[On Stage] Like Pansori, Like Theater... Drunk on the Excitement of the Boundary-Breaking '1-in-3 Role Sorikkun'

'The Song of the Stranger' Performance After 4 Years, Sorikkun Ijaram "My Feet Have Changed"

[Asia Economy Reporter Park Byung-hee] "Slice it, chew it, slice it, chew it, slice it, chew it...."

The audience gets excited at the rapid-fire voice of Lee Jaram (41). The drummer also speeds up the drumbeats to match the rhythm and heighten the excitement. This is a scene from the pansori performance The Song of the Stranger, performed by vocalist Lee Jaram at The Zoom Art Center in Yongsan-gu, Seoul, until the 5th of next month.

Lee Jaram portrays Omero, a migrant worker who is so distracted by an unexpected steak that he exclaims, "What a windfall!" and keeps slicing and eating the meat. There are three main characters in the play: Omero, his wife Rasara, and the former president of Omero's homeland in the Caribbean. The story centers on the deposed president, who fled after a coup and came to Geneva, Switzerland for recuperation, where he meets Omero, a migrant worker who drives an ambulance at the hospital.

The Song of the Stranger is a pansori adaptation created by Lee Jaram based on the 1995 short story Bon Voyage, Mr. President! by Colombian Nobel laureate Gabriel Garc?a M?rquez (1927?2014), who won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1982.

In front of his nagging wife Rasara, Omero looks like a mouse before a cat. When portraying Omero, Lee Jaram slows her speech and blinks her eyes frequently. But when portraying Rasara, she widens her eyes, raises the corners, and speaks faster. It truly feels like a one-person theatrical performance. The Song of the Stranger is a one-woman show stage where Lee Jaram’s talent and flair can be fully appreciated.

Performance scene of 'The Stranger's Song'
Photo by Wanseong Playground

The Song of the Stranger premiered at the Seoul Arts Center in 2016. Lee Jaram said the biggest change in this performance after four years is the stage. The premiere was performed with only one chair on stage. This time, the stage is designed like a softly lit bar. The boundary between the audience and the stage has been broken down. About ten round tables are placed on the stage with audience members seated at them. Lee Jaram freely moves among the tables to perform the play. The vocals have deepened and the theatricality has intensified. When delivering the line "Slice it, chew it...", she sits facing an audience member at a table, creating a scene as if they are actually sharing a steak.

Lee Jaram described the change of space as "my feet have changed," meaning her movement paths have increased and her motions have become larger. "Having performed traditional shows until now, I realized I didn’t have the quick movements needed for this performance. So I spent a lot of time with actor Yang Jo-ah from the theater company Yangson Project, learning the movements of a one-person show actor."

Previously, Lee Jaram also adapted German playwright Bertolt Brecht’s (1898?1956) Good Person of Szechwan and American novelist Ernest Hemingway’s (1899?1961) The Old Man and the Sea into pansori performances.

"When choosing a work, the criterion isn’t whether it suits pansori. Ninety percent of it is my own desire to do it. After reading M?rquez’s novel, I took a nap and woke up saying to director Park Ji-hye, 'I have to do this. I don’t know why, but I have to.' After performing, it turned out to suit pansori because the vocalist brought the story," she said.

Performance scene of 'The Stranger's Song'
Photo by Wanseong Playground

After selecting a work, the first thing Lee Jaram does is to adapt it into her own story. This is the most important process and usually takes over six months. "During the adaptation, I sometimes remove or add episodes. The steak-eating scene isn’t important in the novel. The scene where Rasara and the president smoke together is not in the novel."

Lee Jaram has performed The Song of the Stranger multiple times overseas, including at the National Theater of Taiwan, Okinawa Arts Festival, and the Avignon Theatre Festival in France. "Foreigners’ reactions are always positive. Especially, they like the theatricality inherent in the pansori genre. I’ve heard many say it’s even more theatrical than the theater they know. They ask where I studied theater, and I say, 'I don’t know. I just did pansori, and it turned out theatrical.'"

She added, "Pansori is actually a genre with tremendous theatrical imagination, but in Korea it’s often dismissed as just traditional music. I once told foreigners that I am an artist who tries to show the theatricality, satire, literary quality, and musicality of pansori in a balanced way."