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ABSTRACT
This study investigates the correlativity between the acting of the Seonghwangdang (Village Shrine)-style revolutionary theatre in North Korea and the Stanislavsky system. Kim Jong-il dictates that Seonghwangdang-style revolutionary theatre is one of the representative art works that explains the origin of North Korean juche in his books On the Art of the Cinema and On the Art of the Theatre. Despite his criticism of the Stanislavsky system, Kim almost translates the process of role creation into urisik (our style, that is, North Korean style) one, borrowing a given circumstance, experience, jagam (creative state), and “magic if” from the system according to the principles of juche and sokdojeon (speed battle). The result is simplification of the semantic area of experience and the creative state, which shows how theatrical arts are limited by political ideological centrality.
Notes
1 The plot of the play is that Boksun’s mother, who believed in seonghwangdang and tried to marry her daughter as a concubine to a county headman, realizes that there is no ghost due to Dolsoi’s wisdom, and believes in herself, and so comes to live independently. In the pre-modern tradition of Korea, seonghwangdang is a place of faith where people worship seonghwangshin. It is a conical pile of stones at the entrance of the village or on the hill near a tree that is regarded as holy It is forbidden to bury or break down the items, such as five-colored cloths, that people left behind.
2 In South Korea, juche (주체) is usually translated as “subject,” as in the subject of a sentence. However, the word is included in the Oxford English Dictionary. According to the dictionary, juche means “the political ideology associated with North Korea (the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea), which aims to achieve national autonomy through the rule of a single leader, the maintenance of a strong military, and the pursuit of economic self-sufficiency.” While the opposite of juche is “object” in South Korea, the opposite of juche is sadae (사대, worship of a foreign power) in North Korea. North Korea defines the juche (self-reliance) idea as a theoretical and methodological system of revolution and construction. It is North Korea’s state ideology for attaining self-reliance in politics, independence in economy and self-defense in defense. Juche has different objectives and can refer to a separate objective or a collective whole of the three according to its specific context. Simultaneously, it denotes people as masters of revolution and construction. The actual meaning of Juche can only be deciphered in the previous and subsequent context of discourse. The English word “subject” cannot entirely convey the meaning of juche, therefore this study uses juche. It is the official ruling ideology in the Socialist Constitution, adopted in December 1972. According to Kim Jong-il, it consists of philosophical, socio-historical, and guiding principles. The philosophical principle is the so-called “human-centered philosophy,” which states that “man is the owner of everything and determines everything” (Kim Citation1982, 9). The socio-historical principle states that the people are the masters of revolution and construction, and they also have the power to drive revolution and construction.
3 To explore how this new form of acting related back to a pre-Stanislavsky Korean performance style, see Hong and Cho Citation2018.
4 The Russian title is Rabota aktyora nad soboi. Chast 1: Rabota nad soboi v tvorcheskom protsesse perezhivaniya: Dnevnik uchenika [An Actor’s Work on Himself Part 1: Work on Himself in the Creative Process of Experiencing: A Student Diary]. In North Korea, the book was translated and published as Baeusueob: Cheheom-gwajeong [Actor’s Training: Experience Process] (Pyongyang: National Publisher, 1954). For a detailed description, see Hong and Cho Citation2019.
Jagam (자감) is a North Korean translation of Russian samochuvstviye (creative state). samochuvstviye is a combination of sam meaning “self” and chuvstviye meaning “sense.” In the System, the creative state can be interpreted as “a personal feeling about oneself on stage” (lichnoye chuvstvo o sebe na stsene). In the System, the right creative state always receives the modification of the adjective, “onstage (stsenicheskii).” The correct (onstage) creative state refers to the psychophysical state of the actor on stage. It involves nothing being played or presented; it is the process of the actor transforming into the character from their own psychophysical nature. See Hong and Cho Citation2019 for more details.
5 Hong did not use the Stanislavsky system when he worked in Tokyo. For further discussion, see Hong and Cho Citation2018.
6 For further discussion, see Hong and Cho Citation2018.
7 Under the juche idea, it is the theory of socio-politics that explains the relationship between the people’s independence and loyalty to Kim Il-sung. According to this theory, each individual is an organic cell and the leader is the brain of the living organism. Only when they are united can “the people” maintain an independent and healthy life as a living organism. For this reason, every individual’s loyalty to the leader is essential.
8 An area of Changchun county in Jilin province, Manchuria, formally designated as the place where Kim Il-sung first propounded the juche idea.
9 Like Kim Il-sung, Kim Jong-il conducted various on-site guidances. On a guide plate in the Culture Department of Revolutionary History Museum (Kim Jong-il Museum) at the Joseon Art Film Studio, there were 12,000 cultural and artistic guidance sessions spanning forty years from the mid-1960s. Among them, “on-site guidance,” during which he directly visited institutions, is recorded 2,000 times. In the case of the theatre, the first performance directed by Kim Jong-il was Following the Banner of Victory by the National Theatre Company in May 1969. See Eom Gil-sun et al. Citation2001 for more details.
