A Study on Performance Storytelling based on the Life and Living of Jeju Haenyeos

The purposes of this study were to figure out the unique cultural attributes of Korean people, make good use of storytelling around the unique Korean cultural prototypes, especially intangible cultural heritage, and ultimately suggest a direction for creating a representative Korean brand with cultural contents. The study set out to examine how to utilize the life and living of Jeju Haenyeos(female divers), who live a life in the ocean and take care of the family livelihood as the model of strong women in the 21st century, as well as to extract their critical values. On December 19, 2013, the Intangible Cultural Heritage Subcommittee of Cultural Heritage Administration considered and decided to make an application for registering the Jeju Haenyeos culture as "UNESCO Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity of 2015" as the representative item of Korea. The problem is, however, the chase by Japanese female divers called "Ama divers." The efforts to register them as UNESCO Intangible Cultural Heritage are becoming full-blown in Japan, which has carried out broad promotional activities to achieve the goal. If Koreans do not get tense about the whole situation, the world can be deprived of a chance even to hear the name of "Haenyeos," who are the mothers of the sea possessing the strong life force of Jeju women and represent the unique, precious intangible cultural heritage of Korea. Considering such timeliness, the study investigated Jeju Haenyeos by combining the diachronic and synchronic perspectives. In particular, this study set out to closely examine the storytelling of Seongsanpo performance by Jeju haenyeos, which is put on the stage in Seongsanpo, Jeju these days, and contemplate over storytelling research plans to make use of the life and living of Jeju haenyeos and deliver richer and more diverse performance content. The ultimate purpose was to propose directions for big killer content to attract the global attention by developing storytelling for the performance of Jeju haenyeos.