Queer Archives, Affects, and History

Yeosung gukgeuk requires extensive physical training. The actors master pansori singing as well as the physical skills required to embody masculinity.^{Footnote 10} Although yeosung gukgeuk has been almost forgotten in theatre history, the male-role actors’ bodies and gestures have gained new attention and respect through Yeosung Gukgeuk Project, connecting today’s South Koreans to a derided queer past. How does the project pull the yeosung gukgeuk body from the past? Or more precisely, how does it excavate the physical gestures and affects of a forgotten genre and reanimate them to further explore queerness? The project’s actors’ attempts to materialize the yeosung gukgeuk world have been especially concentrated on presenting ideal versions of men, which was the source of the genre’s popularity in the 1950s and 1960s, and is now once again the source of its popularity via new queer interpretations.

Across various iterations of the project, jung choreographs movements and affects derived from yeosung gukgeuk in a new way: she completely disregards the heteronormative narratives that prevail in the genre. Drawing upon archival research and oral history with yeosung gukgeuk actors in their 60s and 70s, jung rediscovers queer potentialities in the form, especially in the ways that the male role actors embody masculinity, through physical gestures, voice, props, and costumes. Her work also draws attention to these performers’ experiences of queer intimacy showing their struggle to survive as actors.

In Directing for Gender (2010), a single-channel video installation that was part of Yeosung Gukgeuk Project, jung isolates gestures and mixes and matches them in the video edits, focusing on gestures that inscribe masculinity (see figs. 3 & 4). She casts yeosung gukgeuk actors in their 70s who remember the yeosung gukgeuk gestures, and has them manifest the bodily movements differently than they would have on the yeosung gukgeuk stage: the gestures are detached from the drama and thereby given more prominence. Thus, jung is not just documenting a disappearing art form. Her new choreography offers a contemporary insight into the gender-crossing acting of the past by showing how yeosung gukgeuk performers “became men.” By presenting a particular set of masculine gestures and affects via camerawork and editing, jung creates a new cinematic stage. A red curtain is draped behind the actors indicating that the cinematic frame does not belong to the world of yeosung gukgeuk anymore. The new choreographic video work magnifies how yeosung gukgeuk itself made use of the performative construction of masculinity with a careful articulation and repetitive bodily practices that would undo the embodied femininity in yeosung gukgeuk actors. By isolating the gestures of masculinity, jung demonstrates that gender is a meticulous set of constructions that formulates a male body through repetitions over time. In yeosung gukgeuk, performing male roles is not a one-time thing, but more of a permanent designation. Actors were required to be trained for a long period of time to fully embody men onstage—learning the expression of gender through repetition over time.

Figures 3&4.

Kim Hye Rhee, a yeosung gukgeuk actor and director. Stills from Directing for Gender, a single-channel video installation that was part of Yeosung Gukgeuk Project. Platform SlowRush, Songdo International City, Incheon, 4–24 December 2010. (Photo courtesy of siren eun young jung)

In the cinematic stage of Directing for Gender, Kim Hye Rhee, a yeosung gukgeuk actor and director in her 70s, demonstrates how she built the male protagonist in a yeosung gukgeuk play entitled Muyeongtap. The play was originally staged in 1955 by the company called Yim Chun Aeng and the Troupe, but the script was subsequently lost. Kim had rewritten the script in 1987 based on her memory of the original show and wrote it again to perform for Directing for Gender. jung asked Kim to tell what kinds of directions were given to the yeosung gukgeuk actor who played the male protagonist, Asadal, to help the actor embody an ideal version of a man on a yeosung gukgeuk stage. “It is mut that completes everything,” says Kim in the performance (jung Reference jung2010). The actor must possess mut, which can be translated as dandiness or coolness, in order to mesmerize the audience. Mut is both a physical and emotional force that completes the male character. What attracts the female audience so intensely, according to Kim, is this affect: “the actor should be able to express how their eyes, heart, and their whole body is possessed by mut” (jung Reference jung2010). Mut comes before gesture. The charm derived from mut, according to Kim, is what completes the male character of yeosung gukgeuk. Kim continues showing how ideal masculinity is constructed in yeosung gukgeuk with other characters, such as Joomong and King Dongmyung. These characters are constructed using bigger, if not exaggerated gestures, “like roaring toward the sky” in Kim’s words:

Combining male gestures with affect, or mut, yeosung gukgeuk directors and actors build an ideal version of a man onstage.

