Patrice Pavis offers an array of observations and assessments of Korean performances ranging from plays and dance to art installations and even a K-pop music video.
Part One presents a fundamental set of questions about how a performance scholar might situate theatre in the larger context of globalization. Accordingly, Pavis situates performance trends he witnessed, as well as scholarly approaches from the field of Korean theatre studies, within the context of a Euro-American genealogy of performance research. He acknowledges the near-prohibitive difficulty of comparing these two realms, and applies his own research methods. For example, he uses Oh Tai-Sok's adaptation of The Tempest (2012) as the basis for his conceptualization and evaluation of the state of globalization in Korean theatre, as well as his attempts to unravel the notion of ‘Koreanization’ (apparently antithetical to globalization).
In Part Two, Pavis comments on the much-contested uses of adaptation and translation in modern Korean theatre, analysing Korean stagings of Western classics. Through the examples of Kim Hyun-Tak's Death of a Salesman (2013), Medea on Medea (2012) and The Maids (2012), Pavis expresses concerns about what he considers the ineffective performance outcomes of Kim's deconstructive stylistic approaches. He also expresses regret upon finding Lee Jaram's Ukchuk-Ga (Mother Courage and Her Children, 2011–12) to be apolitical, and mourns the difficulty of connecting the traditional pansori genre to the ground of politics. In his discussion of Kim Kwang-Lim's Batyr Mamaï (The Puppet Play, 2011) and its handling of Korea's socio-economic problems, Pavis refers to the Kazakh legend that is used in the performance, as well as sources of other Asian performance traditions (e.g. Japanese bunraku). For Pavis, the performance's featuring of such devices eventually blurs its initial aim of visualizing the putative concepts of Asian identity and inter-Asian politics onstage.
Other chapters in this section employ methods of analysis normally associated with European dramatists, such as Pascal Rambert and Falk Richter, to consider Kim Myung-wha's Dol-Nal (First Birthday, 2011–12), Choi Zin-A's Unexpected (2011–12), Baek Ha Ryong's Biography of Jeon Myung Chool (2011–12) and Lee Young Seok's Coming Up for Air (2011). The pairing of the European methodologies and the Korean performances is less than convincing. Even as Pavis proposes ‘tellacting’ (a combination of dramatic action and storytelling) as ideal for these works, he criticizes Korean acting as ‘too insistent, too psychological … crushing the delicate architecture of the texts’ (p. 100). Pavis then sows more contradiction by praising Kim Minseung's I, Na Hyeseok, the Undesirable (2012) and Lee's Coming Up for Air as exceptional plays that successfully incorporate tellacting to appeal to non-Korean audiences.
In Part Three, Pavis explores a few modern Korean dance performances. He celebrates Im Do-Wan's Woyzeck (2003), Hong Sehee's A Song for You (2011–12) and Nam Jeong-ho's Self-Portrait (2011–12) as experimental, and addresses the difficulty of theorizing intercultural theatre through a comparison of Im's Woyzeck and the ‘Franco-Serbo-Hungarian’ Josef Nadj's choreography of the same piece. The rest of the dance analyses, which reflect Pavis's impressions and reminiscences of his own viewing experiences, lack scholarly argument.
Part Four abandons scholarly pretensions in favour of Pavis's personal thoughts on Korean society and culture in general, illustrated via extended analyses of cultural texts beyond the realm of theatre. By closely reading the K-pop music video of the song ‘Nobody’ by JYP's Wonder Girls (2008), Park Eunyoung's art installation titled Flowers and Tears (2012) and a series of the author's own photographs of Seoul, Pavis extrapolates how Korea can always usher its people to run faster and move upward. This ‘vertical modernism’ (p. 235), we are informed, not only accelerates Korean society, but also puts it at risk of falling.
The Epilogue reveals Pavis's self-consciousness about the limits of foreign spectatorship. To his credit, he admits that when performances and their culture are analysed by a ‘perfect stranger’ (p. 249), some overreading inevitably results. Nonetheless, despite the fresh methodological framework that Pavis, the ‘perfect stranger’, is occasionally able to provide in theorizing Korean performances, ultimately he avoids talking about Korean contexts in favour of applying Euro-American perspectives and epistemology. The end product leaves the reader with more knowledge about the author than about his purported subject of study.
