Madang-nori is the performance mode of 30 years which has popularized successfully through the acceptance and recreation of traditional performance. Since 1970s and 1980s, there were movements to create the archtype of Korean theatre overcoming the su...
Madang-nori is the performance mode of 30 years which has popularized successfully through the acceptance and recreation of traditional performance. Since 1970s and 1980s, there were movements to create the archtype of Korean theatre overcoming the submissive acceptance of Western theatre. The theatre movements have begun to include the traditional elements in our theatre to show the concerns about the traditional theatre. Under the name of modern recreation of the tradition, many theatrical modes were produced based on the folk arts like shaman arts, mask dance, and pansori, but these modes couldn't carried through ten years.
Considering those historical evidences, Madang-nori should be highly appraised in that it reinterprets the modes newly based on the traditional theatre, reconstructs them in contemporary sense to be the original mode of Korean musical, and keeps the tradition alive.
I work over in this thesis to study the originality and the relevance with the traditional theatre of Madang-nori by the theoretical explication to show its evolutive succession of traditional theatre.
Madang-nori mode makes the multi layered structure of the space by using open space. In Madang-nori, theatre space itself is able to make space in theatre, to become ordinary space or ritual space, and to show the space fusion synchronously. With the space change and the fusion whenever it is needed, Madang-nori mode constructs multi layered space to achieve the communal unity as the two way venue of festive understanding between the audience and the player. I compared it with the space of the Western theatre which separates the actors and the audience to the bottom to create the other spatial time from the real spatial time for the dramatic immersion.
Since Madang-nori takes its material from the pansories and ancient stories, and its narrator goes between the stage and the audience to make an communal identity, Madang-nori is able to keep its whole description. Also because of its open playfulness, Madang-nori can enlarge the theatrical play to let the player and the audience watch the performance with objective and critical attitudes.
Open acting in the open space produces realistic presence and impromptu reaction. This impromptu reaction with moveable dramaturgy ensures the active engagements of the audience to recognize the 'playfulness' of Madang-nori. The presence of the impromptu can be displayed quickly by the actors' understanding on the social issues and the whole flow of the performance. Jest and satire, the necessities of the traditional performer, can be shown theatrically by the complete training of the traditional acting and the traditional voices.
Considering on its successive repertoire of every year from the <THE TALE OF HEUSAENG> in 1981 to < THE TALE OF KAEGUL> in 2007, Madang-nori should be read its theatrical import now.
Because of the lack of the studies for Madang-nori, it has been treated as the same theatrical mode with Madang-Geuk and considered often as a corrupted commercial play. However, there are some similarities of these newly framed modes of Madang-nori and Madang-Geuk in the acceptance and recreation of traditional arts, but their theatrical views are significantly different.
Many attempts to modernize the traditional arts couldn't keep up more than ten years. It is because the Western logic of theatre couldn't solve the question how to accept the traditional arts, and how it is related with the contemporary theatre by the lack of professionalism for the theatrical mode. In the space of "Madang", Madan-nori is the theatrical mode to communicate with the audience by jests, satire, and the critical view to interpret the ancient stories with modern viewpoint and to recreate the epic theatre structure of Mask dance, Pansori, and Daedong-Gut.