jung continued to explore the queer potentiality of gestures in yeosung gukgeuk through Masterclass (2012, 2013), one of her first theatrical iterations to shed light on how yeosung gukgeuk masculinity is embodied.^{Footnote 11} jung set up a master class onstage, with Lee Deung Woo, a male-role yeosung gukgeuk actor in their 60s; Kim Young-sook, a yeosung gukgeuk trainee who was previously trained in pansori singing and had recently been introduced to yeosung gukgeuk; and a female role actor who rehearsed with Kim. The audience was invited to observe the entire process of the masterclass in which Lee transfers their knowledge and skills to Kim. Onstage, Lee has already transformed into the male figure Lee Mong-ryong from Chunhyangjeon, a long-time classic pansori performance that was also revised as a popular yeosung gukgeuk play. Lee is displaying appropriate attire, makeup, posture, and gestures. They are wearing a blue and white durumagi (Korean outer robe for men) and gat (Korean traditional hat for men), and holding a fan. In contrast, Kim is in casual black clothes with no makeup, depicting her status as a trainee.

In opening up the stage, Kim Young-sook introduced herself and the stage. She remarks: “I will be taught how to sing, act, move, and vocalize. This will be repeated again and again. And through this repetition, my body will take on the appearance of a real man.” After this short introduction, the three actors begin their masterclass with one of the most popular scenes from Chunhyangjeon, in which Lee Mong-ryong and Chunhyang flirt with each other. Lee explains various “masculine” gestures, from basic body posture to tone of voice.

Kim, the trainee, initiates the infamous “Love Song” scene in Chunhyangjeon in the role of Lee Mong-ryong. Kim in her soft voice tries initiating a conversation with the girl: “Hey Chunhyang.” Lee Deung Woo intervenes: “You have to show your determination for love in this scene. Call her name with great confidence. Do it again” (jung Reference jung2013a). Kim tries the scene again, but Lee is not satisfied. Lee instructs Kim by demonstrating the scene, emphasizing how they drop the tone at the end of the sentence and how they pronounce each word to deliver the confidence. They repeat the scene multiple times, to equip Kim with the right tone, nuance, and enunciation.

Once Lee is somewhat satisfied with Kim’s performance of the male role, they move on to the next scene. Lee comments on Kim’s gestures: “A man doesn’t walk like you. When you walk, you walk. When you don’t, you stand still” (jung Reference jung2013a). Lee asks Kim to walk one step at a time, and firmly, with no movement in transition between steps, such as shaking arms or heads. In the following scene, Lee details even more meticulously with gesture and affect, citing one line:

Lee details how the male protagonist should be masterful in flirting with the female protagonist with sets of gestures, combining gentle touches with an aggressive approach. When walking, the male role actor must walk confidently, if not arrogantly, one step at a time. Lee’s direction is so precise that the trainee keeps failing to follow it exactly.

Frustrated by their student’s failure to perform masculine gestures, Lee eventually invites an audience member to participate in the session. Although, as jung told me, “There were a bunch of lesbians who were raising their hands so eagerly, wanting to be picked by Lee, with great confidence in their ability to perform masculinity” (jung Reference jung2016b), Lee selects a male-presenting audience member, with the expectation that he will be able to easily perform the masculine gestures that they teach.^{Footnote 12} However, he completely fails to replicate Lee’s gestures, which elicits loud laughter from the audience. No matter what he does, his gestures are too effeminate and not satisfactory for Lee. His failure to act “masculine” completes the piece in an unanticipated way: a male body does not naturally embody masculinity; masculinity is acquired through repetitive practice and some male-bodied persons do not comply with the norm. The audience member’s mint blue, American Apparel T-shirt with “Legalize Gay” printed on the chest adds another layer to his failure to perform masculinity.^{Footnote 13} In my interview with her, jung described this scene as one of the most memorable moments of the piece (jung Reference jung2016b). Through this piece, jung provides a space for Lee to showcase a set of skills, techniques, and rules for performing yeosung gukgeuk masculinity and at the same time reveals the shortcomings of gender norms on- and offstage through the failure of a young woman actor and a gay male audience member. The young actor failed at performing masculinity because she had not spent enough time practicing, repeating the techniques over and over to embody a set of masculine gestures; the male audience member failed, even though he was male-presenting, because he had not been trained as a yeosung gukgeuk actor. In Masterclass, gender norms on- and offstage pressure each participating body differently, revealing a complex entanglement of affects in performing and constructing gender and sexuality.

Transformations in Queerness in South Korea

Before Yeosung Gukgeuk Project, jung had never worked in theatre; in order to share the subversive power of yeosung gukgeuk with an audience, she transformed herself from a visual artist who worked alone to an interdisciplinary artist who must collaborate with actors, set designers, musicians, and theatre producers. This interdependent relationship reveals an essential dimension of queer historiography as a collective gesture. By utilizing theatre as her artistic medium, jung allows spectators to encounter alternative socialities and collectivities, depicting the time and space of yeosung gukgeuk as a site of queer temporality.^{Footnote 14}

In addition to Masterclass, jung developed (Off)Stage (2012, 2013; see fig. 1).^{Footnote 15} Through (Off)Stage, jung explores and expresses the ways in which the space of yeosung gukgeuk fascinated both the actors and their audience with its unique environment, which was separate from the heteropatriarchal world outside theatre. jung wrote the script for (Off)Stage based on an oral history interview with Cho Young-Sook, a yeosung gukgeuk actor in their 80s whose expertise is in the sammai (comedic supporting male character) role.

