4.12.00

Tonight at the Seattle Art Museum the Yongin Art Troupe performed a sampler of Korean music and dance. They must love those because every performance I've ever seen of traditional music and dance in Korea, and even China, is a medley. It's like a buffet, and you know how big of a hit those are on the other side of the Pacific. Yongin University. I've never heard of it so it must not be very good. Well, I know it's not good because the Vice President of the University, who was traveling along with the students, is a woman and they would never allow a woman to occupy a position that close to the top at a prestigious university. I knew it would be amateurish and I knew it would be a buffet. I went anyway because you know that place got to me and now I can't help myself. And when I got there the place was nowhere near full but full of Koreans mostly. There were a couple young white folks like me who probably lived there at one time. I saw a mixed couple wearing modern hanbok, the cheaply-made but expensive-anyway kind bought off the rack at a store like that one on the south end of Insadong-no. Several Chinese people sat behind me and when they spoke I knew what language it was from the first three syllables. It sounded as familiar to me as Korean. The first to go was a plump young man playing the bamboo flute -- should've kept my program so I could give the proper name. He was the poorest of all, sad thing; we could hear the air whistling somewhere not through the pipe and it was distracting, distorted, juvenile. But it took me there; I mean it took me right to that tea house with the birds and I smelled the pine nuts on that tea of seven flavors and we were sitting on cushions listening to the quiet trickles of water in the stone fountain. There was quite a bit of dancing, which is what followed the flute. Sungmu. A young man in a medusa of white silk with those 12-foot sleeves fellating the sticks held in his hands. He moved like a woman, slowly and toe-pointedly. (I love the gender bender of the Asian form; what separates man and woman is only a bit of hair, really, and nothing more. He looked more a woman for his face lacked roundness. I know he is gay, and I have rarely known that about a Korean man in Korea.) His sheathed arms punctuated the beat of that blessed drum, a folded square of paper twisting on the end of wire. That's what he was: animated origami. And it did look professional; I know he wants to be a national treasure. Dancing and zithers. I dig the zithers you know, but not so much as the drumming. But pansori ... pansori is masterpiece. A young woman, her voice just beginning its growl, roared through ovarial lips and grimaces. Shapelessly all voice and occasionally an arm extended. I heard the zip of her fan as it expanded to dramatize a moment in the story. Out of nowhere I understood "uri pi." Is it a story of tragedy? Or patriotism? They are the same. The teacher wore the horsehair and answered her calls in taps and yesses and, every now and then, a chigum. Now! The sensuality kills me. (How is it that I know all of these things? The stuff about the toes and wrists and head movements and colors and gender. I mean, what it means for one sex or the other to bang on the drum, to cross the line into restrained lewdness: Orbs of silk, puckered at the center and oozing from that ligature.) Finally the drums. Men and women but one woman in particular taking it in through the creases in her legs. (Some of these students are lovers on this trip.) They writhe on the sweat of overripe fruit, crying out when momentum overtakes them. The guy with the horn comes out and blows. The drummers erupt and that one woman with the hourglass drum is all teeth and wings. All of them sit wide-legged, rocking and pounding at the hips, transposing our hearts with the most basic human rhythm. I am numb at the jaw from shivers of delight; I am paralyzed in everything but that one desire to move with them.

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