냉전 센터의 기획, 유치진과 드라마센터－아시아재단 유치진․신협 파일을 중심으로－

Abstract

Contemporary research about the Cold War has reached a turning point. In particular, as it has become possible to access documents from American public institutions and private organizations recently made public due to the Freedom of Information Act, research about Korea’s cultural Cold War, pivoting around the United States, has been become invigorated. This paper uses the Asia Foundation Yoo Chi-jin documents stored in the Stanford Hoover Institute Archive to examine postwar theatre from the perspective of Cold War history. The file relating to Yoo Chi-jin, stored in the Hoover Archive, contains the personal documents of Yoo Chi-jin produced between 1954~1962 and papers from 1955~1959 relating to the Shin Hyop Theatrical Company for which he was a representative. I also referenced documents about production support in 1958 from the Theatre Production Drama Society, which played a critical role in the small theatre movement of young theatre artists from the same period. The productions supported by Yoo Chi-jin and Shin Hyop from this period are I Want to Become a Human Being and The Han River Still Flows. In addition, through Yoo Chi-jin, a representative Korean playwright, the Asia Foundation supported theatre contests in middle schools, high schools, and universities. However, Yoo Chi-jin’s Why Fight, a production chosen by the 1957 Nationwide University Theatre Competition, received accusations of being pro－Japanese, and amid opposition from the National Federation of Culture Associations and censorship by the Ministry of Education, the competition was closed down. At the time, the Asia Foundation classified reports about the Why Fight incident as being secret in nature, but the documents reveal a close grasp of the trends from the world of Korean culture. One distinctive characteristic of the Asia Foundation’s support in relation to Yoo Chi-jin is that the project was affiliated with the Rockefeller Foundation. A representative example is the support for the construction of the Drama Center(now Namsan Arts Center). Yoo Chi-jin received backing from the Rockefeller Foundation to survey the world of America theatre, and then received support from the Korean American Foundation, the Asia Foundation, and the Rockefeller Foundation under the Shin Hyop name to build the Drama Center as an “experimental small theatre”. He also separately received funding from the Rockefeller Foundation to create a Korean Research Institute For Dramatic Arts Inc. as a nonprofit group. This Drama Academy is now the Seoul Institute of the Arts, and the Drama Center, previously used as a training arena for the Seoul Institute of the Arts, and is now being leased as the production theatre Namsan Arts Center for the Seoul Foundation for Arts and Culture. The Drama Center was built as an “experimental small theatre” in an era when young theatre artists were driving the small theatre movement and therefore was widely welcomed by the theatre community, but after only a year the theatre was closed due to management difficulties to be taken over by the Seoul Institute of the Arts, and with it went the longstanding hopes of the community for the small theatre. New approaches and research are needed to understand the public character of the Drama Center in relation to recent controversies in the theatre community about public theatres as the products of the era of Cold War culture.