as fully complex human beings."

For baan's members, who had never seen talchum performed live, the collaboration opened an entirely new world. "It was completely different from what I had imagined talchum to be," Kim Jin-gyu said. "It's closer to contemporary dance — what I thought talchum was before wasn't really talchum at all." Park Hyeon-min reflected on the symbolism of the masks. "Most of the masks look broadly similar to one another, and I found that meaningful — it suggests that we are all, in the end, the same kind of human being," he said.

Cheонtal, metal, haetal — the three-way meeting at the heart of "Siddhartha" turns out to be more than wordplay. The talchum of Cheonhaje Il Tal Gongjakso, the metal baan pursues, and the novel's narrative share an unexpected common ground.

Talchum has historically been a dance of resistance — using satire and humor to dismantle the hypocrisy of the ruling class. Heavy metal is no different: it is music of resistance, shattering the repression and pretense of established society through sheer sonic force. Hesse's Siddhartha, too, is a man who abandons his caste (Kshatriya) and religious authority to break free. All three share the same emotional core: refusal and liberation from the world as it has been handed down.

"Working on this made me look back at myself — at how I had been reducing other people to one-dimensional judgments," Lee said. "This project was an intense experience of syncing with Siddhartha."

The discomfort Ban Jae-hyeon felt on the novel's opening pages was, he concluded, "a deliberate reaction the novel was engineering." baan's music works in a similar way. The band is classified as heavy metal — last year they won the best album award in the heaviness category at the Korean Music Awards.

Yet Ban Jae-hyeon is quick to add a caveat. "Honestly, calling us metal or hardcore feels like a stretch," he said. Kim Jin-gyu elaborated: "When people think metal, they think extreme aggression — 'everyone die,' 'start headbanging.' Our music is more emotional and sensitive, closer to the emo genre." Ban Jae-hyeon jumped back in: "But we weren't trying to do emo either. We don't actually like emo that much." The band's music — never conventional, always resisting definition — mirrors the members themselves, who refuse to be pinned down.

"There's nothing one-dimensional about life. Anger contains grief and joy at the same time, and I hated the idea of expressing that in a flat, single-layer way. You have to feel the complexity. I didn't want music that just wallows or just rages."

The band's willingness to interrogate the novel from multiple angles stems from the same impulse that has driven their music — a persistent questioning and rejection of definitions imposed by the existing world. Ban Jae-hyeon identified a central paradox in the source text. "The novel's dilemma is that it tries to convey wisdom through words, while insisting that wisdom cannot be taught through words," he said. Park Hyeon-min went further: "The moment Siddhartha thinks he has achieved enlightenment is precisely when he goes wrong. Wandering has no end."

These ideas are already embedded in baan's music. The moment you declare yourself a new person — a "neumann" — change stops. That is why the band's album begins with "new person" and ends with "Oldman."

The two groups define "Siddhartha" as "a story about how someone who has left comes to understand the way those left behind must let go" (Lee) and "a journey toward becoming a new person." They deliberately subvert the novel's enlightenment-as-happy-ending. What they want to show on stage is not Siddhartha's awakening, but the process itself — the wavering, the doubt, the self-negation. A new person may or may not emerge from it. None of the baan members will define what that new person looks like. "Not knowing is why we make music," Ban Jae-hyeon said with a laugh. "We don't make music with a message to deliver." Park Hyeon-min put it simply: "If you're curious about the new person, come see the show."

This ancient narrative is dismantled piece by piece and dressed in exploding noise, emotional melody and the wit of talchum. "No matter how well you explain something, you can't know it until you've lived it," Ban Jae-hyeon said. "This performance will be an experience unlike anything audiences have seen before." Kim Jin-gyu agreed: "Sitting still in a fully exposed concert hall and letting metal wash over you is itself something audiences will never have encountered. When you come face to face with a wall of sound, you will feel what I can only call an auditory awe — something close to fear." That, the collaborators say, is the moment nearest to the enlightenment they are talking about.

"After the show, I want the audience to walk out thinking: 'What on earth did I just witness?'" Kim Jin-gyu said.