{THEATRE} Jasmine Gwangju

Cry freed Jun-tae Kim is recreating the noise of fighter jets

‘P fweee! Pfweeeeeeeeeee!’

it was the pivotal political event of their lives. The parallels with the recent Arab uprisings are unmissable: Geumnamno, the street leading from the university to the regional government office was the focal point, Gwangju’s Tahrir Square. Yet it has quickly become ancient history for subsequent generations and is virtually unheard of in the west.

Now Jasmine Gwangu, a multimedia requiem mass based on the events of May 18, attempts to give the uprising the status it demands. The time is right: earlier this year, UNESCO gave the uprising’s archive world heritage status. But this is not, the artistic team are at great pains to point out, a heavyweight piece of political theatre. Instead it is a theatrical move towards reconciliation, a ceremony in which the restless spirit of one of the victims of the uprising, trapped between worlds of the living and the dead, finally finds peace.

The show is told mainly through traditional Korean music, with dance, shamanic rituals and digital art supporting the narrative. Archive footage, photos of people who died in the uprising, calligraphy and other evocative imagery flash behind the action, add another layer to the experience.

‘The whole process started with victims of May 18,’ says Sam-Jo Jeong, the show’s producer. ‘Some revolutionaries come on the stage, we try to release them, help them take off the whole history and sadness and painful memory. Once we take it off from them, we can let them go to heaven. That is the whole process. The audience is alive and, with the performers on the stage, they are healed together. It is not only for the dead people but the live people also. That is the point.’ The menace that Kim recalls so vividly is absent from the stage, perhaps because the three men behind Jasmine Gwangju were in their early teens when the tanks rolled in. This is not an angry dispatch from the front line but a measured, adult response.

swooping over the South Korean city of Gwangju. It was 18 May 1980 and he was a young geography teacher, on the streets with thousands of other students and citizens protesting against the repressive military dictatorship. In rolled the US military machine, with gunships, helicopters and even fighter jets. Tanks and 30,000 American troops took over the main thoroughfare of Gwangju, population 180,000.

‘The sky was dark even though it was

daytime,’ he recalls. ‘It was like Vietnam.’

The Gwangju uprising, the start of the painful process of democratisation in South Korea, was long and bloody. One hundred and forty-four civilians died and around the same number were wounded. Many were still in their teens. The authorities dumped their bodies on the edge of town. For Koreans like Kim, in their 50s and 60s,

72 THE LIST 11–18 Aug 2011