Proletarian-Amateur Theater: Political Performativity and its Memory

Abstract

This study focuses on the proletarian-amateur theater of Korea during the Japanese colonial period as a popular mechanism through which to promote socialism as a cultural experience, while simultaneously employing it as a form of art partaking in the formation of socialist culture. Proletarianamateur theater that could communicate with the masses was in large part the result of the successful socialist appropriation of the people's taste for sinp'a[new wave drama]. To this end, proletarianamateur theater also exhibited similar characteristics when it came to the performance methods employed. Proletarian-amateur theater was generally staged in combination With other types of cultural forms, and this hybrid Construction is characterised as "subversive bundle sale". However, the tightening of performance regulations from the late 1920s onwards caused proletarian-amateur theater to exist solely within the "subversive" invisible sphere, termed here as the absent presence. While the emergence of proletarian-amateur theater was indigenous in nature, its collapse was occasioned by the coercive exercise of colonial power. This result came as part of the successful application of the politics of space to proletarian theater, a move dividing the center from the periphery, controlling performances through the deliberate separation of political and artistic practices. The experience of proletarian-amateur theater was stored as inactive energy in individuals' biological memories. Over time, this became a cultural memory which could be activated at any moment once circumstances became conducive to such an emergence. The passionate reactions exhibited after the liberation of the nation in 1945 stand as a salient example of this reality.