2023, Vol., No.78

The Journal of Korean drama and theatre 2023 KCI Impact Factor : 0.77

pISSN : 1225-7729 / eISSN : 2713-8453
https://journal.kci.go.kr/kdrama

In 1964, Korean theater artists held the 400th Anniversary of Shakespeare's Birth Festival. The most important event of the celebration was the performance of Shakespeare's plays. Seven theater companies performed eight consecutive performances for a month. This "memorial performance" is a great success, recording a total of 37,000 spectators. The result of attracting about 9,000 people in a single work and about 700 people in a single performance was enough to give expectations that Korean theater, which had been in a slump, could be rejuvenated. However, this success due to several factors was also limited. First, in the 1960s, Korean theater artists were aiming for modern theater as a new aesthetic and wanted to acquire global contemporaryity through this. Although Shakespeare's play is not modern, performing it was a great opportunity to take pride in participating in contemporary world theater issues as a member of the world theater field. However, the establishment of modern aesthetics in the actual performance was not substantially pursued. Second, the media cooperated with the successful hosting of the festival and used it as an opportunity for the cultural advancement of Korean society, where industrialization had just begun. The media's extensive publicity contributed greatly to attracting audiences, but it was only a simple propagation of liberal arts ideology, and lacked interest in establishing practical cultural modernity.Third, many audiences were able to gather together in the boom of the festival. However, this is the result of the maximum gathering of theater audiences at the time, and it can be said that it was not very successful in developing a new audience. Moreover, the temporary gathering of the audience was far from the appearance of the liberal arts public who would appreciate plays as high-end art. As such, the 1964 Shakespeare Memorial Festival was the scene of a contradiction in which the desires of the theater field and the immediate problems in the 1960s were intersecting and refracting from each other.

This study aims to shed light on the activities of stage artists who have been marginalized in existing theatrical history narratives, to reveal the aesthetic contributions of stage artists in the 1960s and 1970s, considered a turning point in Korean theatre, and to shed new light on the landscape of the theatre scene during this period, based on the oral histories of Choi Bokyung, Yang Junghyun, Byun Changsoon, and Lee Byungbok. They position themselves as ‘performance artists’ rather than ‘stage technicians’, emphasizing their professionalism and fighting against the low perception of the performing arts through narratives about their independence from the theatre company or director and their creative contribution to the performance. There is also a sense that they are part of the current trends and challenges of Korean theater, which is the search for what is Korean. While the oralists who worked on costumes and staging share a common emphasis on the fact that their work was a creative process based on images and symbols, rather than a reproductive process of realistically creating a “setting,” they also present distinct aesthetic perspectives, which allows us to examine the direction of the modernization of tradition in Korean theater since the 1970s. To understand the unique features of their works and perspectives, one must examine their performances or the aesthetic foundation of the works in conjunction with plays and directing and examine them in a three-dimensional manner.

This paper empirically examines the flip side of the establishment and development of the distribution network of the early Korean film industry through the first copyright dispute case in Korean film history. In 1927, the first movie copyright-related lawsuit was filed in Korea by one of the U.S. major film companies, the United Artists, which accused two local agents in Korea for the charge of distributing illegal copies of American films. The year actually marked a watershed moment for Korean film history to understand the differentiation of the distribution industry and the concept of film copyright. This is because Kisin Yanghaeng, the first Korean foreign film distribution company, was established, and an amendment to the existing incomplete film copyright was submitted to the Japanese parliament, which resulted in the elaboration of the concept of film copyright. Apart from the efforts of the Korean theaters to systematize the distribution network, however, the circulation of illegal copies that were commonly called “piracy” did not easily disappear. This paper argues that the circulation of unauthorized film copies of American films in colonial Korea could mean more than just violations and infringements of copyright as this implied structural conditions of the colonial film market that were located at the end of the global distribution network. In doing so, this paper aims to identify the following two. First, a large-scale campaign lauched by United Artists to root out the practice of "piracy," or unauthorized illegal copy distribution, which prevailed in the Far East Asian market in the 1920s, will be examined from a comparative perspective. Second, the paper tried to track down the actual route in which the pirated version of Way Down East (1920) arrived in colonial Korea from an empirical perspective.