Word: epical
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...structure of Korean madang-gut or folk epic works like a chain. Its intent is to alternately constrict and release the crowd's emotional energies through an unfolding sequence of acts depicting celebration and tragedy...
...Incantation" is a kind of wandering epic in search of its audience, that is, its "people." At one point, the trial of a student charged with insurrection against the government is interrupted by the demand to know who the minjung or "people" really are. The open search for an identity critically reflects on the problem of imposing an artistic unity on an everyday reality that remains, in its future prospects, open-ended...
...madang-gut, literally, "openyard festival," has been compared by western critics to the epic drama of Brecht, in its recovery of neo-primitivism as the starting point of "experiemental" drama. Brecht's influence is especially evident in the elimination of the stage. Instead, the audience participates in the illusion. The drama begins with an appuri, an opening act whose typical function within the epic form, as Marxist critic George Lukacs observes, is to create "the sphere of life" where "a loosening of the bonds that tie men and objects to the ground" can spontaneously occur...
...SIXTEEN DANCERS enter into the wide open clearing formed by the audience seated on the floor who become, like the chorus in classic epic, the inclusive margins of the ritualized performance. Throughout the evening, which proceeds largely in the fashion of oral narrative, the audience is incited to sing, cheer, lament, and otherwise express on cue their sympathies for the story being "made" in their midst. At the end, following the shamanistic purging performed by the women's "Dance of Life," the shamans invite members of the audience to join in the final frenzied clamor of the nan-jang...
...epic oil plunge of the 1980s started out slowly and a bit remotely. To most people, it was just a downward-sloping diagram on the financial page, an abstract reminder of the mysterious world of desert oil wells, filthy-rich Arabs and the irritating antics of OPEC. But suddenly oil's new situation is hitting home with the wallop of a 42-gal. oil barrel dropped on the front porch. Last week consumers, businessmen and traders around the world watched in awe as the price of crude dipped below $10 per bbl. for the first time in almost a decade...