On Gut-on-Stage: an Essay about Performance and Technique of the Korean Shamanic Ritual as Folk Art

Victor Turner juxtaposed ritual with theatre in terms of “performance” and emphasized the potential for a well performed ritual to generate new symbols and meanings that transform its existing frame. Following this inspiration, this article investigates the meaning of potential authenticity in the shamanic ritual represented as folk art. The authenticity defined by conventional folklore as a metaphor for the things not modern deprives the ritual performed in the frame of modern representation from a chance of being authentic. The possibility for the new authenticity can only be traced in the course of performance during which the modern representation becomes something other than modern by rupturing its own frame.The shaman’s act of cult is reconstructed as an object of exhibition through the frame of modern representation in which the division of performers and audience and the boundary between the stage and seats are explicit and the leisure of audience is emphasized over the ritual efficacy. The performance of an Altai shaman at “Siberian Soiree” in 1909 was well performed only paradoxically in a sense that the strife broke open at the end showed the indocile nature of shamanic cult to be obediently objectified as a matter of exhibition. The producer of the album “Seoul Jaesugut” of 1996 provided an eminent Korean shaman with the recording conditions well suited to her artistic inclination. The shaman’s technique turned the cult value invested in recording into the best kind of exhibition value, yet the rehabilitation of the cult value latent in that exhibition value is left in deferral as a share of consumer in the age of mechanical reproduction. Another Korean shaman could only perform well with the aid of a few participating audience at “National Intangible Heritage No.104 Seoul Saenamgut Special Performance” in 2017. The performance of a god-spirit could only be sustained by means of talks and money traversing the stage and the audience, and the god-spirit which once was an object of exhibition could now be exhibited as an object of cult.