Dancing Toward Democracy— Korean counter-publics

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Let’s review what the Higashi-kujo Madang offers to Kyoto’s public sphere. Since 1993 when the Madang was first performed, Kyoto residents have had the rare opportunity of seeing (or participating) in the performance of democracy. It is just such a performance that can tactically appropriate a public space for a counter-public event. After openly recruiting an all-volunteer staff, and after months of democratic public meetings, the Higashi-Kujo Madang assembled the efforts of many local groups to bring food, music, dance, song, contests, and, finally, drama, into a common cultural venue.

“West's black prophetic framework includes the oppositional moment of the externally designated “we.” This reminds us that the importance of the "exclusion of exclusion" appears at the level of sexuality, ethnicity, and interest more strongly than at any other: identity politics has been motivated in part by a struggle against those persons and practices ex cluding us because of our differences, a motivation which has called into question those exclusions operating within identity groups themselves. When differences are self-affirmed rather than results of labeling or traditional spatial and cultural boundaries, they provide “a standpoint from which to criticize prevailing institutions and norms,” helping to anchor a sense of involvement with the plurality of others in our communities, societies, and the world. Unlike ascribed identities, achieved identities provide us with a critical strength”
(Dean 1996, 42).

At the center of this production is the madang geki, the street drama. In this drama, local volunteer actors use a self-scripted play to explore the predicaments of their everyday lives. The end of the drama signals the beginning of a final dance in which everyone joins in. As twilight deepens, the dance twirls to a final drum beat, and the madang collapses into itself, returning the schoolyard to its normalized state.

By design, this Madang is an event where the internal boundaries within the community are conspicuously ignored. It is a therapeutic space, a place of communal healing, a zone where conversation is possible between adversaries (and Kyoto's Korean and buraku Japanese neighborhoods house several adversarial social groups). Standing in the crowd at the first madang, one of the Madang organizers directed my attention to two elderly men holding an animated conversation. “See those men. They live close to one another, but I've never seen them talk before. I thought I never would. It's incredible (shinjirareinai)!" The Madang opens up an internal arena of active, discursive social negotiation and collective embodied experience, which creates important memories for the entire neighborhood.

The visibly inclusive aspect of the Higashi-kujo Madang festival and the generalizable notion of heterogeneity (“ishitsusei”) translates the community demand for inclusion into a demand for a public sphere open to all people residing in Kyoto, regardless of gender, origin, occupation or physical ability. At this moment, the Korean community establishes the right of its members for inclusion in the public sphere, by articulating a message that is already accepted as part of the self definition of the public sphere in “democratic” Kyoto. The tactic points to the discontinuity between legal guarantees of access and common practices of exclusion.