After sitting in the sun for half an hour we were handed a leaflet by a tall thin lady who at the time we just presumed to be Korean! We later discovered she was an America who had been living in Korea for the last 13 years! The leaflet told us about the performance we were about to see in English and act by act. This proved to be a very good thing as the Songpa Sande Nori was a maskdance play that involved a lot of talking, which obviously we couldn’t understand.

The leaflet explained:

Songpa Sande Nori is a maskdance drama played around the Songpa ferry in Seoul. It is an offshoot of the sande mask dance dramas of central Korea.

Songpa Sande Nori was formed about 250 years ago when the local market reached its height. It was performed on the full moon of the first lunar month, Tano, or the spring festival on the fifth day of the fifth lunar month, Buddhist All Souls’ Day and Ch’usok. It sometimes went on for a week around Buddhist All souls’ day.

The play started and we soon realised that despite our English language leaflet we were still not going to able to follow exactly what was happening. After just 10 minutes we had no idea what Act was being played out in front of us but enough information to understand the gist of what was going on!

Here is my attempt to explain some of it using the pictures I took!

According to the leaflet: Eight Buddhist monks and old monk appear and dance. An old monk, Nojang plays with a young woman and he shows offense against the Buddhist Commandments by his gesture and dance.

Looking at the leaflet I can’t make any sense of how this photo fits into any of the Acts!!! I remember at the time something about the guy being upset after the women spurned his advances because of his pockmarked face (something you can’t really see in either of the photos). I’m pretty sure in this photo the man is being upset because the women rejected him. Later the women realise how upset he is and they all end up friends!

Ninth Act – Ch’wibari Nori (The play of a prodigal)

The English explanation of this act doesn’t make a lot of sense. But this guy appeared and danced around stage for a bit before a woman then a Quack (doctor) appeared. After a lot of dancing and talking in Korean the woman gave birth to a baby boy!

Just for the record the English explanation says:

Ch’wibari enters beastly drunkenly, drives out Nojang and has relations with Somu. Eventually all, have a baby boy and Ch’wibari teach Chinese characters to his son.

Watching and not being able to understand the Korean as this was happening I thought she was dying. I was very surprised when a baby emerged from under her skirt!!! The Quack is rolling up his sleeves in preparation for the pending birth.

Once the dancing was over all the performers came out on stage without their masks and invited the audience to join them as they demonstrated their style of maskdancing. Emily and me decided to stand and watch from the sidelines mainly because we wouldn’t be able to understand the instructions. But plenty of people participated in the activity.

In this photo (slightly to the left, tall, thin and wearing brown) is the American woman we met. After handing out leaflets at the beginning of the performance she set up a professional looking camera and snapped photos throughout. As she headed down to the stage to have a go at the dancing she asked if we were going to join in insisting it was easy. As we watched it was clear she had the best rhythm of the amateurs and had done it before.

Later whilst browsing the shops (again), we bumped into her and were amazed to discover she spoke fluent Korean. She told us that she had lived in Korea for 13 years but was now living in China. She was studying Korean culture for her Phd and had only missed the maskdance festival once in the last 13 years. We also discovered that she had done maskdancing before, she explained that she was the lowest ranking member of the Songpa mask dancing troupe and was using them for her studies – which explains why she was handing out the leaflets at the beginning and had such good rhythm.

* Posted by j150vsc on 06/11/2006.