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Yeonwoo Mudae is an exemplary theatre company of Korean theatre of the 1980s. It focused on newly created pieces (changjak-geuk) to provide a critical and historical understanding of contemporary Korean politics and culture. Using Brechean epic theatre, elements of madang-geuk (outdoor, episodic performances colored by traditional Korean theatre aesthetics), and local literature or history as its source, the company transitioned from a student workshop with no space of its own to a group with a permanent little theatre-style space in first the Shinchon area and then the Daehakro theatre district. Its exemplary productions both reflected and spurred the movement toward democratization and freedom of speech in the fraught political environment of a country repressed by the military-led government of President Chun Doo-Hwan.
Topography of Korean Theatre in the 1980s and the Yeonwoo Mudae (Yeonwoo Stage)
Theatre is sensitive to social change, and Korean theatre in the 1980s was impacted especially by the dominance of the military regime. The 1980s witnessed exemplary responses in theatre to social upheavals in these culminating years of the military control. This decade saw the expansion of little theatre, the rise of political drama, and greater experiments in style and form.
An increasing number of little theatres in the mid-1980s reflected the changes in the social and cultural environment of Korea resulting from a rapid growth in the number of facilities for mass entertainment.1 Little theatre in this period was somewhat different from its Western counterpart in its origin and nature. While Western little theatre appeared as experimental and independent theatre against the banality of existing commercial theatre, Korean little theatres started as commercial performing venues to meet popular taste and therefore survive the competitive theatre market (Jung Ho-Soon 2002: 222; Shim 2002: 14-15). With modest financial resources, the founders could afford only small spaces. Up to the mid-1980s in Seoul, there were only two theatres with more than one thousand seats, the National Theatre of Korea and the Sejong Center. The Korean Culture and Art Foundation (KCAF) Theatre was the only medium-sized house, with about six hundred seats (Shim 2002: 15). In this situation, little theatres in Korea with houses of two hundred seats, cheap ticket prices, and convenient access gained popularity. Almost all types of performance, from realistic...