Pansori: “Chunhyangga” – Korea (Traditional)
A performative ritual of narrative agency, where a single voice, drum, and fan channel collective memory, social critique, and emotional transformation through sonic embodiment and gestural minimalism
Thinking Through Alfred Gell (1945-1997)’s Art and Agency
Introduction
Pansori (판소리) is a Korean traditional art form in which a single vocalist (the sorikkun) delivers a long narrative performance—often several hours in length—accompanied only by a drummer (gosu) and a folding fan as prop. The epic story of Chunhyangga recounts the tale of Chunhyang, the faithful daughter of a courtesan who resists an abusive magistrate and remains loyal to her beloved. It is both a love story and a tale of resistance and virtue.
Unlike operatic or ensemble traditions, Pansori is stripped to the bone: it is vocal theatre at its most elemental. From Alfred Gell’s Art and Agency perspective, Pansori is not performance-as-expression but performance-as-action, where voice, rhythm, and story function as causal agents in a social, ethical, and aesthetic network. It is an artwork that acts, not depicts.
Art as Index of Narrative and Social Agency
Gell defines artworks as indexes of intentionality. In Pansori:
The vocalist’s performance indexes personal mastery, emotional conviction, and communal memory,
The stories told are moral architectures, filled with social critique, satire, and ethical ideals,
The voice’s modulation, from speech to shriek, from sob to melody, traces the emotional topography of the tale in real time.
The storyteller does not merely narrate—they manifest characters, enact scenes, and trigger response. The voice becomes a ritual surrogate, and each syllable is an agent of transformation.
Distributed Agency: Singer, Drummer, Audience, Character
Pansori is a triangular performance system, matching Gell’s idea of distributed agency:
The singer embodies multiple characters (often switching between them with changes in pitch, timbre, or rhythm),
The drummer responds with chuimsae—verbal interjections (“eolssigu!”, “johta!”)—that guide tempo, affirm emotion, and create communal rhythm,
The audience joins in through laughter, tears, verbal responses, or even silence-as-attention,
The characters—historical, legendary, archetypal—become temporarily real through the event.
In Gell’s terms, the Pansori singer is a nexus, not a soloist—a point through which ancestral voices, social values, and collective sentiment converge.
Sori and the Sonic Embodiment of Emotion
The vocalization (sori) in Pansori is:
Often rough, guttural, sustained, and unadorned by classical polish,
Infused with han—the Korean aesthetic-emotional complex of grief, longing, and perseverance,
Improvised within a fixed melodic and rhythmic structure (jo and jangdan), allowing for emotive freedom within ritual boundaries.
Gell would interpret this not as musical expression, but as a sonic action upon the audience. The voice acts directly—crying, cracking, raging, joking—to induce emotional alignment, not through illusion, but through authenticity performed with technique.
Temporality and Narrative Enactment
Pansori unfolds over extended durations (up to 6–8 hours in full):
Time is structured not linearly, but emotionally: scenes expand or contract based on the performer’s intensity,
Transitions are managed by tempo modulation and percussive cues, enabling ritual immersion,
The audience doesn’t watch a story—they live through it, suspended in shared performative time.
Gell would see this as an artwork that controls and reshapes time. Through rhythm, gesture, and storytelling, Pansori performs collective temporality, aligning performer and listener in a time-outside-time.
The Folding Fan as Multi-Modal Index
The folding fan, used by the singer, is not mere prop:
It becomes multiple objects (a sword, a letter, a gate),
Its gestures punctuate emotional peaks, serving as visual rhythm,
It represents economy of form—one object as a thousand meanings.
For Gell, the fan is an index of action: each flick, tap, or snap is a gesture of intentionality, integrating sound, movement, and representation into a unified agentive act.
Enchantment Through Voice and Endurance
The Pansori performance enchants not through spectacle, but through:
The sheer stamina of the performer—hours of vocal acrobatics that evoke ritual mastery,
The fusion of the serious and comedic—heartbreaking sincerity and biting satire in one breath,
The extreme control over tone and rhythm, often executed while seated or minimally moving.
Gell’s “technology of enchantment” is vividly embodied here: the performer’s skill appears near-superhuman, yet entirely grounded. The audience is drawn into an enchanted state not by fantasy, but by the transformational power of voice-as-agent.
Conclusion
From Alfred Gell’s anthropological theory, Pansori: “Chunhyangga” is a living, agentive artwork, where narrative voice acts upon the audience, where tradition flows through breath, and where the singular body of the performer becomes a channel for collective transformation.
It is not a story told, but a world made audible. The singer does not entertain—they act upon history, memory, and emotion, sculpting each moment with the force of voice, rhythm, and embodied truth.