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27 (Erven 1992, 104-105)
(Erven 1992, 104-105)
...So far, the movement has not been very successful in recruiting the required professionals. "We have 5,000 years of performing arts tradition in Korea," states Hwang Sok-yong,
Koreans love to sing, dance, and make music. The Chinese call us "players." We are very proud of our traditional culture. We are proud of our people's vitality. We also have very talented professional artists. But the current people's theatre movement was begun by amateurs at university. Later, in a prolonged and fruitful collaboration with peasants and workers, it developed to what it is today. Of course, we can learn a lot from the professional's techniques. But professionalism can be dangerous too. A lot of spontaneity gets lost in commercialism. We feel that, more than acquiring professional performing skills, we need to retain the powerful vitality of the people.
Hwang Sok-yong started his grassroots activities in 1975 when he and several friends began holding theatre of liberation workshops in the factories and fields. Soon a steadily growing number of cultural workers began collaborating with progressive Catholic parishes. Culture became a weapon.
One of the first sustained activities we started with was the People's Night School, based on Freire's _Pedagogy of the Oppressed_ and Augusto Boal's theatre techniques. The workers loved it. Many fruitful discussions emerged from these night classes. Through them, we became more than ever convinced of the profound political nature of people's culture as it was engaged in the battle for the minds of the masses. People's cultural activities were primarily concerned with community building. We did away with specialized artists, playwrights, actors, and stars. Everyone in the night classes was equal. Farm workers had just as much creative input in the creative processes as the students and artists. This, we created little gems like Sweet Potato, a now legendary madang play. \
At least 500 plays have already been created directly from peasant experience. We professionals only served in an advisory capacity and taught basic skills: movement based on daily working motions, "life actions," "worker's actions." In return, the workers also taught us a tremendous amount. They were passive at first, inhibited. But soon they started taking the initiative and organized people's culture festivals where they performed old traditional ceremonial plays like Gut. They guided and we followed.
_Sweet Potato_ is a documentary of the farmers' lives, their struggles and their sadness. Sweet Potato is the name of the narrator, a man dressed in a potato sack. He asks the audience of farmers all kinds of questions about their predicament. When they respond the action starts. The play has a basic scenario upon which the farmer-actors improvise. The play opens with a group of drunken farmers in the village square who talk about the good life. Sweet Potato enters asking questions. He takes them back in time, reconstructing tragic little domestic scenes of the recent past, in order to show that it has not been all that good.
With two secret service men stationed in a car across from his home, Hwang Sok-yong told me that madang theatre is the only kind of political theatre that is able to evade censorship because it is performed underground. The South Korean news media are systematically censored and most newspapers actually have a Korean Central Intelligence agent in their editorial offices. "Everything that goes into the newspaper has to pass through his hands. Censors are everywhere. There is a so-called Cultural Officer in City Hall who controls all scenarios for theatre performances. All scripts have to be submitted to him first.'' Madang is the public mouthpiece of the people's cultural movement and its performances are often linked with political demonstrations.
