Song of the Wanderers

Official selection, 1998 Seoul International Theatre Festival

The lonely lives and sorrows of performers who lived on the road

The Namsadang troupes arose in the late Joseon period, and their performance traditions survive to this day. Except when bad weather or cold made performing impossible, they spent most of the year on the road — sleeping, eating, playing, loving and dying there, on mountain paths and field paths, valley trails and village lanes, forest roads, sea routes and new highways. Their lives evoke the artist as a being somewhere between nature and humanity.

With some sixty characters and forty scenes, the scale alone set it apart from Arirang’s earlier work. It carried great expectations — and special meaning, as an official invitation to the Seoul Theatre Festival seven years after Passion of Ten Thousand Miles had been withdrawn from it.

Bong Chu-san joins a Namsadang troupe after stealing its trunk while running with a beggar gang, and rises to become its leader. Around him are Bang-cho, an orphan who serves him as a parent and gives him her love; Mae-ryeong, a tightrope walker’s daughter who carries on the art with his love; Yu-ran, who flees a tavern to join them but cannot bear the wandering life; and Seong-nak and Wan-bae, who grow with Chu-san yet leave him with the pain of betrayal. The play portrays love — including same-sex love in this closed, all-male world — artistic spirit and human warmth.

Actors, changgeuk singers and pungmul musicians came together, and the performers themselves, without doubles, presented the six Namsadang arts: tightrope walking, mask dance, tumbling, puppet play, plate spinning and pungmul. The production revealed Arirang’s deep engagement with bringing traditional performance to the stage.