10 The more fundamental difficulty of the North Korean text, in the original Korean, is that the semantic domain of a given word differs due to the heterogeneity of the two Koreas. This heterogeneity is easily noticeable when translated into a third language, but it can be also found in specific examples of the two Koreas, which use the same language. This difference reflects the misfortune of 75 years of inter-Korean disconnection and ideology, and researchers must be constantly aware of this fact so as not to misunderstand North Korean texts.
11 The definition of saenghwal in the Standard Korean Dictionary of South Korea is as follows: “People or animals live in a certain environment, to make a livelihood or a living, acting as a member of the organization. (National Institute Citation1999).
12 This is not just a phenomenon of North Korea: Palllpalli (빨리빨리, quickly). The pressure to “complete everything quickly,” is a powerful phenomenon that dominates everyday life in South Korea as well. The goal-oriented mindset that emphasizes achievement and results rather than procedures and processes was the fate of the Korean people, whose survival was threatened multiple times in the twentieth century.
13 The Baekdusan Creation Team specialized in the production of revolutionary films related to Kim Il-sung, and established a new revolutionary creation style by putting forward the production method of sokdojeon (speed battle).
14 Pibada (The Blood Sea) is the first revolutionary opera created according to Kim Jong-il’s juche realism, and it is evaluated as a work that fully embodies the juche literary art idea and the policy on the construction of revolutionary opera.
15 In summary, in the early System, Stanislavsky overestimated “affective memory,” but later, he reconsidered “affective life” as more significant than “affective memory.” In other words, he reevaluated the importance of experience. Since the mid-1930s, the logic of physical action prevailed over experience. Please see the following quote: “ … at the first stage of the development of the ‘System,’ Stanislavsky greatly overestimated the importance of affective memory in the work of an actor. … He made the erroneous conclusion that all the experiences of the actor on the stage are exclusively repetitive. Without denying the importance of affective memory as one of the elements of the ‘System,’ Stanislavsky later revised the role of this element (i.e. affective memory) … He came to the conclusion that a more perfect means of influencing the feeling (than affective memory) is the logic of physical actions, aimed at implementing the line of through action and the super-task of the play and the role. … Unlike affective memory, which deals with a capricious and elusive feeling, the logic of the physical actions of the role is more definite, accessible, materially tangible, easily fixed, and amenable to control and influence by consciousness” (Krechetova Citation[1957] 2013, 477, translated by authors).
16 The anti-materialistic nature of the System was consistently pointed out even during Stanislavsky’s lifetime. The Soviets had consistently persuaded him to change his system in accordance with the government’s materialistic position. For example, for political reasons, he was recommended to change “affective memory” to “emotional memory” because “emotional memory” is a better way to physically describe “how stimuli operated in tandem with associated memories and triggered responses.” Lyubov Gurevich, his editor from as early as 1908 until the early 1930s, forced Stanislavsky to comply with the Soviet mentality and its vocabulary and to delete words like “spirit,” “soul,” “inspiration,” and “radiation” (of energy). See Shevtsova Citation2020.
17 One-site experience would be similar to participant observation, but it has a different focus. It does not maintain a distance between the observer (actor) and his or her object but aims at experiencing the inner life of the object by copying the outer physical actions of it.
18 From this perspective, it is justified for Shevtsova to add “emotional” to “experiencing” to indicate the feeling of the process undergone, which is intrinsic to the Russian word itself. When translating perezhivaniye (experience), she emphasizes “the feeling of the process undergone” and uses the gerund form instead of the noun to translate it as emotional experiencing. See Shevtsova Citation2020.
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Notes on contributors
Jaebeom Hong
Jaebeom Hong (first author) is a professor in the Department of Korean Language and Literature, Konkuk University, Seoul, Republic of Korea. His recent book is The Contact Point of Stanislavsky System and Korean Dramatic Art (Seoul: Drama and Man, 2022, 2nd edition). One of his most recent essays is “The Popularity of the Light Comedy during the Late Era of Kim Jong-il” (The International Journal of Asian Studies vol 20 n°1, 2023).
Seungmoo Paik
Seungmoo Paik (co-author) is a theatrical critic and an associate professor in the Department of Russian Language and Literature at Seoul National University, Seoul, Republic of Korea. His fields of research include Russian theatre, the Stanislavski System, Meyerhold’s Biomechanics, and Korean theatre. He is the editor-in-chief of the journal Today’s Seoul Theater, and the author of 20 Playwrights of the 20th Century (Seoul: Sallimbooks, 2012) and Korean Theater, Depth (Seoul: Umurinnunjip, 2013).
Seong-kwan Cho
Seong-kwan Cho (corresponding author) studied performance and theatre studies in the UK (Queen Mary University of London and University of Warwick) and is an assistant professor in the Department of English Language and Literature at Kyung Hee University, Seoul, Republic of Korea. His research interests are Shakespeare and posthumanism, stage and nation, and comparative drama (East Asia and Europe).