Put Yourself in White Shoes: Race and Translation in a Korean Production of Songs of the Dragons Flying to Heaven
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This essay examines the 2017 Korean production of Young Jean Lee’s Songs of the Dragons Flying to Heaven (Yongbiŏch’ŏn’ga [용비어천가]) as a case study to consider the construction of racialized spectatorship. While the production revealed the conundrums of staging Lee’s multicultural and multiracial text, the aesthetic failure allows us to rethink the construction of racialized spectatorship in modern and contemporary Korean theater. Re-enacted by Korean actors for Korean audiences, Yongbiŏch’ŏn’ga inevitably created ruptures between the original text and its translation. Such ruptures, which unveil the differences between the original and its translation, help us to rethink the prevalent notion of translation as seamless and invisible. I argue that the production called for a specific kind of racialized performance on the part of the audience— namely, putting themselves in the shoes of white liberal audiences to better understand the play’s original intention, and thus temporarily withholding their uneasy feelings of racial tension. This collective gesture in theater for a “universal” understanding of the play calls attention to existing processes in the Korean theater in which spectatorship has been covertly constructed in white terms, where audiences, over time, have been disciplined into “raced subjects.”
Abstract
This essay examines the 2017 Korean production of Young Jean Lee’s Songs of the Dragons Flying to Heaven (Yongbiŏch’ŏn’ga [용비어천가]) as a case study to consider the construction of racialized spectatorship. While the production revealed the conundrums of staging Lee’s multicultural and multiracial text, the aesthetic failure allows us to rethink the construction of racialized spectatorship in modern and contemporary Korean theater. Re-enacted by Korean actors for Korean audiences, Yongbiŏch’ŏn’ga inevitably created ruptures between the original text and its translation. Such ruptures, which unveil the differences between the original and its translation, help us to rethink the prevalent notion of translation as seamless and invisible. I argue that the production called for a specific kind of racialized performance on the part of the audience— namely, putting themselves in the shoes of white liberal audiences to better understand the play’s original intention, and thus temporarily withholding their uneasy feelings of racial tension. This collective gesture in theater for a “universal” understanding of the play calls attention to existing processes in the Korean theater in which spectatorship has been covertly constructed in white terms, where audiences, over time, have been disciplined into “raced subjects.”
참고문헌 (20)
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