A Kitchen-Turned-Percussion Laboratory
Take three cooks, a nasty manager and an apprentice. Put them in a fully equipped kitchen; add some pots, knives, cutting boards, ladles and spoons; stir with a couple of cups of percussion, comedy and pantomime; hone with a dash of dancing, singing and gibberishing; and, finally, sprinkle with a fine pinch of shamanism, Korean samulnori drumming and kimchi. Mix well. Pour into a greased casserole, place in a pre-heated oven, and bake for 20 minutes at the highest temperature. Serve immediately. Sound like an impossible recipe? Not at all. What you get is Korea’s most famous theater show, Nanta, with a name literally meaning “hit repeatedly” or “strike relentlessly.”
According to the New York Times, Nanta is “part food fight and part percussion festival,” and it is definitely influenced by widely known drum shows like Stomp. Yet Nanta’s producers changed one slight yet effective component of that recipe: they added more ingredients. Now it’s not only drumming—there’s only so much you can do to keep your audience alive without making them feel like they’re at a tribal ritual somewhere in the bush—but also an eclectic mix of several genres of the performing arts.
It all starts really quietly, with a table set as if in preparation for a Korean ancestral ritual. Some silver rice bowls are caressed, and later tormented with wooden chopsticks that serve as drum sticks. A hollow Korean pumpkin placed on a pot of water gets soft stick treatment, and the huge barrel gives off deeply reverberating sounds. Then comes the action, and things are kept spicy for the audience until the very end. The cooks show the full range of their incredibly diverse skills—they juggle plates, throw melons, magically create a festive cream cake, save the life of a bird and replace it with delivery fried chicken, chase a fly around, mob the apprentice, get stuck with their behinds in waste baskets. There is enough comic potential that the intermission-less 90 minutes just fly by.
Simple, Korean Fun
The plot is kept to a minimum and is conveyed through the tossing in of a couple of English words and lots of pantomime. Three cooks are making it through their day in quiet and relaxation. Some teasing is going on, between “Sexy Guy”—you got it, the Don Juan of the cooks—and “Hot Sauce,” the only female cook. For her outfit, the tailor must have run out of white linen, because there is a big hole around her midriff area—wouldn’t that hurt when hot grease is splashing from the frying pan? Then the grumpy manager comes in, telling them to get it together and stop their games. They have to prepare a wedding feast within the hour—way too little time! To make matters worse, he presents his nephew, a total greenhorn, whom they are supposed to teach how to handle the pots and spoons and veggies and flames. So they rush from recipe to recipe, not forgetting to clean up in between and fool around while the manager is out of sight.
It wouldn’t be a show created in Korea if there weren’t at least some elements of Korean culture packaged into it somehow. Nanta is aimed at foreigners, so the little shamanist shrine to one side of the stage and the traditional wedding gowns that two chosen spectators are costumed in while spooning some soup on stage are just two examples of this.
Audience participation is yet another element to heighten the entertainment factor. At two times during the show, some lucky audience members are called onstage. At one point, they even have to engage in a race to make mandu (a kind of dumpling). And later, when the cooks are probably enjoying their Feierabend after the successful and timely completion of the wedding feast, having gotten the grumpy, achy-backed manager back to smile and having accepted his dumb nephew as one of them, they throw colorful balls into the audience. They're the same kind of balls you find at the kids' corner at McDonald's and in family restaurants. Make sure you bring your kids—they will love it.
Nanta is currently playing at four locations in Korea. One, the first theater in Korea ever dedicated to a single show, is located in the cozy area behind Deoksugung Palace. There is also a theater in Gangnam and another on Jeju Island. Recently, on Oct 10 of this year, a brand new theater opened its doors in Myeong-dong. This new location in the heart of touristy Seoul, where you hear more Japanese in the streets than Korean, is sure to attract a lot of tourists. Three times a day, the culture-craving urbanites can take a break from shopping to take in a performance. All told, the play is showing at least seven times a day! There are seven teams of actors, with new ones needing to be trained continuously in order to keep this business a-rolling. Prospective Nanta stars are sought out through periodic auditions.