An actor sits in the middle of the stage. As they begin to talk, a screen shows pictures from their youth. Their name is Cho Young-Sook. They were born in the Japanese colonial period and lived through hard times, including the Korean War and its aftermath. The many ups and downs in their life are circumscribed by their love of the stage: “I had no idea about ideology, society, or whatever. All I knew was the stage. Having been immersed in the excitement of the audience, I practiced, practiced, and practiced. My only hope was to become a real man.” A black-and-white picture of them dressing up as a man onstage is projected onto the screen behind them. Many emotions flicker across their face: happiness, sorrow, regret, and nostalgia. They sigh and say: “I just can’t fully describe what I experienced” (jung Reference jung2013b).

In an interview, jung told me about the difficulties that she experienced in staging the piece, as she had to give up some of the decision-making and let her collaborator, Cho Young-Sook, direct the staging (jung Reference jung2016b). She said that the show did not go as she had intended; Cho improvised some parts and in other moments simply did not follow jung’s stage directions. As an artist used to working alone and controlling everything, the theatre process put her in a new and vulnerable position (jung Reference jung2016b). One way to view the process is to see it as a necessary compromise that yielded unexpected results for both artists and the audience. Staging themselves in (Off)Stage rather than performing a supporting male role in a yeosung gukgeuk play might have been a compromise for Cho in order to have an opportunity to work onstage again, but it was not the stage to which they had dedicated their life. However, it was a chance for Cho to share and celebrate with a contemporary audience their lifelong experience as a yeosung gukgeuk actor. Their face shone brightly as they described the popularity of the genre in the 1950s with pride; their body shivered with joy when they received loud applause from the audience for their signature sammai performance.

In (Off)Stage, through their life stories and performance demonstrations, Cho evoked a historical imaginary of queer lives from a past in which identitarian terms like lesbian or transgender did not yet exist. And yet, Cho’s stories about the actors’ lives as (trans) men as well as about same-sex intimate relationships in the group provoked a special kind of response: the audience laughed, screamed, sighed, and cried in their encounter with this queer past. In the metropolitan city of Seoul, yeosung gukgeuk found a new audience that appreciates and enjoys queerness and its forgotten history. The Yeosung Gukgeuk Project is not just about finding traces of queer lives in the past, but also about the desire on the part of the audience to touch upon the political and social fantasies and imaginations that may have existed in a distant past. Through a staged encounter with yeosung gukgeuk octogenarian actors, the contemporary audience gets to hear directly from members of communities that fostered intimate relationships between women and gender-nonconforming people before the 1990s when “queer” became part of the vocabulary. It is a rare experience. In providing this opportunity, jung avoids framing yeosung gukgeuk actors as LGBTQ+ subjects, despite the fact that some actors in the troupe were in relationships with one another, and despite the fact that some of them lived as (trans) men. As Cho Young-Sook describes in (Off)Stage:

Cho sees intimate relationships between the actors as a “natural thing” that substituted for familial kinship bonds that had been destroyed in the Korean War. At the same time, in the extraordinary environment of a yeosung gukgeuk troupe, male-role actors were conceived of as men at least while they were wearing the male persona, both on- and offstage. Should we consider this past to be a lesbian history or a transgender history? jung does not offer an answer at all. Instead, she lets the story live onstage. While it may be the present that has pressured the queer past to appear onstage, it is the past that exerts a pull upon the present, as the past of South Korean queerness does not fit in so easily with how we know what we know about gender and sexuality.

Anomalous Fantasy_Korea Version (2016) explores queer potentialities vis-à-vis the challenges of making a highly collaborative work and explores connections between yeosung gukgeuk artists of the past and contemporary artists (see fig. 4).^{Footnote 16} jung invited Nam Eun-jin, a yeosung gukgeuk actor, and G-Voice, an amateur gay choir, to devise scenes of encounter across time, across differences. The legacies of yeosung gukgeuk resonate differently with each artist. Yet by appearing together on the stage and acknowledging each other’s life stories, they build a new relationship. Here, interdependency becomes a driving force, which I understand to be a core element of queer historiography. The stage of Anomalous Fantasy becomes a space to share “a fantasy we will be creating together,” as Nam recites at the beginning of the piece (jung Reference jung2016a). Through their collaborative art project, they draw attention to lives that have been neglected and oppressed.

