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Memoirs of a Kisaeng: Choreographing Performance Historiography
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 03 January 2013
Extract
The dance opens with a bespectacled dancer, dressed in a contemporary tracksuit, entering the stage space. She stops at the edge and looks out into the audience, surveying the bodies sitting before her. After taking them in, the dancer heads upstage to a long table. She sets her hands in front of a video camera, and they are projected via a live feed onto an adjacent video screen. She takes a threaded needle and begins to sew into the top layers of her skin (Fig. 1). The dancer does not display any discomfort and she does not pierce all the way through her flesh. Each time the needle emerges from skin, the dancer makes a knot. These knots are small black nodes extruding from the dancer's porcelain skin. The thread between the points is submerged in thin epidermis, tracing a path, but from here to where?
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References
Endnotes
1. Songi, “Everything You Do,” in Songs of the Kisaeng: Courtesan Poetry of the Last Korean Dynasty, trans. and intro. Constantine Contogenis and Wolhee Choe (Rochester, NY: BOA Editions, 1997), 60Google Scholar.
2. In his analysis of slave dances in New Orleans' Congo Square, Joseph Roach expands on the resonances of deep skin. First, he notes that “skin is the principal medium that has carried the past into the present. . . . Skin has been and continues to be not only a document but a performance, persisting as such notwithstanding the courageous resistance of many unwilling participants in the bogus and cruel expansion of its meanings.” He continues: “These meanings metastasize differences that are only skin deep into what I am calling deep skin, a melanoma of the imagination: skin deepens into the cancer of race when supposed inner essences and stereotypical behaviors are infected by it in the collective fantasies of one people about another. The malignancy of deep skin usually begins with a blank space or a kind of erasure, which empties out the possibility of empathetic response, but this cavity quickly fills with bizarre growths. First deep skin becomes invisible; then, after the passage of time—the twinkling of an eye is all that is required—it alone remains visible.” Roach, Joseph, “Deep Skin: Reconstructing Congo Square,” in African American Performance and Theater History: A Critical Reader, ed. Elam, Harry J. Jr. and Krasner, David (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), 102Google Scholar. The sewing through and across skin in Kisaeng Becomes You enacts the shift from visible to invisible, the depth of meaning, history, memory, and fantasy that is only skin deep and in “deep skin.”
3. Wong, Yutian explores the intersection between Asian American studies and dance studies in Choreographing Asian America (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2010)Google Scholar. Wong begins her study of the aesthetics and politics of identification with an only somewhat rhetorical question, “Can you name an Asian American choreographer?” She asks this question at the same time as she herself is dancing and choreographing. Wong writes against a repeated answer to her query to fill a silence with her examination of bodies in motion.
4. Joseph, May, Nomadic Identities: The Performance of Citizenship (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999), 17Google Scholar.
5. Palumbo-Liu, David, Asian/American: Historical Crossings of a Racial Frontier (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999), 1; Palumbo-Liu's italicsGoogle Scholar.
6. See Atkins, E. Taylor, Primitive Selves: Koreana in the Japanese Colonial Gaze, 1910–1945 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010)Google Scholar; and Pilzer, Joshua D., “The Twentieth-Century ‘Disappearance‘ of the Gisaeng during the Rise of Korea's Modern Sex-and-Entertainment Industry,” in The Courtesan's Arts: Cross-Cultural Perspectives, ed. Feldman, Martha and Gordon, Bonnie (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006), 295–311Google Scholar.
7. In addition to his transnational collaborations, Moss has ties to Asian American theatre; he has been a principal shaper of the form of movement in performances written and directed by Asian American playwright Young Jean Lee.
8. All specific visual references to the dance herein are to this 27 February 2009, performance. Moss archived his performances, and when I requested a copy of the dance, he sent me a copy of the evening's performance I saw on that date. This video is available for screening online at http://vimeo.com/26199127 (accessed 23 September 2012). Dean Moss and Yoon Jin Kim, choreographers, Kisaeng Becomes You (2009), Jerome Robbins Archive of the Recorded Moving Image, Dance Division, The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts.
9. The volunteers are nominally recompensed at the end of their participation with a few dollars. Audience members are not solicited as performers and are in no way hired at the start of the evening. When the volunteers are handed the money, they seem bewildered or chagrined to be receiving the currency (as is the first volunteer in the cited video), and often the performers shove the cash into the audience participant's hands.
