Pansori And K-Pop Electrify The Timeless Tale Of ‘The Trojan Women’

Euripides’ story of The Trojan Women takes place after the fall of Troy, as the Trojan women mourn the dead and confront their future as Greek captives. Although it’s an ancient story, it’s also a timeless one that continues to inspire adaptations.

“Despite being written almost 3,000 years ago it still holds very very true,” said Ong Keng Sen, director of an upcoming production of The Trojan Women at the Brooklyn Academy Of Music (BAM). “It’s still kind of amazing how the narratives of war and the people caught up in war don’t change. So there is a kind of timelessness that I think is important to bring to the stage over and over again.”

Ong’s interpretation of the ancient tragedy incorporates both k-pop and the traditional Korean form of musical storytelling known as pansori. It’s not the first time the Singaporean director has used Asian culture to reinterpret Western classics. He staged Richard III in Japan with a kabuki star and brought artists from Japan, Thailand, China and Indonesia together for a version of King Lear. He’s fascinated by the possibilities of artistic hybridization, whether it takes place by meshing cultures or juxtaposing eras.

“For me, working between cultures is kind of the basis of my artwork,” said Ong. “But more important than that is also working between times, the idea of what is traditional and what is contemporary, and what remains essential or vital from one age to another age to yet another age.”

The Trojan Women is a story about a specific time and place, but the play works in so many times and places, said Ong. “It has moved all over the world. There have been so many productions of Trojan Women, sometimes staged in very extreme war situations. In Syria, there was a version within the Arab world set during the time of the war there.”

This time the cast is Korean and so is the music. When Ong first experienced the expressive singing style of pansori, it seemed a perfect fit for the Greek tragedy. Adapting the story, however, took a few years.

“It took some time to grow,” he said. “The form requires rewriting the words into a kind of melodic poetic form. They have to rearrange the syllables to fit a certain meter and this requires several stages of writing. Euripides has to be translated into Korean and also rewritten to fit the meter and then you have to have a composer to fit an existing melody, because pansori has existing melodies, and then usually there’s also another composer who writes the incidental music to bring all the verses together. So, it’s a complicated writing process.”

The pansori portion of the play was written by Ahn Sook-sun, a pansori singer who has been designated as a national living treasure by Korea’s Cultural Heritage Administration.

“Ms. Ahn Sook-sun is now, I think, in her 80s and she fitted the words into the traditional melodies and the chorus,” said Ong. “The new compositions were composed by a k-pop composer Jung Jae-il, who was the composer of the film Parasite. These two composers composed different parts of the opera and so it’s again my interest in this idea of hybridizing different genres together. In Greek tragedies there are monologues by the main characters and then there’s a chorus commenting on what’s happening. So, the chorus is written in a more k-pop style and the lead characters sing in a more traditional style.”

The director was first was introduced to Korean culture while working on his masters degree in performance studies at NYU Tisch School of the Arts. He was already running a theater company in Singapore, putting on several plays a year, but he wanted to study performance in the context of politics and cultural studies. “The whole idea of politics and gender and cultural studies was really important to me,” he said.

When casting the character of Helen, Ong wanted the audience to have a clear sense that she was an outsider.

“Because of pansori being quite a specific art form, the question was, who could play Helen,” he said. “If it was two Korean women playing the Greek Helen and Hecuba, the queen of Troy, you wouldn’t immediately be able to tell they belong to different worlds. So I initially thought that maybe we could cast an opera singer from the west, and stay in the genre of opera, although it is a different operatic form. But then it seemed too cliched to think of this east-west element being played out so overtly. Then I thought, if we’re limited by everyone coming from pansori, because you can’t train someone to sing pansori in just a year, let’s try a male pansori singer as a counterpoint to the rest of the women.”

Although Helen causes the Trojan War by running away with Paris, she begs for mercy in the play, blaming her misadventure on the gods. By having a male singer play Helen, Ong added layers of complexity to the question of her guilt.

“When Helen sings that it’s not her fault, that it was the gods’ design to bring her and Paris together, it brings up all these questions,” said Ong. “Do we have a choice about our sexuality? All these age old questions of nature vs nurture. So, it adds some complexity after the initial formal difference. To choose a male pansori singer suddenly brings in all the social and political questions about sexuality and how people live together.”

Ong, director of the Singapore-based TheatreWorks and recipient of the 2010 Fukuoka Prize for Arts and Culture, is drawn to classic tales of tragedy such as King Lear, Richard III and The Trojan Women because they reveal something about the essence of what it means to be human. In the case of The Trojan Women it’s about resilience.

“When they are in a kind of calamity we see what they are actually made of,” he said. “It’s no longer about political transactions. It comes down to a very basic question of what do we hold onto to survive and what do we value in the end. That’s what happens with these women, because in the end they may be transported out, but what will they still hold as valuable?”

Although the play has an international crew, the artistic talent comes primarily from the The National Changgeuk Company of Korea, which was established in 1962 as a part of the National Theater of Korea. Ong’s version of the classic play first debuted in Korea in 2016, followed by a performances at the Singapore International Arts Festival and then had sold-out shows in London, Amsterdam and Vienna. The performance at BAM will take place on Nov. 18 and 19.