Abstract

The purpose of this study is to analyze the aspects of practicing North Korean literary discourses represented in the 4 revolutionary plays except Seonghwangdang from the viewpoint of performance. Researches on North Korean culture and art policy itself have been made but researches on how the literary discourses were practiced in performances have remained as a blind area up to now. In the 21st century sensibility age, researches on North Korean performing arts from the viewpoint of performance, i.e. researches on such things as play, performance, stage, music, that can promote communication from the emotional perspective, staying away from ideology, are pressing and urgent. This study, which started based on this belief, is summarized as follows. Since Seonghwangdang was produced under the instruction of Kim Jeong‒il in 1978 until the early 1980s, North Korean theatrical circles had concentrated on repeat performances of Seonghwangdang. The fact that news on new play performance existed in Joseon Central Yearbook issued from 1981 to 1984 shows that the theatrical circles in the early 1980s came to a state of momentary lull. It was from the time when ‘revolutionary plays’ were created again under the leadership of Kim Jeong‒il in the mid‒1980s that the theatrical circles were revived. The revolutionary plays that began in earnest from the mid‒1980s continued to remain in existence until the mid‒1990s. The literary discourses in this period are Juche Idea and nationality. Nationality discourses, of course, began from the political reason of system protection. The literary discourses that originated from the political discourses emphasized that ‘the master of one’s fate is oneself’ which is Juche philosophy and Joseon music, Joseonization, and Joseon dance should be shown to Joseon people, and socialistic contents should be put into nationalistic style, and this is immediately accepted in the theatrical circles. The plays began to show changes in contents and styles. Joseonization techniques, whose characteristics were that the theme of the play was the manifest autonomy related to contemporary age, leading characters of the play should be defective person to idolize Kim Il‒seong, performance should use practical, realistic, poetic narration, the stage should be of clear, concise, soft, and lucid color, were materialized. From the viewpoint of only the works, diversity is certainly grasped in the revolutionary plays. It is because the essential themes of the works were fixed but the backgrounds of performance works were different, and characters were diversely set such as patriots, nationalists, farmers. Although it is true that the idolization of Kim Il‒seong that all North Korean literary art circles should observe acts as the limitation, North Korean actors’ individual capabilities and the attempts to attain diversity containing limitations in this period look certainly prominent.