Between Destruction and Enchantment:
Bonn Park on ‘The Third War’

Why don’t you start by briefly introducing yourself and telling us a bit about “The Third War”, which was showcased last year and is to be performed in its entirety at this year’s SPAF (Seoul Performing Arts Festival)?
“The Third War” is a war opera set in a sort of fantasy world. After a hundred years’ peace, the three great nations go to war for a third time, due to a curse that strikes once every hundred years. Nothing can be done about it: the world has to go to war. 

Musical storytelling

“The Third War” is conceived as an opera. Why did you pick opera, a form of musical theatre, to tell a story about war?
To me, theatre, art and music are languages of emotion. And opera is, to me, the realm of the greatest emotions, of catharsis. Nothing on stage is more majestic, more overwhelming, than opera – and I say this as someone who actually knows next to nothing about opera.

The way we laypeople imagine the sound and the look of opera: gilded, ornate old European opera houses, an orchestra, tuxedos, red velvet curtains, opulent costumes and multiple sets, divine singing.

War is about everything – it’s a matter of life and death. You can’t get any more existential than that. In my opinion, opera is the only genre that can do justice to this subject matter. Music seems to be far more than a means of creating atmosphere in your works. Its role is as central as the script. What does “telling a story through music” mean to you? What’s the relationship between music and text in your works?
Music has a great manipulative power. The choice of genre in and of itself determines how seriously, casually, joyfully or attentively we listen to the music: pop is for leisure, a musical is a lightweight form of stage magic, we listen to classical music attentively with our legs crossed. Opera is earnest – and earnest enough for war.

The music then manipulates our emotions, driving them straight into our hearts – and we can’t resist. So it’s an ace in the hole for aesthetic storytelling. Together, the music and libretto can capture the complexity and ambiguity of reality as I perceive it: namely, as being always difficult, always ambiguous and simultaneous.

Let’s say the music is sad and the libretto cheerful: then we’ll be simultaneously sad and cheerful. They don’t match at first, but that’s only because we’ve forgotten how to handle complexity. The combination of libretto and music apparently going in opposite directions forces us to accept contradictory states once again, even to delight in them and feel that they’re possible.

“The Third War” deals with such real and weighty subjects as war and politics. What can music express or make us experience in this regard that’s hard to get across using language or dialogue alone?
Yes, exactly. In this case, the weighty subject is war, but that doesn’t mean the music cannot – or must not  – be beautiful. I’m not interested in a photorealistic portrayal of violence, trauma, bombs, suffering and so forth. Fortunately, most of us have never experienced war first-hand, only in books, on screens, through algorithms.

Our final act is a twenty-minute battle scene, but without any shooting or stabbing. Instead, it consists of ballet, stage magic, enchanting moments and an atomic bomb in the form of a dancer falling very slowly from the sky whilst dancing softly. This is not a glorification of war. On the contrary, the contrast between destruction and enchantment elicits feelings that hurt all the more because they’re so beautiful.

It can’t be put into words, which aren’t precise enough for what we feel – and that’s fine, because we have the stage and art for that, the language of emotions. Different cultural and linguistic contexts often come together in your pieces. Your collaboration with the German composer Ben Rössler is one example: he composes for Korean works without speaking Korean. How do you experience this process together? What does it mean for the collaboration when music is written for a language that the composer himself doesn’t speak?
Not much, actually. It mainly means having to develop more steps in the working process and systems to make it work. Mozart composed in Italian; Swedish producers create a great deal of K-pop music. That sounds so simple, but Ben is a genius – not just musically, but also in developing systems that make it look, from the outside, as though this were no obstacle.

Bonn Park’s opera: Between tradition and innovation

In works like “Three Billion Sisters” and “Gymnasium”, you’ve repeatedly engaged with the form of opera and reimagined it in various ways. What makes you keep coming back to opera? And how does your own conception of opera relate to traditional opera?
To me, opera is the grand, majestic, as well as cumbersome and slow, stage genre. It’s the genre for the very biggest emotions. I’m always interested in emotions. The bigger, the better. But emotions that belong to the audience, not the performers.

A play that really goes all out, in which the actor supposedly feels what his character feels – that’s not for me as a spectator, it’s only for the actor, and the spectators often see right through it. Those feelings don’t belong to the director, playwright or composer either. What happens on stage – whether theatre or opera or whatever – should always belong to the audience.

That doesn’t mean it should pander to the audience. On the contrary, it has to juggle our emotions. It has to give us, as the audience, those emotions and even impose them on us. Music can do that, and so can opera.

So I use opera as I see fit to create all of this, and not as an end in itself – to produce “opera” – that involves adhering to hard-and-fast rules. I see myself as a link between art and reality. I try to understand both and create something which, in the best-case scenario, everyone will understand – not necessarily like, but understand.

That involves updating a centuries-old genre in a way I intuitively feel is right. We keep what’s good about it: the majesty and opulence, the orchestra and singing, the earnestness and beauty, the cathartic element.

But we get rid of what has become unbearable for most people: its length, the old stories – none of which is designed for my attention span –, the fussy adherence to rules, the intellectualism. I’m not out to betray or challenge ope

Opera is still widely associated with classical music, orchestras and trained opera singers. Your work, on the other hand, also takes up elements of pop culture and everyday culture as a matter of course, along with various different forms of language. How broadly would you define the term “opera” in our day and age? Is there anything you’d consider indispensable for a work to still be called an opera?
It’s not up to me to define terms or argue about genres: that’s up to the audience – or rather, actually, scholars and the experts. I don’t think artists ever stop to consider when something is still a chamber play, pop art, contemporary dance or opera. They just create. I’m happy to leave the job of evaluating and categorizing to others.

Cross-genre works and the German theatre scene

To what extent has this approach been influenced by the German theatre scene and its conditions of production, along with your personal artistic interests? Do you think certain structures or conditions in the German theatre system enable artists to explore the boundaries between genres with relative freedom?
In order to draw a comparison here, I’d need to be familiar with many other theatre systems. But I don’t think so. There’s theatre and music all over the world. I think what Ben and I are doing is simply unique and has nothing to do with the German theatre system. On the contrary, it’s often tough going. It often involves forcefully challenging existing structures, and that requires a great deal of commitment on the part of the receiving theatre to make it possible.

Takeaways for the Korean audience

In closing, what’s the takeaway you’d like to give the Korean audience who’ll be experiencing “The Third War”? What questions, thoughts or perhaps even emotions would you like spectators to take home with them after the show?
“The Third War” was born out of a sense that the most trending emotion is fear. And in a world where everything is polarized, fear is the feeling that unites us all. There’s something beautiful about that, I’d say, seeing as we never find any other consensus and we’re constantly at odds with one another.

So we can all sit down together in a theatre, regardless of whether you’re of this or that persuasion, and finally experience something together again. Our show is certainly sad and heavy. But it’s also beautiful, opulent and enchanting, and it speaks to you.

So it’s a matter of being frightened together and ultimately, thanks to the power of opera, exorcizing some of that fear together.
 

Interview & Concept: Sohee Shin
Korean Translation: Jeeyeoun Kim
English Translation: Eric Rosencrantz