Hyo, Filial Piety: On Universal Ballet's Simcheong
Hyo , Filial Piety: On Universal Ballet's Simcheong She walks to the edge of the ship. The sea below is dark and churning, rendered in the theater with the particular combination of light and fabric and sound design that ballet uses to make the impossible present: the waves, the danger, the depth. She is sixteen years old, or the dancer playing her is — young enough that the sacrifice reads as a sacrifice rather than a decision, which is perhaps the point. And she jumps. I was sitting in the Opera House at the Seoul Arts Center on the evening of May 3rd, watching Universal Ballet's fortieth anniversary production of Simcheong , and I was thinking about my father. · · · The story of Simcheong is one of the oldest in the Korean repertoire — its origins lost in the oral tradition, its earliest written traces appearing in the eighteenth century, though scholars believe the tale is older. It has been told in every available form: as pansori, the single-narrator musical storytelli...