At the Avignon Festival in France last month, the world's largest performing arts festival, pansori artist Lee Ja-ram was every bit a "pansori rock star." Every seat, up to the fourth tier, was filled at each performance, and standing ovations erupted at the end of every show. When Lee opened her fan, chuimsae — spontaneous shouts of encouragement such as "eolssu" and "sshweeek" — rose from across the audience. Even spectators who understood no Korean at all responded immediately to the texture of the sound, the gestures and the acting, breathing together with the pansori singer.
Looking back on last month's Avignon performances at a press meeting held at the LG Arts Center in Seoul on the 25th, Lee said she "felt a moment of becoming one with the audience." She presented her original pansori work "Snow, Snow, Snow" four times at the Avignon opera house from July 17 to 21.
"The weather was hot, and the audience response was tremendously hot as well," Lee recalled. "During the festival, the entire city became a completely different time and space. Performing in a place filled with people who love and create art felt like a dream." "Snow, Snow, Snow," co-produced by the LG Arts Center and Wanseong Playground, premiered last year at the LG Arts Center's U+ Stage. It will meet audiences again at the LG Signature Hall on October 23 and 24.
As she took the Avignon stage, Lee was not without concerns about the language barrier. "I worried whether audiences who don't know the flavor of the Korean language could really understand the work, and even during the performance I kept thinking, 'Are they following along well?'" she said. But when she acted out a scene in which the protagonist Vasily counts numbers, laughter burst from the audience and her worries disappeared. "At that moment I thought, 'Ah, people have come in — this is all mine now,'" she said with a broad smile.
The audience grew more heated as the performance moved toward its later stages. "From the moment the snowstorm begins, the heat in the audience changed," she said. "As soon as the last song ended, the audience rose all at once like springs and gave a standing ovation."
One of the phrases she heard most often on site was "the rock star of Avignon." "Korean audiences tend to have a typical image that comes to mind when they hear pansori, or a preconception that it will be boring," Lee said. "Overseas audiences first marvel, 'Oh, there is such beautiful art,' and only then become curious about what pansori is. That's probably why they gave me the label 'rock star' of Avignon."
The power of pansori, as Lee sees it, is "the encounter of imaginations." "The singer feeds on the audience as 'fuel' and runs the engine of imagination for a couple of hours," she said. "It is a poetic and beautiful thing, in which the imaginations of the audience and the singer collide in the same time and space and a new world unfolds."
"Snow, Snow, Snow" is a pansori reinterpretation of Tolstoy's short story "Master and Man." Lee has previously adapted works by Brecht and Hemingway into pansori for the stage. On why she consistently turns foreign classics into pansori, she said, "Pansori is a genre that fires people up. If you tell a story too close to the modern and contemporary era in pansori, it can actually become excessive." She added, "Even 'Simcheongga' begins by saying, 'Long, long ago, there lived a blind man named Sim.' The charm of pansori is that it pulls a story from the distant past right in front of your eyes and instantly closes the distance with the audience."
For the October performances, the third tier of seats has also been opened in response to the audience's enthusiastic reception. Lee stressed that "Snow, Snow, Snow" is a work that can show its power in a large theater. "There is a scene in which the protagonist stands alone amid a raging snowstorm," she said. "In a large theater, I expect the emotion and imagery of that scene can be maximized even further."
