Le Nouveau Monde Amoureux depends on the unique aesthetics of tradition and performativity in pansori, a genre of traditional music in Korea. The work as a performance appropriates the content and form of Chunhyang-ga, the most well-known piece of pansori among the five songs left today. However, it reveals that the development of the typical romantic narrative is embedded with a constant struggle against the class consciousness of the period. Unfortunately, the class struggle in Chunhyang-ga sustains distance by assuming the patriarchal hierarchy forced on women; Le Nouveau Monde Amoureux moves its focus to gender struggle, which Chunhyang-ga pretends to give up for the sake of class struggle. Moreover, it captures the fundamental dilemma and division of the protagonist of the performance, Chunhyang, which manifests through a series of constant, bitter laments made by the character. The five characters who appear in the performance―joker, drummer, academic, singer and Gukgeuk performer―are incarnations of important formal features in pansori performance, which are respectively narrative, rhythm, the hidden side (meaning), singing and performance. The features of each character, acquired through a formal division of pansori, are transformed and reorganized through the individual performances of each character.
Le Nouveau Monde Amoureux is inspired by a book of the same title written by a 19th century utopian socialist François Marie Charles Fourier (1772-1837). The initial production of the work was supported by the Asian Arts Theater in Gwangju, South Korea. The current work is a revised version of the original, produced with support from Mediacity Seoul 2014. [siren eun young jung]
