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Performance Info

Park Min-hee majored in Korean classical music, more specifically gagok, in high school, college, and graduate school. Currently, Park is a performance creator and vocalist who explores where the Korean traditional artistic way of doing things and the contemporary performance format converge and experiments through various mediums. To Park, “Korean traditional music” is not about reproducing a past style but reinterpreting the attitudes of the period from today’s perspective. The No Longer Gagok series has been showcased in many festivals around the world. Currently, Park is making the 12Land series. Amongst her major works are No Longer Gagok: Four Nights, No Longer Gagok: Room5 , Summer House, and Hanging Bed.

Q. First, I would like to learn what “traditional” means to you.

A. What I see as tradition in terms of tense and temporality is not something that is limited to the past, but it’s something that has existed for a long period of time to arrive at the present. As times change so does what people find value in; as a result, the content of traditional arts inevitably evokes a different emotion from what it used to. Then in order to play Korean traditional music, I think about the original intentions as it pertains to today’s context rather than re-creating something from the past. I feel that tradition has to be destroyed. It’s an endless process of what to keep and what to change, and it’s hard to make that decision on my own. That’s because there is no copyright when it comes to traditional culture. It means that the history and the assets of a culture belong to the people who are active in that particular cultural area. So I have a sense of obligation to destroy it responsibly. When I think about what to leave, the most important feature is intonation. I look at music as a language. When intonation is taken out of the language then it comes across as a different language. You can’t learn intonation. You get it from living in a certain region, or you naturally absorb it through relationships in your life; intonation is something you have before you even become aware of it. I make a distinction between my attitude as the person who creates performances and as a person who sings, and when you look at my attitude when I’m singing, I feel that I am studying to find the intonation. How did people who sang and listened to the songs (gagok, gasa) for entertainment enjoy it? I try to imagine what they might have felt, and in that process, particularly, the method of re-creating inevitably gets destroyed.

Q. Gagok, jeongga and gasa are not as familiar to us as pansori is. Can you tell us about them?

A. Gagok is an old word. It’s a chant made from traditional poetry and if you look at the root you’ll find that it started from Goryeo gayo, which were songs that were made in the late Goryeo era. Then it became popular in Seoul and Gyeongki-do during the 17th century, Joseon era. At the time there were songs popular to specific regions, so it wasn’t a unique phenomenon. But in Seoul there were many people from the ruling class, so gagok became a way for the urban chic to entertain themselves. Often jeongga is introduced as music that the king or aristocrats enjoyed, and when pansori was popular throughout the country, it was welcomed by the palace, so it’s not peculiar to jeongga in that sense. Jeongga refers to gagok, gasa, and sijo (traditional three-verse Korean poems) all wrapped into one and came about when traditional music was being formally organized in the mid-1900s. Gasa were popular songs in Seoul and the Gyeong-ki suburbs in the 1900s. There’s material that says that during off season of agricultural farming, umjib (traditional Korean homes¬–thatched roof hut) were used for performing music. When I was a student, I was taught that all the songs that became gasa started from gasa literature. But as I learned more, there was a lot that I found suspicious. When I looked at each song, there were only a few songs that originated from gasa literature, and in fact, the content or the format had disappeared or changed. As the entertainment factor became stronger—since the person singing and the person listening have to have fun—only elements like that of entertainment remained. Gasa was most popular during the early 1900s, and with each history being different, the fact that gasa, gagok, and sijo were bundled into one musical category as jeongga wasn’t adequate. If the point was to listen to gagok from the point of view of gagok and not from a Western point of view when I was producing the No Longer Gagok series, then my recent projects involving gasa are about tradition and how much of that idea is political and how much it changed the content’s original context.

Q. No Longer Gagok means let’s forget about the formality of gagok that is established in tradition. Amongst the series I’d like to talk to you about is No Longer Gagok: Room5 . At a meeting at the 2016 Teater Formen Festival, what stood out was that you said the space itself in No Longer Gagok: Room5 was the musical score. Could you elaborate?

A. I converted the song’s structure into space. Our project was to create the audience’s movement path. First, we looked for a space where there was a pathway from where you could enter rooms. We needed a space that had seven rooms, eight total including a waiting area for the audience. We also needed a space where from each room and through the corridor you could hear the sounds from the other rooms. Each room had a number. There were rooms numbered 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 in the middle, and at both ends, a room numbered 0 that only the audience was in. It was where the audience spent time listening to the sounds coming from the five rooms and weighing in. The five rooms had performers, and the audience moved to the other rooms when given instructions to do so. The gagok songs all followed the same form, and the audience heard the gagok sounds (voices) coming out of the rooms all at once or sometimes in order. I produced the performance musically based on the heterophony technique. The audience got to experience listening to the voices

at various degrees and distances. Each song combined became a gagok suite. We say, “That’s one round of gagok played.” I put out the idea of “cycle” with the songs repeating in the same structure. The first room 0 and the second room 0 could be thought of as an intro and outro, but these are Western ideas. There is a term in traditional music called daeyeoeum (trailing note like an echo). When gagok is performed as a single song the daeyeoeum is performed like an intro. But I thought that couldn’t be right. I thought it referred to a big lingering tone between songs, and I thought that I should create that in the beginning and at the end of the performance. I created a structure where the first room was labeled 0, and once you went through all the rooms—0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5—you came across another room that was once again 0. When the audience passed through all the rooms and was sitting in room 0, they heard something they hadn’t heard in the first room 0. They experienced the perspective of the sounds at different levels. It was the same but what the audience heard in the second room 0 was what I thought of as a big lingering tone. I thought long about how if there were no lingering tones there wouldn’t be a cycle. That’s why I attached the cycle symbol in the title.

