Far From Home

Incantation to Spring

Performed by Binari

At the Malkin Athletic Center

April 19, 7:30 p.m.

THE PROBLEM with trying to put an event like Binari's Incantation to Spring into context is its homelessness. Those who attend tomorrow night's performance should keep in mind the irony that they are catching a rare glimpse of the Korean people's modern history that Koreans themselves, living under the ongoing threat of political repression, will most likely never have a chance to see.

"Incantation" is a kind of wandering epic in search of its audience, that is, its "people." At one point, the trial of a student charged with insurrection against the government is interrupted by the demand to know who the minjung or "people" really are. The open search for an identity critically reflects on the problem of imposing an artistic unity on an everyday reality that remains, in its future prospects, open-ended.

It is no accident that members of the New York-based semi-professional dance troupe chose April 19 for their Boston debut. The date marks the anniversary of an infamous student-led revolt in South Korea in 1960 that occasioned its modern rebirth as a "democratic" nation. The controversial significance of the event is heightened by the present situation of political instability in Seoul, where the daily-increasing volume of student agitation for constitutional reforms keeps reintroducing the spectre of recent events in the Phillipines.

Based on the original script of a contemporary Korean playwright residing in the United States, Incantation draws upon traditional elements of native drama, song, and folk dance to get across its less-than-traditional historical perspective on the Korean people's oppression under foreign aggression, and on the past and future prospects for the divided nation's reunification.

The structure of Korean madang-gut or folk epic works like a chain. Its intent is to alternately constrict and release the crowd's emotional energies through an unfolding sequence of acts depicting celebration and tragedy.

The madang-gut, literally, "openyard festival," has been compared by western critics to the epic drama of Brecht, in its recovery of neo-primitivism as the starting point of "experiemental" drama. Brecht's influence is especially evident in the elimination of the stage. Instead, the audience participates in the illusion. The drama begins with an appuri, an opening act whose typical function within the epic form, as Marxist critic George Lukacs observes, is to create "the sphere of life" where "a loosening of the bonds that tie men and objects to the ground" can spontaneously occur.

THE SIXTEEN DANCERS enter into the wide open clearing formed by the audience seated on the floor who become, like the chorus in classic epic, the inclusive margins of the ritualized performance. Throughout the evening, which proceeds largely in the fashion of oral narrative, the audience is incited to sing, cheer, lament, and otherwise express on cue their sympathies for the story being "made" in their midst. At the end, following the shamanistic purging performed by the women's "Dance of Life," the shamans invite members of the audience to join in the final frenzied clamor of the nan-jang-pan.

The absence of a stage, the emphasis on audience contact, and the performers' bare feet and plain dress are part of an implied attack on the tradition of bourgeois realism and its "Western association. Themes of capitalist imperialism, the superpowers' hegemony over East Asia during WWII, Cold War ideology, and the Korean people's long-standing enmity against imperialist Japanese, who colonized Korea from 1905 to 1945, are played out allegorically amidst the liberating outbursts of ritual and dance.

Those with little or no sense of Korean history will likely feel more hit than passed over-the-head by the drama's contents. Occasionally, the allegory weighs down the improvised of the rest of Incantation with its hammering message. At one point, a baby named "Liberation" is born to its joyful peasant parents, only to be taken away and symobolically torn in half by forces representing the United States and Russia.

Still, the subversion can be entertaining as well. A scene depicting the struggle of various class elements comprising Korean society on the eve of its modern transformation is presented in the guise of a children's puppet-play.

In spite of the fact that the dialogue is in Korean, even those at previous performances in New York, Philadelphia, and Providence who spoke as much Greek as Korean appeared to have no difficulty relating to the contradictions depicted: modern "progress" in Third World countries like South Korea under Western captialism's political and economic shadow. The overt questioning of the impact of continuing American influence in the form of U.S. military troops and the recent build-up of nuclear arms is not simply rhetoric being played out on stage, but a form of experimenting that asks how far one can get away with extending the boundaries of "art."