Musical the Last Empress: A Korean Staging of Woman and Nation (2006)

This work was supported by the Korea Research Foundation Grant (KRF-2003-042-G00016) As the global age of transnational capital is upon us, nostalgia for the nation-state and its story has inspired cultural products from high-budget movies to modest solo performances. The glamour of emperors and empresses, or heroic stories of resistance featuring heroes and heroines, reflect the luxury of the few and the fiction of the individual in the corporate age. Nostalgia for 'the last' of such magnificent individuals and the foundation of nation-states marks it as a bygone era. In the current climate of 'modem' global fashions, produced without local textiles or design, period costumes and hairpieces from the regal past satisfy the longing for a visible difference that is fading. Cqntrarily, in performance, the display of great wealth and historical costumes, and the performance of national identity betray the desire to enter the promise of the global market of entertainment. Ironically, staging the glory of the nation-state is the ticket to the global stage. Movies such as Bernardo Bertolucci's The Lost Emperor (1987), or the new success of Zhang Yimou's Hero (2002) or The House of Daggers (2004), illustrate how Asian traditions of dynastic opulence now enjoy a global multi-million-dollar market. In live performance, this nostalgia for the 'golden' past finds its global form in the musical, with its tradition of lavish sets, period costumes, and heroines who sing yearning lyric solos. The nation-state is often embodied in the form of a powerful woman who suffers, such as in the role of Argentina's Eva Peron in Evita, the new pop version of Aida, or the Korean 'last empress'. From Puccini's Madame Butterfly to Robert Wilson's CIVIL WarS (started in 1982), musicals have staged historical elements as fashion and emotion, while dropping out any rigorous attention to detail. Details don't play along with the broad symphonic sweeps of rising emotion that carry the sentiment of transcendence - configured as national and global. This transcendental aesthetic is what Rey Chow terms 'Hegelian sublimation'.1 Chow relates the transcendence of detail to the very project of nation-building. Chow notes: 'If details are ... what should be carefully deselected in the proper construction of [a national] narrative, and if narrative itself is instrumental in the construction of a new national identity, then details are a deadly impediment ... to the earnest program of nation building.'2 Chow identifies the process of national identification that, I think, is in consonance with the form of dramatic identification in the musical: transcendence. Chow argues that the effect that national and global structures must produce, in order for their forms of identification to work, is one of wholeness and belonging that transcends individual or factional difference. Resistance to the formation of the whole, the state, or the global enterprise is thus depicted as abject or misguided. Chow: 'A part that is already broken off from a presumed ... is incomplete and desolate ...'3 Thus, the musical, in its generalised citation of location and time, suits this project of creating a larger, more indistinct whole with which one is forced to identify. Resistance to that whole registers as a kind of desolation, a longing, or a yearning for it. In the form of the musical, this is expressed through a lyric solo. This requirement to belong means that any exile or murder in the narrative must resolve into a transcendent martyrdom that will finally be made to represent the wholeness of state. The South Korean musical, The Last Empress, is a perfect example of this form of global performance in both its form and its content. The Last Empress4 centres on Empress Myoungsung, literally 'the last empress' of the autonomous kingdom of Chosun and the first leader of state to encourage the adoption of the modern technologies and diplomacies that would lead to the independent nation-state of Korea. …