Q. What is 12LAND, which is composed of twelve popular gasa pieces from the late Joseon era?

A. I would like to make each piece one by one and then bring them all together in one big space. 12LAND looks like it is twelve gasa pieces purporting elegance, but in actuality my goal is to reveal the entertainment aspect that was a reflection of the times. I have finished four pieces: Playground Roundabout, Summer House, Everlasting Liquor, and Hanging Bed. From these, Summer House’s intellectual enjoyment is the point of amusement. It’s about multitalented recluse scholar.

Q. Summer House, performed in 2017, looked like a sound installation project. You showed various ways of listening by creating sound that you could hear from far away and sound you could hear close-up. It felt different from No Longer Gagok, which was based on voice. I’m curious about how you came up with this different way of delivering meaning.

A. Summer House is a performance I made thinking about the audial mediums’ physical differences and the psychological effects created by distance. I created three spaces in octagonal shapes inside a museum’s seminar room. I arranged different contexts for listening to music in each space. Songs that told a personal context could be listened to at a slight distance or by moving; if it were a sound that had a strong social context, then you’d listen closer; and if it were a musical context, then it was played live so you could enjoy it right in front. These three layers happened at the same time. I structured it so that the audience could synthesize those spontaneous events themselves. That is why the heights of the three spaces were somewhat different. That was done in order to adjust how much sound could physically intervene and how much outside scenery could be seen. The space was made with an audience movement path that allowed the divided groups of three to remain in the three spaces at the same time and then rotate. There was no way to compute the direction of the sound perfectly, but I went through a simulation as an audience member to fine tune it. There’s one point where the song was

heard live. There were earphones that could be used to listen in each room. If you looked inside one room, it looked like the audience was listening to the song through headphones, but they might have also been hearing live sounds from far away; and what to focus on, what was disrupting what, and what they heard or saw changed depending on what the person was focusing on.

Q. Could you tell us about Hanging Bed and Everlasting Liquor, performed in November 2018?

A. Hanging Bed is a gasa that was actually very popular. Because it’s a song rooted in gasa literature and because it’s so old, the content disconnects in the middle, so it’s hard to understand. Since it was a song for entertainment, if it did not suit the generation, then it was erased. Hanging Bed is a song regarding sleep, so I made an audience area where they could lie down and listen to the song. The performer sang either below or behind the structure that the audience lay on. I placed a hammock above the floor so that the audience could climb in and use their own weight to settle into a comfortable position. I also made the flowerbed that sat below the structure. It was truly made into a “hanging bed.” You could even see the natural scenery outside the theater through a large window. The thing that probably evoked the most powerful feeling was nature. After that it was probably the arranged manmade landscape. But the thing that the audience could see most comfortably was the screen that was attached to the ceiling. The audience watched animation that followed the lyrics as they listened to the song from below. It seemed like the audience had a lot to choose from visually, but in reality, there was nothing that they could choose. They ended up abandoning the meticulously set overpowering scenery and observed the screen provided by the artist. The landscaped flowerpots betrayed nature outside of the theater; the screen betrayed the flowerpots. I think this process is the politics of “tradition.”The lyrics to Everlasting Liquor goes “make liquor from bullocho (the herb of eternal youth) and pour in the everlasting cup for longevity.” I looked for the herb bullocho and found a brewer to make bullocho liquor. I was curious about how a performance could transform in an era in which people look for information and entertainment on their smartphones rather than from a performance medium. Equipped with the basics needed to put on a show—a specific time, space, and action for execution—I wanted to test out if we could put on a performance that gave off the same feeling as if watching it from a smartphone. I designated a website for part 1, where one drink from the brewed liquors was picked and one song from the four Everlasting Liquor songs commissioned to four artists was selected. Although part 1 is a questionnaire survey, the website was developed in a fun way. There were more audience members who were unaware that this process was reflected in the survey. We performed Hanging Bed and Everlasting Liquor as part 2. It will not always be the same. When I was first putting the project together, the concept was to have the audience look for a personal place, but it ended up being structured at a theater.

Q. When will 12LAND be completed? And what do you hope to say by staging gasa?

A. My goal is 2020, but I won’t force it. As I complete little by little they’ll come a day when it’s finished. Right now, I’m more interested in music within the social context rather than the music itself. I would like to talk about the“politics of tradition” through gasa. But politics and tradition carry such deep meanings that I have to think about it carefully. I worry that I won’t be able to see the projects objectively behind these big words. I want to find the right words that show a performance but also reveal awareness about an issue.

Photograph Copyright :

1. (Main Image) : Summer House, 2017 ©Yun Jae-won

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E-mailparkparkvoice@gmail.com

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