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영어

Postdramatic Theater is relative to the reality that one identifies with and thus renounces linguistic vested rights through decentralization, absence of playwright-subject and exclusion of fiction on stage which has been considered as an absolute aesthetic perspective since Aristotle. Documentary theater refers to a series of works that exclude fictions as much as possible by utilizing testimonies based on reality such as newspapers, documented records and biographical elements to emphasis the reality on stage.
Documentary theater has its origins in Piscator’s political theater in Germany in the 1920s and saw such playwrights as Peter Weiss in the 1960s and the German Theater Rimini Protokoll of today. In Korea with the introduction of Rimini Protokoll’s Karl Marx: Das Kapital, Erster Bandin 2009, the movement of documentary theater became more noticeable. Of course, works such as The biography of Terrorists(2004) and A Good Person Yang-gyu Cho(2007) showed concepts belonging to documentary theaters but were performed intermittently and it was not until two or three years ago that the concept of documentary theater was fully established.
Ki-ung Sung and Han-sol Yoon are representative of those who belong to the documentary theatres in Korea. Their works, particularly As it seems that intimacy is also sickness(2012) and I am a sex king(2011) show the very characteristics of documentary theaters. However, there are differences between the two theaters. While Ki-ung Sung’s narratives are more individual and thus microscopic, Han-sol Yoon uses meta-narratives. Moreover, while Ki-ung Sung advocates the use of imagination, Han-sol Yoon tries to be objective as possible in his works. These differences stems from Ki-ung Sung being a playwright and a director, while Han-sol Yoon is simply a director.
The theatrical circles in Korea judge documentary theaters as an experiment, and as yet are taking a wait-and-see stance as it may be just a temporary curiosity and a trend. As seen in Germany, in order for the documentary theaters to establish themselves in the main theatrical movement the time is of essence.
In the case of German documentary theater the political perspectives manifested were found to be the cause of the decline, because the reliability of historical materials and their objectivity were put to question due to the subsequent subjectivity that may have influenced the montage sequence and thus the final work. These are questions that are very much valid and still has to be explored in the contemporary documentary theaters.