Nanta Goes International
This includes a young Japanese woman, Iwamoto Yoka, who came to Seoul in 2002 as a tourist and happened to see a Nanta performance. Thrilled by the exhilarating show, she began dreaming of becoming an actor there herself. Back in Osaka, she got a job in a Korean restaurant and started to study the language. A couple of years later, she came to Korea, continued her language studies, and signed up for a Nanta audition. After she was accepted, she spent long hours practicing juggling pepper mills, knives and other kitchen utensils, and learning how to drum, dance and sing—all the things a Nanta performer has do simultaneously. Yoka is now performing regularly on the Nanta stage in Myeong-dong, making this Korean production truly international.
The international quest began much earlier, though. The first time Nanta hit the stage in Korea was in the fall of 1997. Since then, it has attracted the largest audiences in Korea ever for a play, and it debuted internationally in 1999 at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival. Guest performances followed in 231 cities on every continent of this planet. The show even found its way to Broadway in 2003. This October marked the 12th anniversary, and there is no end in sight for this huge success story.
After the performance, the streets of Myeong-dong are fun to just walk through—especially at night, when they’re full of street vendors that people have to find their way around. If you’re a bit hungry or thirsty and don’t mind going real Korean with soju and stir-fried octopus, try the food alley located behind the Korea Post headquarters. This one’s a bit different from the ajeossi and businessman meet-up, as it is mostly young and very fashionable crowds that gather here, making it a perfect spot for people-watching.
Additional Information
At the new location in Myeong-dong, Nanta is playing daily and all year round at 2, 5, and 8pm. Tickets are between 40,000 and 60,000 won. Discounts are available for groups. For more information, check out www.nanta.co.kr or call (02) 739-8288.
Getting There
Come out of Exit 6 at Myeongdong Station, Line 4. Follow the main road until you hit the big intersection near the Myeongdong Arts Theater. Turn left. The Nanta theater is on the third floor of the building with the KB bank on the first floor, opposite Burger King.
Written by Gitte Zschoch
Photographed by Ryu Seunghoo
|
Article 
65 years have passed since the concentration camp at Auschwitz was liberated by Soviet troops. Visiting the German Bundestag in January this year, Israeli President Shimon Peres implored everyone to remember the cruel crimes committed by the National Socialists, emphasising the importance of remembering this atrocious act of genocide---especially by the younger generations. This is what the exhibition "At Home Everywhere and Nowhere" hopes to achieve. It will be opened by Martin Doerry on Wednesday, March 3. Over the span of several years, photographer Monika Zucht and author Martin Doerry travelled through Europe and America to talk to those that had survived Nazi Germany's concentration camps, those that had been sent abroad for their own safety by their parents, as well as those that had survived the Nazi years by living in hiding. An insightful body of work by Zucht emerged from these encounters, with interviews and essays by Doerry. The photos portray 23 individuals; they are some of the last representatives of a time when the Jewish presence in Europe was strongly felt.
Goethe-Institut Korea will be welcoming bestselling author Martin Doerry, a long-time member of SPIEGEL's chief editing team, for the opening of The Art of SPIEGEL. SPIEGEL is the most significant current affairs journal written in the German language; published worldwide, and with more than 6 million readers, it counts as one of Europe's leading journals. Founded in 1947, it obtained its widespread significance by fearlessly advocating democracy and freedom of press, and exposing countless political scandals within its pages. "The Art of SPIEGEL" will be showcasing more than 100 works by diverse 60 illustrators that have been commissioned and published by SPIEGEL over the last 50 years. Not only will this exhibition offer a unique insight into international politics and trends from contemporary history; it will also give you the chance to learn about the work that illustrators and editors put into producing a SPIEGEL cover illustration. 
