nanta

And on Wednesday, after the concert in Seoul on tuesday, I went back to Seoul on a culture workshop fieldtrip to the Korean equivalent of Broadway to see Nanta, which means "cooking." This was SO COOL, everyone reading this must pick up and come to Korea immediately to see it. It ran on Broadway in New York for a while, but I can't coerce the internet into telling me if it's still there. It was apparently received very well by American audiences, though. Doug and Mr. Stites and anybody else in charge of a group of high-school musicians should take their students there the next time they make a New York trip if it's running; they'll love it. The pictures are of the stage inside the theater, a cool sculpture of a cook made out of kitchen tools that was outside the theater, and the current poster advertising the show. Sorry about the head in the picture of the stage; I was sort of a little bit not actually allowed to take a picture, but there weren't any performers on and the usher looked extremely unenthused about enforcing the rule and ran away as soon as she told me not to, so I snapped one kind of quickly anyway and couldn't avoid the head. It was very bad, but I have not landed in jail just yet. Please don't reprint it. :)

Nanta is a non-verbal percussion performance, akin to Blue Man Group and Stomp. The premise of the show, which was delivered to us on a video screen right before it started, is that three cooks ("Head Cook", "Female", and "Cool Guy") are working hard to prepare a wedding feast by 6:00. The manager ("Manager") comes in and tells them they have to let his nephew ("Nephew) cook too, except Nephew is not a cook and doesn't know what he's doing. Hilarious antics ensue. The manager was not a big role, just came on stage occasionally to make it look like there was still a plot going on. Other than that, it was basically just a show of the four main characters, who were all athletic dancers and excellent percussionists, drumming on various kitchen things, having different sorts of drumming duels among themselves, and generally being side-splittingly funny. They had grilling and cutting-block apparati on the stage, and they really cooked there in front of us, chopping up chicken and cabbage and things and throwing them around in hot pots as part of the percussion. They also had a lot of great ways of getting the audience to participate, and they pulled two people from my group up on the stage, one to taste soup and act as half of the wedding couple, and the other to take part in the "dumpling challenge," in which he had to make a lot of dumplings really fast and lead the audience in cheers while all the actors ran offstage and disappeared. So it was great, and I had a wonderful time.

I don't think I have told the story of the culture workshop on here yet. Culture workshop is the class I was so excited about before I come, the one that I was talking up to everyone, having been promised sessions on bamboo flute and traditional calligraphy and tae kwon do. It has not been at all what was advertised and what we all expected, and in some ways it has been a frustrating disappointment. I'm not the only person here that was really looking forward to the things published about it and who based part of their decision to come here on this class, and I'm not the only one who's irritated about it, either. Partly my frustration just lies in not getting what I expected, but mostly I'm reconciled to that. The things we've done for the class fieldtrips--went to two art museums, visited the Korean Film Archive and saw a movie I'd like to purchase, went to see Nanta--are things that I've really enjoyed and definitely consider worthwhile. The two to four hours we've been asked to put in for lecture and discussion each week have been a waste of time that I've been really kind of angry about, and you all know that I am not generally a person to complain about classes. Our teacher is a well-meaning nice lady that I think knows her stuff reasonably well, but either nobody ever told her how to run a class before, or she didn't listen. I won't put the gory details on a blog, but basically, lecture consists of her rambling at the front of the room on and on about the same thing over and over, which often has nothing to do with the topic of the day's class. Discussion consists of her staring at a roomful of sixty people that doesn't want to be there because they've just had to sit through a stream-of-consciousness lecture, guilting a few brave souls into making up something to say so she'll stop staring, and then her repeating those persons' comments about eight different times, adding little or nothing, before moving back to the staring part of the cycle. I don't like it, I don't like it, and it's been the only thing about this trip I've been disappointed with. I'm trying to keep an open mind about it, though, because I really do like the fieldtrips, and I'm stuck with it whether I like it or not so I might as well try to be happy.

And I liked Nanta.