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Posthuman Dramaturgy to Shape the ‘Post-body’ ―Focused on Shin Hyo-jin's play Muffin and Chihuahua(2021), Kim Yeon-jae's play Heads with Hieroglyphic Patterned Hat(2021)

  • The Journal of Korean drama and theatre
  • 2022, (76), pp.49-88
  • DOI : 10.17938/tjkdat.2022..76.49
  • Publisher : The Learned Society Of Korean Drama And Theatre
  • Research Area : Arts and Kinesiology > Other Arts and Kinesiology
  • Received : July 13, 2022
  • Accepted : August 13, 2022
  • Published : August 31, 2022

Min Jo Kim 1

1서울대학교

Accredited

ABSTRACT

The disaster of the COVID-19 pandemic, which broke out with the start of the 2020s, further deepened the awareness of the problem of the Anthropocene crisis. Posthumanism is functioning as a theoretical base to seek alternative relationships with non-human aliens such as nature, life, and objects by breaking away from human-centered thoughts and senses. Korean plays after 2020 actively think about the agenda of posthumanism and show an attempt to shape a ‘post-body’ that crosses the boundary of the body between humans and non-humans. In this paper, we analyze the principle of posthuman dramaturgy that shapes the indeterminate body based on the consciousness of Anthropocene by examining ‘becoming-animals’ motif shown in Shin Hyo-jin's play Muffin and Chihuahua(2021) and Kim Yeon-jae's play Heads with Hieroglyphic Patterned Hat(2021). Shin Hyo-jin's Muffin and Chihuahua is a play belonging to the post-apocalypse genre, depicting a grim world in which all animals are extinct and humans depend on the life management system of super-artificial intelligence. Society has been disbanded, and mankind is in a state of "an narrative end" that cannot autonomously seek the future of species. In this situation, the main character experiences body transformation through the fascination with the mythological shape combined with human-animal species and the primal stories. Muffin and Chihuahua shows the shape of a post-body that goes back to the indeterminacy through the moment when the main character recognizes himself as a non-human being. Kim Yeon-jae's Heads with Hieroglyphic Patterned Hat focuses on the existential crisis of subjective experience and communication breakdown. This work looks at humans as being in a state of fundamental missing, and depicts each person moving to a rhizomatic world of sewers in search of their fragments scattered far away. Sewerage functions as an aisle space where such humans and animals suffering from ‘imigratory restlessness’ encounter. Furthermore, this work calculates the effect of writing and erasing the physical boundaries between humans and non-human beings by repeatedly performing human beings to become birds.

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