Jeom-a Jeom-a Kongjeom-a

A reunification ritual celebrated through the wedding of a Southern groom and a Northern bride

“Ladies and gentlemen, you are now guests at a wedding. Anyone who’d like a commemorative photo, please come forward — we’ll send it to your home.”

In a corner of the Arirang office sits a thick album packed with photos taken on stage, mid-performance, with the audiences who came to Small Theatre Arirang in the hot summer of 1997. Those who left their address received a second surprise a few days later: the photo, in the mail.

When it premiered in May 1990 the play sparked the “gut debate,” and as the reunification movement spread on campuses it became a sensation, invited to more than thirty universities. Through a spirit wedding between a Northern maiden killed in the Korean War and a Southern young man killed in the Gwangju Democratic Uprising, it achieves on stage the nation’s longing for reunification. Expressing a heavy theme through cleansing ritual and play, with mask-dance satire and ceremonial beauty, it caught the eye of prominent foreign guests at the 1997 World Theatre Festival.

A mother dreams night after night of her son, killed seventeen years ago in Gwangju. A shaman from the South tells her she must hold a spirit wedding to console his wandering soul. Through a Hwanghae Province shaman they find a maiden who died in the war and try to join the two regions’ rituals, but the ghost of division disrupts the ceremony. After many efforts, with an earth-treading ritual carrying the living’s wish to unite them, the wedding is held and the cry of a “reunification baby” rings out.

Built on song, dance and music in the manner of a festive play, with masks, caricatured costumes, puppets, jangseung totems and many props, it was praised for its theatrical spectacle. The wedding-photo scene turned spectators into participants. And as two clashing ritual forms gradually merge into one, the play affirms that true reunification must begin with recovering cultural unity.