French actor after watching pansori: 'We need to relearn theater'

"Pansori has had chuimsae — audience calls — since its very beginning. These days we've truly reached an era where people throw them in freely. You hear 'heol' and 'daebak sageon.' Sometimes even 'erai' comes out." — Lee Ja-ram

The formal performance has not yet begun, but the audience is already rippling with laughter. "Snow, Snow, Snow" is a pansori reimagining of Tolstoy's short story "Master and Man." This opening moment is a kind of warm-up. The sorikkun Lee Ja-ram's brief, almost prophetic remarks become reality about ten minutes later — when the sturdy stallion Jeti struggles desperately in a white snowdrift, the audience erupts in a collective gasp: "Heok! Aah … "

The French newspaper Le Monde described "Snow, Snow, Snow" as "an original performance that moves freely between song, theater, mime and even stand-up comedy," adding that "Lee Ja-ram takes the audience into her pocket the moment she steps onto the stage."

Lee's "Snow, Snow, Snow" has been invited to the Avignon Festival, where it will meet audiences at the Opéra Grand Avignon from Friday through Wednesday. The world-renowned performing arts festival has chosen Korean as one of its official languages this year. Meanwhile, the Sydney Opera House has approached Ipgwason Studio to co-produce a pansori work set to open in September.

"Pansori has moved beyond being a promotional vehicle for Korean culture and is now establishing itself as a global genre and a global classic shared by the international performing arts world — setting a new milestone," said an industry official.

At the 1976 International New Music Festival in Berlin, master singer Park Cho-wol completed a full performance of "Sugungga." Local critics heard echoes of jazz legend Louis Armstrong in her voice. Her raspy, cracking vocal technique was described as a new musical language that Western classical singing could not explain. It was the first moment pansori was received not as a traditional performance from a particular country but as an independent art form delivering an aesthetic shock.

Half a century later, the way the world's stages regard pansori has changed. At leading theaters, pansori no longer needs the label "Korean traditional culture." It is now viewed as one form within contemporary performing arts.

The National Changgeuk Company's "The Trojan Women," performed at the Edinburgh Festival Theatre in 2023, completely overturned local critical opinion. The Guardian described pansori's vocal timbre as "a voice no more suited could be found to express tragedy." The performers' voices overwhelmingly embodied the emotional world of ancient Greek tragedy, and the production earned a five-star top rating along with praise that it was "dazzling from start to finish."

Reviewing Lee Ja-ram's "Eokcheokkga" at the 2015 Sydney Festival, The Sydney Morning Herald called it "a percussive interpretation Brecht would have wholly endorsed," adding that "the stage effects are nothing short of devastating."

Ahead of Lee's upcoming performances, the Avignon Festival introduced her as "the most singular voice in contemporary pansori," saying "her work moves freely between song, theater, gesture and narration, creating an entirely new performance grammar."

The world's stages read pansori in a more contemporary way than Koreans do. They decode the sorikkun as a uniquely gifted actor-singer, and pansori as a modern storytelling theater form defined by minimalism and powerful improvisation.

Lee said that after one of her performances in France, a well-known actor told her, "We need to relearn theater — in pansori, the sorikkun becomes a marionette, then a storyteller." She added that "pansori is, by nature, a theatrical genre — one that carries an audience through two hours on the strength of extraordinary vocal technique."

Lee Sang-suk, producer at Ipgwason Studio — the creative pansori collective behind "The Long Night" — said overseas audiences tend to receive pansori not as a piece of Korean traditional culture but as a performing arts form in its own right. "In many cases, it came across as a distinctive and contemporary performance grammar in which a single sorikkun moves freely between narrative, character, description and performance, building a direct relationship with the audience," she said.

At the Maison de Victor Hugo museum in the Marais district of Paris, the creative pansori work "Les Misérables — Guguseon Saramdeul" sings of 19th-century solidarity among the people. Staff at the museum and members of ARTA, the French institute for actor training and research, said they were struck by "the unique performance grammar of pansori and the way Les Misérables was reinterpreted through it," adding that "it was fascinating to see familiar characters from the original work reimagined through Korean sensibility and performance language."

Lee Sang-suk, who presented "Guguseon Saramdeul" in Paris, said Korean students living in France wept and told her they were proud of Korea, while French audience members showed curiosity toward pansori's distinctive formal grammar. "It confirmed again that a good work can connect deeply with audiences in its own way, regardless of language or cultural difference," she said.

This shift did not happen overnight. Pansori, once regarded in the Western world as an unfamiliar Asian folk art, underwent three pivotal turning points that made such a transformation in perception possible.

Pansori first ventured onto overseas stages in the 1970s, passing through an era of state-led cultural diplomacy in which it was essentially introduced to foreign audiences. The turning point came in 1976 through master singer Park Cho-wol.

Through the 1980s and 1990s, English and French subtitles helped broaden the connection with overseas audiences, and in the 2000s, "creative pansori" sought to reinvent the genre. This was made possible by a shift away from preservation-centered values following pansori's inscription on UNESCO's Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity list in 2003. It was also around 2001 that Taru, a young creative pansori collective that Lee Ja-ram passed through, emerged. Lee recalled that "at the time, the gugak world welcomed and celebrated pansori composition with warmth." Master singers and young creators coexisted. In 2003, master singer Ahn Sook-sun undertook a full-performance tour of "Chunhyangga" in New York and at the Edinburgh Festival, making a significant impact on Western cultural circles.

Since the 2010s, pansori has entered an era of co-creation. It was during this period that foreign sorikkun and traditional music theorists such as Anna Yates, a professor in the gugak department at Seoul National University, began to appear. Saying that "to understand music deeply as a scholar, you must embody it through practice," she began studying under master singer Min Hye-seong, a certified holder of Important Intangible Cultural Heritage No. 5 in pansori "Heungboga," starting in 2014. More recently, French-born sorikkun Mapo Rore completed a full performance of the pansori "Heungboga."

No less significant than the growing diversity of sorikkun nationalities is another shift: pansori has now entered a stage of genuine collaboration with leading theaters around the world. This is the era of international co-commissioning, in which landmark global venues join the creative process from the very first planning stage and directly contribute matching budgets. A prime example is "The Long Night," a Korean-English bilingual pansori that the Sydney Opera House initiated by reaching out to Ipgwason Studio.

Lee said a translated play involves moving one language into another, whereas a bilingual pansori means "restructuring the work from the outset with two languages." She said the team examined the flow of the drama, the function of each line of dialogue and the nuances of words "to reach a state where both languages genuinely work."

Introduced to the world through state-led cultural diplomacy in the 1960s, pansori has become, some 60 years later, a performing art that the world's theaters now seek out on their own.

Lee said pansori is "a very contemporary genre," noting that its ability to conjure vast worlds with minimal staging, and to complete a story together with the audience, "touches on exactly what the global performing arts world is grappling with today."

She added that pansori is both a Korean traditional art and "a living performance language through which today's creators can tell new stories," saying it has "every potential to grow into a performing arts form that speaks with global audiences in diverse ways."

Practitioners in the field say that "a genuine overseas presence cannot be completed by presenting a single work on a foreign stage." What matters is sustaining the points of contact through which a work can meet audiences from different cultures while preserving its own unique language.

"For a sustainable overseas presence, building long-term relationships of trust is more important than one-off invitations," said an industry official. "A matching fund system that supports multi-year co-commissioning and workshops with overseas theaters needs to be institutionalized."