10. Pilzer, 296.
11. For more see Christine Loken-Kim, “Release from Bitterness: Korean Dancer as Korean Woman” (Ph.D. diss., University of North Carolina,1989); and Lee, Byong Won, “Evolution of the Role and Status of Korean Professional Female Entertainers (Kisaeng),” World of Music 21.2 (1979): 75–81Google Scholar.
12. Contogenis and Choe, 18.
13. Michael J. Seth writes about medical kisaeng “who besides their duty entertaining men also served to treat upper-class women, since women of good families were unable to see male doctors who were not related to them.” Seth, Michael J., A History of Korea: From Antiquity to the Present (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2011), 164Google Scholar.
14. See McCann, David R., “Korean Literature and Performance?: Sijo!,” Azalea: Journal of Korean Literature & Culture 2 (2008): 359–76CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Sijo is a three-line vernacular Korean lyric form. Like haiku, the sijo has a particular structure that is organized around syllable count. Unlike haiku, sijo are also structured thematically in terms of content development. The first line of a sijo introduces a theme or idea. The second line develops the material introduced in the first. The final line completes the poem with a twist: “a sense of reflection, commentary, conclusion or ironic relation” (ibid., 362). Sijo is performative as well as literary in that it is not just a poem but also a song. According to McCann: “The sijo is presented in sung performance of two kinds, the ch'ang or song style, with its emphasis on the breath, deflection and variation in pitch, and the timbre of the performer's voice; and the kagok style, with its focus on more elaborate instrument accompaniment and vocal ornamentation” (ibid.). The origins of sijo are complicated in two ways. Because sijo is written in vernacular, as opposed to more formal Chinese, sijo that existed before the dissemination of the hangul alphabet in 1446 are difficult to attribute. Because sijo was a song form, even those written after the ascension of the hangul alphabet were not archived until the eighteenth century. Before that time, it existed only as repertoire that was passed along through memory and voice.
15. See Lie, John, “The Transformation of Sexual Work in 20th-Century Korea,” Gender and Society 9.3 (1995): 310–27CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Na Young Lee, “The Construction of U.S. Camptown Prostitution in South Korea: Trans/Formation and Resistance” (Ph.D. diss., University of Maryland, 2006); and Yayori, Matsui and Sharnoff, Lora, “Sexual Slavery in Korea,” Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies 2.1 (1977): 22–30CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
16. Soh, C. Sarah, The Comfort Women: Sexual Violence and Postcolonial Memory in Korea and Japan (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008), 218Google Scholar.
17. Pilzer, 296. Because of the vicissitudes of Romanization, kisaeng and gisaeng are the same.
18. See Soh for more specific information about historical relationship between kisaeng and comfort women.
19. I refer to Seoul as a global city rather than a megacity. I rely on Gabriella Giannachi's explanation: “The difference between mega-cities and global cities has to do with the global city's capacity to generate, control and propagate globalisation. . . . Global cities are the ‘factory’ of globalization. They are the economic, political, scientific, informational and artistic hub of the contemporary ‘global’ world economy.” Giannachi, Gabriella, The Politics of New Media Theatre: Life®™ (New York: Routledge, 2007), 36Google Scholar. Giannachi argues that global cities exist fundamentally in their “interconnectedness” (ibid.; her italics); thus, there is no such thing as a single global city. A particular sequence of global cities—Seoul, Tokyo, New York—is made visible by Kisaeng Becomes You, both in terms of the residencies performers took to create the work and the touring itinerary of the production. The itinerary of touring also resurrects the itinerary of tourism, specifically kisaeng tourism. If we follow Lie, Lee, and Yayori and Sharnoff, then the factors necessary for kisaeng tourism to manifest and flourish were first the Japanese and American militaries and then Japanese and American businessmen. This particular grouping of global cities constitutes a circum-Pacific configuration of pleasure, intoxication, and power with resonances of the colonial circum-Atlantic triangle trade.
20. Pilzer, 306.
21. Ibid.
22. As Edward Said notes, “Orientalism assumed an unchanging Orient, absolutely different (the reasons change epoch by epoch) from the West.” Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage Books, 1979), 96.
