Performing Democracy on Stage: ToBakYi’s Kumhi’s May and the Politics of Mourning in South Korea

Abstract:This article investigates the relationship between grief and democracy by focusing on the South Korean Theatre Company ToBakYi’s 1988 production of Kumhi’s May—one of the first plays to dramatize the 1980 Gwangju Uprising and the state-sanctioned military massacre therein in the time of South Korea’s transition from military dictatorship to democratic rule. Demonstrating how theatre grapples with state-led violence in the recent past, I argue that theatre facilitates democracy by interrupting the state’s regulation of whose deaths are entitled to the public’s grief, creating a space where it challenges the state’s attempt to jettison those it murdered from the collective memories. Drawing on my archival research and interviews with the troupe and the family dramatized in the play, this article shows how ToBakYi made theatre an alternative cultural space where those deaths which state-sanctioned archives obliterate arise into communal memories.