Korean traditional art, a historical product of Korean people and a crystal reflecting all sorts of Korean people’s emotions and feelings, is a valuable heritage entailing our own voice and gesture. However, Japanese colonial rule had resulted in a ...
Korean traditional art, a historical product of Korean people and a crystal reflecting all sorts of Korean people’s emotions and feelings, is a valuable heritage entailing our own voice and gesture. However, Japanese colonial rule had resulted in a loss of our traditional identity and damages to traditional culture, and westernization after liberation from Japanese ruling caused the traditional culture to be degenerated to a non-mainstream art losing its artistic universality.
Proliferation of sense of desperate crisis in the late 1980s led the government and the world of traditional art to develop solution to address the issue and began their endless revitalization efforts having popularization as the initiative’s main objective. As a result, a basis for the second leap could be established bringing out all quantitative growths in education, infrastructure, human resources, and art performance.
Although 30 years have passed since the initiative began, the world of traditional art still clamors ‘popularization’ or ‘globalization’ outshining all the preceding efforts. That is because the efforts have failed in finding contact points with the public in spite of the significant growth attained. Traditional art is a culture in life that has been enjoyed by people’s everyday life in a traditional society. Having said that, popularization of modern traditional culture can be restated as returning the culture as a part of people’s life, and popularization of the traditional culture would be truly possible when the culture is naturally enjoyed in people’s everyday life. Hence it is necessary to develop a more advanced strategy than the current revitalization schemes.
Especially, modern society is referred to as the society of cultural industry where culture is being perceived as the source of power of a nation and has emerged as the strategic industry; and we face turning points of the time where the depressed traditional art started to attain a growing interests among people as the Hallyu disseminates. As a result, we need to prepare an exit strategy to meet the needs of the time.
In this study, we aim at suggesting modern development scheme for neo-traditional performing arts appropriate for modern era. To achieve the objectives, we first examined the transition procedure of traditional arts into modern traditional performing arts by analyzing evolution process of musical history in 20th century, and we examined fundamental reasons for the depression. Also, we deducted limitations of revitalization strategy which is currently implemented on each field by analyzing overall trend patterns of 21st century through collecting data from a recently-published cultural and artistic yearbook, materials for academic seminar, and news release.
Based on the findings from our analysis, we propose the following suggestions as the modern development scheme of traditional performing arts in three categories including policy, education, and revitalization of art market.
First, it is crucial for government to establish supportive policies to enable stable and sustainable growth of traditional performing arts. To achieve the purpose, policy supports such as providing legislations to adopt cultural-industry approach to traditional performing arts, establishing supportive institutions which is in exclusive charge of the creation part the performing arts and developing debut programs to discover unknown talented artists.
Second, it is urgent to develop Korean classical music education to facilitate proliferation and advancement of traditional arts. In regards to the specialized education, its focus is currently centered on the preservation and succession of tradition rather than on education for creation; hence, it is necessary to establish creativity spirit of specialized education institution, prepare professional education system for tradition and creation respectively, diversify education curriculum and introduce ‘practical Korean traditional music’ as a major in college. Also in order to strengthen social education to achieve social dissemination, development of education contents fully utilizing the original compositions to induce joy and interests is necessary in terms of school education, and development of e-learning program and promotion of its application is required to improve general public’s access to the Korean traditional music education.
Third, as a measure to invigorate traditional art market as a cultural industry, it is crucial to develop a more professionalized and subdivided market environment through adopting economical and industrial approach to traditional arts, establishing professional management system, and developing a training system targeted to the specialized performing arts practitioners, and also it is important to build a foundation to develop traditional arts as a creative industry by inducing reproduction through consumption by boosting social dissemination via mass media or diversifying distribution channel.