23. Derrida, Jacques, Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995)Google Scholar.
24. Pilzer, 306–7.
25. Gia Kourlas, “The Loneliness of the Long-Distant Courtesan,” New York Times, 20 February 2009, www.nytimes.com/2009/02/22/arts/dance/22kour.html (accessed 25 September 2012).
26. The first edition of this collection of poems had a different title: Songs of the Kisaeng: Courtesan Poetry of the Last Dynasty (see note 1). All references are from this first edition, which is more readily available.
27. Ibid., 11.
28. Ibid.
29. For more on repertoire as a mode of transmission, see Taylor, Diana, Archive and Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
30. Contogenis and Choe, 11. Note that Contogenis and Choe separate personal concerns from scholarly ones.
31. Ibid., 13.
32. Ibid. Through their oblique references to creativity, Contogenis and Choe may be targeting a contemporary American woman who is also an artist as the ideal reader for their collection of translated poems.
33. Haraway, Donna J., “A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century,” in Haraway, Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (New York: Routledge, 1991), 149–82, at 155Google Scholar.
34. Ibid. 156.
35. Kourlas.
36. Fried, Michael, Art and Objecthood: Essays and Reviews (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998)Google Scholar. For Fried, such subject formation is a necessary part of theatricality. In his essay “Art and Objecthood,” about a large cube by Robert Morris and about literalist, or minimalist, art in general, Fried locates theatricality in “the largeness of the piece, in conjunction with its nonrelational, unitary character, [which] distances the beholder—not just physically but psychically. It is, one might say, precisely this distance that makes the beholder a subject and the piece in question . . . an object.” Fried revises or rather riffs on what he might mean by object on the next page when he circles back to this relationality (after finding “nonrelational” character in the piece of art), writing that “the experience of being distanced by the work in question seems crucial: the beholder knows himself to stand in an indeterminate, open ended—and unexacting—relation as subject to the impassive object on the wall or floor. In fact being distanced by such objects is not, I suggest, entirely unlike being distanced, or crowded, by the silent presence of another person” (154–5; italics and ellipsis are Fried's).
37. Kourlas.
38. For more on dance as/and ideology, see Franko, Mark, Dance as Text: Ideologies of the Baroque Body (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993)Google Scholar; Franko, The Work of Dance: Labor, Movement, Identity in the 1930s (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2002)Google Scholar; and Hewitt, Andrew, Social Choreography: Ideology as Performance in Dance and Everyday Movement (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
39. Foster, Susan Leigh, Choreographing Empathy: Kinesthesia in Performance (New York: Routledge, 2011), 4Google Scholar. In her examination of agency, the archive, aesthetics, and politics, Foster traces a genealogy of choreography but also tracks her own intellectual evolution: “I initially envisioned choreography as the hypothetical setting forth of what the body is and what it can be based on the decisions made in rehearsal and in performance about its identity. Each moment of watching a dance can be read as the product of choices, inherited, invented, or selected, about what kinds of bodies and subjects are being constructed and what kinds of arguments about these bodies are being put forth. These decisions, made collectively or individually, spontaneously or in advance of dancing, constitute a kind of record of action that is durable and makes possible both the repetition of a dance and the analysis of it” (4). Though she goes on to outline more recent theorization, her notions of dance analysis and spectatorship are foundational for my own in approaching this critique of Kisaeng Becomes You.
40. Foster charts shifts in the 1960s and 1970s toward collaboration and the current status of choreography on the global stage. She outlines several developments that prefigure the process and production of Kisaeng Becomes You: the tourism of folk dance companies, new systems of funding, global training programs, and the inclusion of world dance forms into the academy as monolithic timeless traditions. Foster marks the influence of Merce Cunningham and John Cage's avant-garde provocations and the collision of the universal subject of modernist dance with the postmodern avant-garde vision of choreography as processes that “functioned as an unmarked and white set of claims” (ibid., 64). Devised work and multidisciplinary explorations became trends, and bricolage and pastiche became favored methodologies. These factors converged to create an imperial flattening that mirrored the inception of choreography, a method of annotating steps that “uprooted dances by relocating them onto a horizontal geometric plane” (ibid., 72). If in the supposed (colonial) past, “choreography gestured towards the world's dances only by assimilating their differences into its economy of meaning,” Foster argues that “choreography is convening the world's dances in order to substitute for each dance's locale commoditized markers of alterity” (ibid.). The choreography of modernism and the U.S. avant-garde, as manifested in the global arena, replaces difference with signs of difference. Kisaeng Becomes You can be taken as a case study of the final phase of choreography Foster discusses because it engages in both global travel and transnational collaboration.
