한국연극의 국제공동제작 -1990년대 이후의 합작ㆍ협업 공연을 중심으로-

Abstract

Korean theatre has been eager to participate in a variety of international exchanges since the early 1980s. Those 3 international festivals held during the 1980s such as the 5th Third World Theatre Festival(1981), the International Theatre Festival of the 1986 Seoul Asian Games, and the Seoul International Festival on the occasion of the 1988 Seoul International Olympic Games, motivated, in turn, Korean theatre professionals to venture on the communication with individuals, companies of the world. Exchanges at that initial stage were performed rather occasionally in the forms of invitations, visiting, tours, and so forth. Yet it was in the immediately following two decades in which new directions of international exchange towards co-producing began to have been introduced with some fruitful results. From those first examples of intercultural performances as Caponino, The Trojan Women, and the ITI-UNESCO New Project Group's provocative multinational production of King Lear, all presented at the 27th ITI World Congress, Seoul & the '97 Theatre of the Nations, Seoul/Kyonggi, Korean theatre happened to have opportunities to realize what would be the more meaningful and challenging exchanges than what they had done in the 1980s. Throughout the first decade of the 2000s, there were a number of noteworthy international co-productions done by major festivals and public theatres by bringing in foreign partnership. With some exceptions such as Across the River in May(2002, 2005) and Yakiniku Dragon(2008, 2011), they were more often than not artistic collaborations by way of individual artists, who were normally director with an accompanying scenographer and at times, with a choreographer as well. As such a trend has been so strong that the two representative theatre organizations, the recently re-organized Korean National Theatre Company, and also comparatively new and very competent producing theatre, Myungdong Arts Theatre, both are currently doing co-productions by inviting European artists. This paper intends to study the international co-productions and collaborations in Korean theatre performed during the 1990s and the first decade of the 2000s. Chief rationality, among others, for executing this study is that, no major academic investigations have been done so far in this area, and thus to discover not only the hows and whats of the international co-productions in Korean theatre from a historical perspectives, but what needs to be done, in the future, in order to improve the current practices. And in order to achieve what this paper desires as such, it is organized as follows. Following the Introduction, the overall outline of the international exchanges in contemporary Korean theatre, the first chapter of the main body of the paper deals with its historical context for the past thirty years. The third and the fourth chapters which actually argues with those selected productions, as divided by producing organizations, either festival or public theatre. They are the two representative co-producing organizations in Korea, the Seoul Performing Arts Festival and the Seoul Arts Center. And among their productions, only a certain number of them as regarded important both artistically and from the point of planning, such as Robert Wilson's The Lady from the Sea(2000), the upper-mentioned Korea-Japan co-productions(their main producer was, in fact, National Theatre of Tokyo, Japan, thus, the Seoul Arts Center played only a role of collaborator)and those pieces between Korea and Russia, Woyzeck(2003) and two different versions of Chekhov's The Seagull(2005, 2008) are selected to explore in depths. Although such a division and selections of the pieces may seem somewhat arbitrary, this is designed to specify each individual cases within the limited range of this study. Through the critical analyses of those co-productions, this paper argues that the leading international co-productions done in Korea since the 1990s have, in large parts, shown strategic shortcomings. Short-term planning, ambiguity of both the mission and objective, resulted-oriented, limited network, uniformity in execution style as an artistic collaboration of individual artists, rather than promoting for truly constructive intercultural theatre practice, and others are indicated, in final analyses, as critical concerns. Frequent leadership changes, along with irresponsible restructuring of the public theatre organizations by the government, financial difficulties from both the severe reductions of the government funding and the pressure of financial independence in running public theatres are, among many, ones of the primary reasons for those troubling aspects. Based upon them, then the paper proposes a series of suggestions for future development. They are, in brief, the needs for new recognition of the international co-production, clarity of the mission and objective, diversification of the co-production format, strategic orientation, and so forth.