박근형의 연극미학과 연출기법

Abstract

Park Geunhyung is considered as the most active writer and director who is representing Korean theatre since his debut in the 1990s. This paper aims to explore his directing method and its aesthetics based on the analysis of his interviews, the plays, and the performance texts, and his position in Korean theatre history. The aesthetics in Park Geunhyung’s directing is to combine two opposite aesthetic ingredients such as representationalism and theatricalism, the everyday and the grotesque, hyperrealism and absurdity, and the comedy and the tragedy. To do this, he strategically uses the poor condition of little theatre and its glaring materiality, minimal but efficient set, simple props to be transformed into various spaces with ensuing theatricalities. While representing theatre group ‘Golmokgyl’, he was familiar with the performers’ character and their physical condition. This becomes his aesthetic soil to induce their spontaneity and creativity into the process testifying his directing method is closer to the performance. Conclusively, it can not be denied that Park Geunhyung’s directing aesthetic and his position is unique in Korean theatre history. The former directors of the 70s and the 80s described grand discourse with the aesthetics of realism or ‘modernized tradition’. On the other hand, Park Geunhyung induces surrealism and the absurd to the realism, while he expresses social reality and history metaphorically through the little discourse and uses theatrical playfulness in his play writing and directing method. Also, his method is differentiates itself from the 1990s’ directors. Most of the directors in the 1990s were indulged in the formalistic experiments, deconstruction and theatricality, but Park Geunhyung attempts to call back the narrative into his play. As a result, it is not exaggerating to say that he has established his own directing method. First, he choose little theatre and create familiar distance between stage and the audience. Second, he creates everyday atmosphere with simple dialogues and the props but transforms them with the audiences’ imagination to a theatrical leap. Finally, he combines the formalistic acting style and the realistic acting style, and empty space with transformative possibility. This method forms eventually the main stream of everyday realism style and little theatre model, so it says his value and importance in contemporary Korean theatre.