Musical critic Choi Seung-yeon delves into notable musical issues every month. Choi Seung-yeon’s column is published on The Musical website on the third week of every month.
As mentioned in Professor Hee-Kyung Ko’s book “The Birth of a Musical” diversity is a universal value that has changed Broadway musicals. The history of Broadway has continued with themes of race, gender, and sexuality, and the themes encompassed by contemporary musicals have become broader. It’s no coincidence that the current Broadway lineup in 2024 includes the revival version of “The Who’s Tommy” and the 2023 Tony Awards Best Musical winner “Kimberly Akimbo.” The situation is similar in the West End. Recently, “The Little Big Things” completed its premiere season. The keyword that runs through the three works is disabled. The main character is a disabled person suffering from autism and premature death, and is a promising rugby player who was in a wheelchair due to an accident. Their disabilities are dealt with at the forefront of the narrative rather than at a material level, and are expanded into a theme that drives the entire work. The Korean performing arts industry is also not unrelated to diversity issues. It also includes critical discourse on gender, disability, the environment, the animal universe, robots and AI, and current anthropocentrism. In particular, the preceding issues are actively dealt with as the values of gender-free, barrier-free, trigger-free, and so-called ‘three nothing’.
What I want to focus on in this column is ‘Korean musicals and disabilities’. Korean musicals are particularly vulnerable to the disability and disability-free movements. Barrier-free is a term originally used in the architectural world, originating from the movement to eliminate barriers in buildings. However, because it is difficult to eliminate all barriers in reality, the term ‘barrier conscious’, or ‘conscious of barriers’, has been suggested as an alternative with a positive meaning. In principle, the issue of disability in musicals can be discussed from three aspects. These are the problem of the way disability is represented, the problem of hiring disabled actors and staff, and the problem of accessibility to the auditorium for disabled audiences.
Case 1. I was asked this question at a meeting held with theater scholars. “There are disabled people around me who want to see musicals. He likes “The Phantom of the Opera” and he’s sad that he’s never seen it in the theater. What is the position of the Korean musical industry on disability?”
Case 2. One day, I was leaving the auditorium after watching a performance. In one corner of the auditorium, an audience member could be seen calming down the sudden onset of hyperventilation. The audience sitting next to me was helping, but it didn’t seem easy to calm down.
Case 3. I went to the theater to review the performance. But I could hardly concentrate during the first act. This is because an autistic audience member sitting right in front of us was moving around and making noise the whole time. After consulting with the theater management during the intermission, I moved to another seat and watched the second act, but it was impossible to review the performance because I could not watch the first act in its entirety.
First of all, the above empirical cases involve the problem of ‘accessibility’. Here, accessibility refers to the orientation of a theater environment in which anyone can enjoy the theater without physical or mental disabilities, including accessibility to the theater for disabled audiences. Currently, most major theaters where musicals are performed, such as the Doosan Arts Center and the National Jeongdong Theater, have seats for the disabled, but the problem of disabled people actually attending the show and returning home is not that simple. Also, as can be easily expected, accessibility to small and medium-sized theaters in Daehakro is significantly low. The primary task to increase physical accessibility is very clear. It is about changing the structure of the theater. However, in order to implement this, voluntary consent or legal regulations are required. In the case of Broadway, it is also important to remember that theater repairs were carried out for a long time through lawsuits from the Department of Justice following the enactment of the ADA (Americans with Disability Act) in 1990.
‘Modu Arts Theater’, which opened in September 2023 at the Korea Center for Arts and Culture for the Disabled, is an ideal theater model that solves accessibility issues both on and off stage. However, of course, discussions about musicals and disabilities cannot be limited to specific theaters or physical conditions. In response to this, a permanent accessibility manager position can be an alternative. An accessibility manager can be thought of as playing a role similar to a theater security guard. Currently, not only the Modu Arts Theater but also the 2023 Seoul International Performing Arts Festival (SPAF) has actively hired an accessibility manager, so it can be expected that accessibility work will be unified and specialized through this position. You can also consider creating a universal sign so that accessibility information can be intuitively viewed both online and offline, or having the house manager also serve as an accessibility manager, even if it is limited. If this becomes possible, an atmosphere of ‘care’ and ‘welcome’ will be added to the atmosphere of the theater before the performance. There is also a way to minimize potential conflicts by creating separate accessibility sessions or announcing them in advance.
If that happens, elements within the theater that can help disabled audiences, such as sign language interpretation, Korean subtitles, and voice description services, will be able to be used relatively comfortably. But these physical circumstances are all secondary. What must come before this is to achieve a change in perception of musicals as an art that everyone can enjoy. Case 3 above is a type of incident that occurred due to an imbalance in perception. The audience sitting in front of me must have come to the theater because they wanted to see Performance B and thought they could see it, and no one is qualified to judge the value of his actions. If the perception that “musicals are art that everyone can enjoy” had been properly instilled in both the audience and the theater, everyone, including autistic audiences, would have been able to enjoy the performance comfortably while faithfully satisfying the purpose of coming to the theater.
The change in perception can become more serious as musicals bring disability into the narrative. To date, only a handful of Korean creative musicals have dealt with disabilities. “Combined” (premiered in 2022, National Theater), “Alice” (premiered in 2023, Butterfly to the Island), “Helen and Me” (premiered in 2023, Geolpan Theater Company), “Kiki’s Borderline Personality Disorder Diary” (Premiered in 2024, produced by a performance studio) is all (performances produced only for the disabled were excluded). “Combined” and “Helen and Me” aimed to be barrier-free performances, but “Combined” showed an attempt to elevate the barrier-free element into a style by making the voice commentator a character. “Kiki’s Borderline Personality Disorder Diary” is a work that shares the same methodology as “Next to Normal” and “Dear Evan Hansen”, which are currently being performed in 2024, in terms of ‘personality’. The party nature that permeates every point of the performance embodies the narrative of the main character suffering from borderline personality disorder in a very dense manner.
However, it is worth noting that all four works were produced by national or public organizations or were the result of public subsidies. This reflects the reality that barrier-free performances or disability narratives, which require many complex considerations, are not being attempted in the private sector. What if we changed our perspective a little? Rather than condensing disability into a source of limitation and pain, how about boldly using it as a foundation on which anything can be attempted? For example, the immersive revival version of “Oklahoma,” which premiered at St. Anne’s Warehouse in 2018, is a good example of this. At the time, the comical character Ado Annie in the play was played by Ali Stroker, who plays in a wheelchair, and the subversiveness of the performance was further strengthened by raising the bar to a character full of vitality who does not know where to go. In the previously mentioned “The Little Big Things,” the scene where actor Ed Larkin is lifted into the air in a wheelchair shows aesthetic beauty that goes beyond limitations. These are points where commercial possibilities can be explored.
I remember a student I once met at a special lecture at a certain university. He came up to me and asked if I could have a chat with him. I had a friend who had a speech impediment. The following was written on the paper: “My dream is to become a musical writer. “Can I do something like this?” In his arms was a “Fan Letter” script. It is natural to envy those with musical talent. However, I hope that ‘this kind of person’ will speak to the world with a story that only he can tell. We just keep asking questions and moving forward. there is no answer.
Source | The Musical
Trans/Shared by | Musical in Life
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