UCSD Korean Studies Initiative Speaker/Performer Series

Presents

Flog the husband to feed the children, the Hûngbo Manura’s Song

A Transnational Interpretive P’ansori adapted from P’ansori Song of Hûngbo

by

Chan E. Park

May 4, 2012, 4-6pm at Recital Hall, Conrad Prebys Music Center

 판소리

Pansori, the UNESCO-designated Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humankind, is a genre of musical storytelling performed by a vocalist and a drummer. This popular tradition, characterized by expressive singing, stylized speech, a repertory of narratives and gesture, embraces both elite and folk culture. During performances lasting up to eight hours, a male or female singer, accompanied by a single barrel drum, improvises on texts that combine rural and erudite literary expressions.

 

Professor Chan E. Park (Ohio State University) is a transnational artist who delivers to the English-speaking audience the text and art of p’ansori, Korean tradition of story-singing, by weaving her bilingual interpretation in performance. She has published extensively on the theory and practice of oral narratology and its interdisciplinary connection with arts and humanities as a whole, including her recent monograph, Voices from the Straw Mat: Toward an Ethnography of Korean Story Singing (University of Hawaii Press, 2003).

 

Park has given numerous lectures, seminars, workshops and performances of p’ansori locally, nationally, and internationally. She will present from the Song of Hûngbo, one of the five classical repertoires that reminds us of the cardinal virtues of sibling bond not rivalry. In her adaptation, Flog the husband to feed the children, the Hûngbo Manura’s Song, it is less the character Hûngbo but more his wife, the invisible gender, who compellingly portrays the ironic socioeconomic challenges of the less privileged against the dictates of the state in ancient Korea.

This event is sponsored by the Division of Arts and Humanities, the Korea Foundation, and the Music Department, UCSD.