Ivanna Yi

Ivanna Sang Een Yi is an Assistant Professor of Korea Studies at Cornell University. As a scholar of Korean literature, culture, and performance, her research focuses on the performative dimensions of living oral traditions as they interact with literature and the environment from the late Chosŏn period to the present. She has published on the relationship of p’ansori and literature, contemporary Korean poetry, and the storying of land in the Indigenous oral traditions of the Americas. At Ithacasori, she will lead a masterclass exploring the connections between Korean oral performance traditions like p’ansori, literature, and ecological storytelling.

Abstract

According to oral tradition, Korean p’ansori (epic dramatic storytelling) singers from the late Chosŏn dynasty would sing in front of waterfalls until their vocal cords bled and they could hear their voices over the sound of the water. The acquisition process of the p’ansori voice today involves fewer waterfalls and more cityscapes, occurring primarily in the private studios of master teachers and practice rooms of educational institutions in Seoul. Yet for the serious student, intensive study outside of the city is required for mastery of the voice: the student travels with their teacher to attend mountain study (san kongbu), where they practice singing in a natural environment near water, forests, and mountains. Drawing on two years of ethnographic fieldwork and close readings of p’ansori songs, this talk investigates the relationship between p’ansori and the more-than-human world and the contemporary implications of this indigenous practice. Analyzing the p’ansori storytelling tradition from an environmental humanities perspective and with an ecocritical framework, this paper situates p’ansori singing as an interspecies and dialogic art form and argues that p’ansori singers engage with the agency of the more-than-human world to transform their voices during mountain study.