Theatre of Imagination: Study on New Languages in the Theatre Experiment of Ara Kim

상상력의 연극 이미지의 무대구성작업에 관하여 김아라 연출작업에 나타난 새로운 무대언어

This paper attempts to research on the new language in the directing of Ara Kim. She was cranky on working on the stage to experiment with her own style since the 1980s and so opened a new dawn in modern Korean theatre. She leaded the Korean experimental theatre. The background of this experiment is her idea on theatre. And here, we have to look the subject that she setted for the work in Chuksan: Ritual Past, Ritual Present. To her, the theatre has the function of ritual and fest. The theatre suggests universal tragedy given to human as natural life force and has its own agenda to drive people to healing. For it, Ara Kim explores archetypal forms and languages before the fragmentation of genres of art. Her theatre shows the results of experiments in which such languages are recreated with modernized sensibilities. We here, for example by outdoor performance in Chuksan Human Lear, try to interpret the aesthetic principles that body out her ritual theatre. And what we looked at though, is the base of the 'complex-genre-music-theatre', the methode to 'compose' the stage elements and put it all together. The directing of Ara Kim has, in terms of the composition of the stage elements, much of the indisputable artistic value. Her theatre is, so to speak, theatre of image, and it is theatre of imagination that completed by the audience's imagination. Human Lear which has its own characteristic in image fragments, convert the original Lear into a simple tale. It serves as background of the modern ritual that shows the most basic human instincts. We meet in Human Lear a ritual tale with some list of image for the human instincts. The arrangement of image, the montage of scene shows the performance as a kind of artistic space. In Human Lear the space is the natural one. It centers around the arena stage. The objects installed in the space changes it into the laboratory for 'seeing' the happening. The spectators see the performance and at the same time see themselves in the nature laboratory. They see, and equally, they are visible objects. They see the performance and us in the space in which the performance takes place. That is what Ara Kim with her modern ritual really aims. That aim is to this days still in effect. It is a major driver of her experiments to extend the boundary of the theatre. The ritualistic site-specific performance in Akor Wat, Cambodia, A Song of Mandala is the latest great product from her experiments. On the other hand, she continues on her way to experiment with pure stage elements. The 'Station' series(Station of Water, The Station of Sand, The Station of Wind) she recently showed are the non-verbal performance with all the stage elements: movement, sound, body, light, colour, objects and so on.