Mother's Youth

Writer and director’s note

Older audiences may remember the travelling troupes — the canvas tents, the funny stories told inside them. The fantasy those troupes offered was quite different from today’s television, and I wanted to recreate that magic. My first attempt was Song of the Wanderers about the Namsadang; now I want to unfold it through market-day performances.

What matters most is being with the audience — not only joining in the play but sharing feeling. The key to such a show is sinmyeong, collective joy, and there can be none if the show doesn’t speak to its audience. So I kept ordinary people’s lives foremost in mind, taking the old travelling performers as my textbook: a total performance of song, dance and banter.

The first madang (act) is for getting to know the audience — in an open space, actors must approach in a familiar way, because connection begins when spectators feel at ease. In the second, Korean traditional performance tells ordinary people’s stories: believing that families torn apart by economic hardship are today’s greatest problem, I show a family overcoming unemployment and coming together again. In the third, the audience joins the play directly, singing and dancing until we are one — and, I hope, letting go of the stresses of daily life.

Seeking out audiences and helping them find renewed energy for life is perhaps the greatest goal of this tour. Just thinking of meeting new people every day in different places makes my heart race.

If 1999’s “Moving Arts Stage, Part 1,” the akgeuk musical Father’s Youth, restored through family love the lives of ordinary people broken under the IMF crisis, Part 2 for the new century, Mother’s Youth, portrays the life and love of mothers — our eternal home. Worn down by poverty because of a feckless husband, never at peace with so many children, a mother’s life was endless patience and forgiveness, a bitter life of self-sacrifice. With humour and tears, we portray the deeply lined mothers we met at every market stage, through binari chants, folk songs, dance, pungmul, popular music and lively folk tales, so the audience can take a mother’s great love to heart and find new vitality.