The Jeong Yak-yong Project

A rap version of traditional theatre?

They say every Korean has blood that makes the shoulders move to a jajinmori rhythm, but young people today are more used to mumbling raps and swaying to hip-hop. When they hear “Korean traditional performance,” they think of something serious like pansori and keep their distance.

Yet Korean tradition has its own rap and hip-hop. The Jeong Yak-yong Project brings the stress and cadence of the Korean language into its dialogue: lines ride the rhythm like rap, actors sway lightly to keep the groove, and words of differing rhythms become the script. The drumbeats punctuating the lines feel nothing like rap — they feel warmly Korean. With its rises and falls, the dialogue glides as if sung, so easy to follow you could almost sing along.

The company named this unfamiliar yet friendly form tori-geuk. Korean traditional song bends, shakes, soars and drops — features called sigimsae — and the way they are delivered is tori. Because the lines flow like song, the script even marks the rhythm of the words.

In nineteen episodes, the play portrays the reformist ideas and brotherhood of Jeong Yak-yong (Dasan) and his brothers Yak-jeon and Yak-jong. Like a panorama, it follows Jeong’s appointment as magistrate of Goksan after Yi Gye-sim’s uprising, his virtuous governance, his exile through slander and eventual release. All the song lyrics are Jeong’s own poems, and humour and emotion alternate throughout.