41. Raymond Williams defines “structures of feeling” as “elements of impulse, restraint, and tone; specifically affective elements of consciousness and relationships.” Williams, Marxism and Literature (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978), 132Google Scholar.
42. Chuh, Kandice, Imagine Otherwise: On Asian Americanist Critique (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003), 10CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
43. Ibid, 10–11. According to Chuh, “subjectlessness as a discursive ground for Asian American studies can, I think, help to identify and trace the shifting positionalities and complicated terrains of U.S. American culture and politics articulated to a globalized frame, by opening up the field to account for practices of subjectivity that might not be immediately visible within, for example, a nation-based representational grid, or one that emphasizes racialization to the occlusion of other processes of subjectification” (11).
44. Lee, Christopher, “Asian American Literature and the Resistances of Theory,” MFS Modern Fiction Studies 56, no. 1 (Spring 2010): 19–39, at 27CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
45. Active participation in Kisaeng Becomes You, an embodied performance, could perhaps be analogous to Williams's notion of “active ‘readings,’” that is, the idea that “to complete their inherent process, we have to make [works of art] present, in specifically active ‘readings’”; Williams, 129.
46. Though the page still exists, with the same URL, certain structural changes have occurred. In February 2012, Facebook switched group pages to their Timeline structure. All of my citations and analysis refer to the page I viewed on 23 May 2011. The newer version of the page does not have the previous page's “like” feature and does not document the number of Facebook members who “like” the group.
47. Facebook Wall Post by Dean Moss on January 10, 2009 at 9:36am, titled, “Question from Wolhee Choe (kisaeng poem translator)”. www.facebook.com/groups/34550031795/permalink/10150650967196796/ (accessed 23 May 2011).
48. As of 23 May 2011, 116 Facebook members had “liked” Kisaeng Becomes You's group page. The “like” button is what Facebook calls a “Social Plugin,” which “drive[s] user engagement.” See “Facebook for Websites,” http://developers.facebook.com/docs/guides/web/ (accessed 30 August 2012). Under the older model of Facebook pages (before Timeline), when a member “liked” a product or group, that particular entity would show up on the member's Facebook home page. Simultaneous to the user “liking” the item, Facebook would announce this partnership on a member's status update that was broadcast to the member's Facebook friends.
49. “South Korea: The Seoul of Hospitality,” Time 101.23 (4 June 1973): 47, www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,907345,00.html (accessed 25 September 2012).
50. Ibid.
51. I borrow Kim's metaphor of recursiveness and extend it both backward and forward in time. My move is similar methodologically to one she makes in the book, whereby the cold war period and the era of decoloniation are revealed to be overlapping formations. While Kim examines intertwined modernities, I am invested in the entanglements between the premodern and postmodern. Kim, Jodi, Ends of Empire: Asian American Critique and the Cold War (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2010), 4CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
52. Ibid.
53. Such consumption is built on the stereotype of the oriental dancing girl, a spectacle of decadence, desire, and exoticism. As Yutian Wong writes, “The idea of the dancing Asian female body is doubly sexualized through Orientalist fantasies of Asian female sexual availability, as well as the suspect nature of dancing within American society in general” (19).
54. In Contogenis and Choe's translation, the line reads: “Becoming me, you would still desire / me and so tear yourself as I tore you.” Moss and Kim end the line differently: “Becoming me, you would still desire / me and so tear yourself as I for you,” as documented in the recorded performance and on Moss' website, which posts the poems that undergird the dance. The slippage in words does not disrupt the rhyme or structure of the translated poem, but it does alter the meaning slightly. The line used in Kisaeng Becomes You, offers a sense of simultaneity that both the speaker and addressed, protagonist and antagonist tear themselves. Contogenis and Choe's translation gives a sense of process, that the protagonist had torn “you”, and now it is the antagonist (“you”) who tears me (“I”). http://www.gametophyte.org/gametophyte/kisaeng.html (accessed 17 October 2012).
55. Contogenis and Choe, 76.
56. Hewitt, 17; my italics.