최진아 연극에 나타난 여성주체와 타자성의 윤리

Abstract

Theatre of Choi Zin-A, despite of being critically received as somewhat sentimental, conceptual, and rough in dramaturgy in part, has some notable aspects to look at: 1) Most of all, as a rare woman writer-director of Korea, she maintains specific perspectives on woman and shows unique characteristics of writing and directing as woman; 2) The feministic perspective of her works begin to reveal the aspects of the ethics of the Other, that inspires and stimulates her non-representational and performative way of writing and directing; 3) Her theatre in these respects can be regarded as an effort to search a new concept of subjectivity and ethics of the Other since postmodern period. Theatre of Choi mostly deals with a young woman in love, who is also split among as a subjectivity of sexual pleasure, conventional morality and existential spirit. She is not willing to be involved with a lover, a new lover, and husband. Instead of sinking into isolation or nihilism, her spilt unsettling identity begins to ponder relationship between people, to understand, to respect and to embrace others. When the woman in Choi’s theatre makes trip to Vietnam alone, she finds sort of ‘face’s that she feels obliged to care from Vietnamese people. In order to explain how Choi shows the warm agony to women, I lean on the ethics of the Other by Luce Irigaray and Judith Butler, whose interests are recently moved from feminism to ethics of the Other, and thoughts of Emmanuel Levinas, and some ideas from these feminist philosophy. In the theatre of Choi, usually, the main female character speaks directly to audience. But she does not take over the position of main speaker. She listens, hesitates, gives way to the ‘other’ characters so that various voices make the effect of polyphony. This polyphony ultimately attributes to make her open and fluid structure of her theatre. In addition, the simultaneous scene when bodies of many ‘others’ beat, caress, kiss, dance each together is very typical and impressive part as well. It can be said that this is the moment when all the worths such as the ethics of the Other, bodily physicality, and performativity in Choi's theatre come to meet in harmony.