What is Pansori Singing?
Pansori is a form of Korean traditional storytelling through singing (or storysinging) where the singer's voice delivers stories in the nineteenth century Korean speech and song.
2025 Korean Studies Lecture and Performance Details:
Dr. Chan Park brings her art and scholarship of Pansori to this Korean Studies Lecture and Performance. Join the discussion including: the essential nature of pansori singing as “voice theatre,” and its survival in the technology-worshipping and ageistic popular culture, and more. Park also presents her bilingual adaptation of an excerpt of Sugungga, Song of Water Palace, one of the five classical repertories making up the fundamentals of pansori singing today.
Biography: Dr. Chan E. Park is Professor Emeritus in the Department of East Asian Languages & Literatures.
Dr. Park inaugurated the Korean Performance Research Program at Ohio State University and hosted the Annual Korean Wind and Stream performance event until her retirement in 2021. She researches and performs Korean musical and theatrical tradition mainly of pansori in the broader context of dramatic tradition. She is author of Voices from the Straw Mat: Toward an Ethnography of Korean Story Singing (University of Hawaii Press 2003), 5-volume Songs of Thorns and Flowers: Bilingual Performance and Discourse on Modern Korean Poetry Series (Foreign Language Publications 2010-2015), and Korean Pansori as Voice Theatre: History, Theory, Practice (Methuen Drama, Bloomsbury Publishing, 2024). Park searches for performatively-sound ways to unpack for her English speaking audience the ancient literacy densely compressed in the original pansori narrative: her signature bilingual pansori boosted with translation subtitles to sync with listening for example. She has premiered new pansori either solo or collaborative theater including: Centennial Pansori: In 1903, Pak Hungbo Went to Hawai’i (2003); When Tiger Smoked His Pipe (w/ Honolulu Theater for Youth, 2003); Shim Chong: A Korean Folktale (w/ California State University Northridge Theater Department, 2003); Alaskan Pansori: Klanott and the Land Otter People (w/ Stefan Hakenberg, 2005); Pak Hungbo Went to Almaty (2007); Fox Hunt and the Death of a Queen (w/ Kathy Foley, 2012); Look & Listen: Asian Art and Music (w/ the Freer Gallery of Art and the Arthur M. Sackler Gallery, Smithsonian Institution, February 18, 2021).
Originally published at cslc.nd.edu.