None of the participating artists are fully masterful of what they do onstage at Namsan Arts Center: jung has never trained in theatre production; Nam is a yeosung gukgeuk trainee with few stage opportunities; G-Voice meets on weekends to practice, using singing as a way of organizing a politically active gay community. Instead of attempting to conceal the actors’ lack of mastery, jung chose to address it explicitly in the performance. Before G-Voice appears onstage, a house manager announces, “Please turn off your cell phones, as the actors are not equipped with strong voices” (jung Reference jung2016a). Clearly, the performers are not professionals, at least not in the conventional understanding of the term.

In the show, Nam reflects upon their attempts to professionalize their yeosung gukgeuk male-role acting. If their life is incomplete and not to be remembered, as Nam laments in Anomalous Fantasy, it is because their acting career of more than 10 years does not look like it will provide economic success or fame. But they still “decided to dive into a diminishing, unpopular genre,” no matter the consequences (jung Reference jung2018b). Because yeosung gukgeuk has declined in popularity, Nam does not have a teacher to guide and train them in the particular set of skills needed to perform male characters, nor do they have any opportunities to perform. Disregarding this precarity, Nam continues to work to master the technical skills needed to perform male characters.

If failure, as J. Jack Halberstam argues, is “a connotation of a certain dignity in the pursuit of greatness,” Nam’s failure is rooted in their ultimate goal of mastering yeosung gukgeuk techniques (2011:94). Nam is pursuing the perfection of their posture, manner of walking, gestures, foot work, and shoulder movements that will turn them into a male character. According to Nam, this is “the art of mastery” (jung Reference jung2018a). What makes Nam’s acting special is not just the reflexive nature of their performance but also their commitment to this particular art form, despite its and their seemingly unpromising future. What is it that drives Nam to continue in their efforts, even when failure seems inevitable? No matter how much they suffer in their pursuit of mastery, they continue because they are deeply enchanted by the experience of becoming a man onstage. As if that desire could be universally understood, Nam recounts: “Fascinating, isn’t it? You could become a man just by mimicking and practicing repeatedly” (jung Reference jung2018a). It is their immense pleasure of performing a male character onstage that Nam shares with the audience.

In Anomalous Fantasy, Nam directly refers to their failure to master the skills of the male-role actor. Reading aloud from an autobiography of Cho Young-Sook (Reference Young-Sook2013), the first-generation actor who appeared in (Off)Stage, Nam proclaims: “To be remembered is an amazing thing” (jung Reference jung2016a). They read the part of the autobiography that discusses how popular yeosung gukgeuk actors were in the 1950s and 1960s; fans would wait in front of the actors’ houses to see them. They tell the audience resentfully: “But I don’t think I will be remembered. Who would remember this incomplete life, anyway?” (jung Reference jung2016a). At that moment, members of G-Voice enter and read from Nam’s personal diary. It is a collective act of remembering and celebrating their life, even if Nam’s diary entries do not match the glitz of Cho’s biography. And yet, while their life may not be as successful, the audience learns about Nam’s persistent efforts to perfect their skills, regardless of the status of the craft itself in today’s world.

In Anomalous Fantasy, G-Voice is essential for understanding what queer historiography is and does. Though they may be amateurish as a choir, G-Voice appears onstage unapologetically, masterful in their solidarity. G-Voice has long sung at protests and the group is nicknamed the “idols of protest sites.” With this history of political participation, G-Voice adds an important layer to the piece, showing what it means to come together, particularly for people at the margins.

In relating Nam’s struggle to their own experiences as gay men, G-Voice sings “On the Way to Bugayeon-dong” (2017b), the song written to commemorate Choi Young-soo, nicknamed Spaghettina, a member who died from complications related to AIDS. With this song, G-Voice creates affinities by juxtaposing Nam’s life and their struggles to become an actor without much recognition, with their friend and others who died of AIDS without the attention their plight deserved. While the tone of the music is solemn, the lyrics convey a willingness to remember those whom they have lost and to survive in the world regardless of the social pressures they face as gay men.

Ending with G-Voice’s original song “Congratulations” (2017a), Anomalous Fantasy remembers and celebrates queer pasts and presents and depicts a future with hope. Wearing a sparkly jacket, Nam dances to the music of G-Voice, as altogether the performers celebrate a world they want to share—and inviting the audience to share in the joyful music. It is a queer attempt to share the “anomalous fantasy” together.

The pressures of collaboration led jung, Nam Eun Jin, and G-Voice to achieve a whole new sort of mastery: not of the skills needed for directing, acting, singing, and dancing, but of being able to connect with each other while being vulnerable. The queerness that drives Anomalous Fantasy is not about gender or sexual identities, but a sensibility to form affinities across differences.