WHA Annual Meeting: Korea 2026

This paper situates the ongoing difficulty of defining changgeuk’s stylistic identity within the global circulation of the concept of ‘drama’ in the twentieth century. As Western notions of causally structured plot became institutionalized through modernization, translation, and colonial-era cultural exchange in East Asia, ‘drama’ emerged as a universalized formal standard. Changgeuk has consequently been evaluated according to its proximity to Western dramaturgy.

Reconsidering this framework, the paper reconceptualizes ‘drama’ through pansori’s performative narrativity and sound-centered aesthetics. Focusing on Bonjour, Docteur Knock(2025) by Creative Taroo, it examines how the production foregrounds unaccompanied vocalization and minimizes musical accompaniment, positioning sound as the primary medium organizing genre, affect, and meaning. Its scene-centered structure, fluid role transitions (four actors sharing one role), and the overlap of narrative and present performance time generate drama not as causal representation but as a performative event emerging in the here and now.

The analysis engages three theoretical frameworks. Saussure’s semiotics elucidates how sound functions as a signifying system that generates meaning rather than substituting for music. Chion’s theory of listening clarifies how unaccompanied vocalization activates the audience’s memory and cultural experience, evoking genre-specific listening modes associated with boat songs, trot, and ritual incantation. Schechner’s performance theory further supports an understanding of the work as a performative event emerging in performance rather than as the representation of a fixed dramatic text.

Engaging the conference theme ‘Closed Borders and Global Connections,’ the paper argues that while ‘drama’ has circulated globally as a universal aesthetic category, it also operates as a conceptual border grounded in historically specific assumptions. By examining how changgeuk negotiates and redefines this category, the study highlights how non-Western performance traditions contest and transform dominant theatrical concepts in the ongoing condition of being global after globalization.