North Korean musicians warm up in Paris / Reuters
Last
week, North Korea's premier state instrumental ensemble, the Unhasu
Orchestra, performed in Europe for the first time since 1953, the year
the Korean War ended. The event was a landmark in North Korea's latest
show of opening and reform, a cycle it has repeated many times, this
time under the leadership of young new heir Kim Jung Un. The carefully
managed event was also a reminder that, with so much energy and scrutiny
applied to an event that would be boringly routine for most countries,
the world has a long way to go before seriously engaging North Korea on
touchier matters like, say, nuclear weapons or conflict with South
Korea.
In 1972, one week before President Richard Nixon's
historic trip to China, an ensemble of North Korean dancers and circus
performers stormed Paris, imitating the new push for cultural diplomacy
in Beijing. Individual North Korean musicians still occasionally
perform in the music competition circuit in Europe.
North
Korea's cultural diplomacy started during the Korean War and has not
changed a great deal since that time. The mission has always combined a
Stalinist style ruler-worship with, more practically, a way to press for
foreign donations for the impoverished county. During the war, North
Korean troupes regularly toured East Germany and China, both reliable
allies, where they ate well and collected as much material as humanly
possible, from cash to hydraulic drills, to take back home.
In
1952, several large delegations of North Korean performers set out for
European fundraising tours. German audiences were particularly
appreciative, lavishing private donations on the state chorus and
children's choirs that crisscrossed the Eastern bloc. One group
travelled with a few wounded veterans and General Kim Il. The general
was very much free to engage in fundraising trips, given that he had
left the command of his decimated army firmly in Chinese hands. Choirs
of North Korean orphans were particularly effective at eliciting
donations. Would it be possible, the East German bureaucrats who'd
organized the concerts asked in neatly typed letters from Leipzig, for
the North Koreans to send more orphans next time?
More recent
acts of North Korean musical diplomacy have followed a somewhat less
overtly pathetic model. Last October, then-leader Kim Jong Il unleashed
the Sea of Blood (Pibida) Opera Troupe, named for a revolutionary saga of Korean migrant women in Manchuria that was supposedly written by regime founder Kim Il Sung,
consolidating the relationship with his regime's most important patron.
Back home in North Korea, the regime portrayed the opera as an act of
Kim's personal, overactive, and micromanaging genius. The tour was also
an opportunity to show Chinese audiences that they were getting
something back for all their foreign aid to Pyongyang.
But the
North Korean leaders always find a way to rattle their sabers. North
Korea's official news agency probably chose their words carefully when,
on February 11, they declared that the Unhasu Orchestra was "more
powerful than a nuclear bomb." The country has a special skill for
mixing beautiful and belligerent, and the recent trip to Paris was no
exception.
The Unhasu Orchestra is made up primarily of Western
instruments, which are sometimes used, as they were in Paris last week,
alongside traditional Korean soloists. The group is a product -- the
most celebrated instrumental product, in fact -- of the state's
centrally controlled system of artistic training and production. The
ensemble bears the specific imprimatur of the Dear Leader, Kim Jong Il,
and his Respected Successor, Kim Jong Un. There are few greater signs of
political commendation for a North Korean official than to be invited
to appear with the leader at one of the orchestra's performances.
Last
June, in the Chinese city of Dandong, just across the border from North
Korea, I discussed the Unhasu orchestra with one of Dandong's ubiquitous North Korean musician-waitresses.
As we admired the front page of the state-run newspaper Rodong Sinmun
and its immense photo of Kim Jong Il implacably standing to applaud a
performance by the orchestra, I asked her what made the ensemble so
good. I wondered if it wasn't their conservatory training? "It is
because they want to honor the Supreme Leader (suryongnim)," she told me
earnestly.
Only days after a black Cadillac hearse paraded Kim
Jong Il's body though Pyongyang, the state produced, staged, and
repeatedly performed a huge choral-orchestral cantata all about the life
and legacy of the man who had portrayed himself as philosopher-king.
Rewards to the composers were rapidly distributed. The strings, brass,
and woodwinds of the Unhasu Orchestra stood at the centerpiece of those
performances, which were attended more than once by audiophile and
successor Kim Jong Un.
The group went on a punishing performance
schedule across North Korea. While the orchestra's main repertoire in
Paris was Brahms and Saint-Saens, North Korean state media strongly
implied that the Unhasu's tour there was imbued with the spirit of Kim
Jong Il, a demonstration for Europe of the Kimist renaissance in the
greatest and most generous country on earth, North Korea.
For
all its propaganda value back home, the orchestra tour also sent an
important message to Europe and the West: the country is receptive to
contact with the outside. The carefully staged pre-performance
activities were, in communicating this bit of diplomacy, practically as
important as the show itself. The North Korean musicians appeared at the
Louvre, posed with the Mona Lisa, and spent a day at Versailles. For a
country whose national propaganda often portrays such Western icons as
representations of barbarism and evil, this was a big deal. China's
state-run news agency Xinhua, an eager booster of North Korea's opening,
quoted a French violinist as saying, "with this collaboration, opening
itself to the world -- they will soon be at the level of their
neighbors."
As is so often the case with North Korea's
outreaches, this is probably about aid. The European Union Working Group
on North Korean Issues, which makes formal recommendations on food aid
to the country, is scheduled to meet later this month. Pyongyang has
probably noticed that international human rights abuses are getting more
attention in Europe lately, which could risk European support for food
aid to North Korea.
European leaders might also see an
opportunity for greater diplomatic access to Pyongyang, which Russia and
the U.S. have long dominated. Kim Jong Un was educated in a European
middle school, after all.
Still, North Korea is North Korea, and
happy engagement is not this regime's most comfortable habit. State-run
news on the day of the concert promoted military drills and angry
speeches by "Red Guard Worker-Peasant Militia," who used old machine
guns to blast holes in targets bearing the name of the South Korean
President. University students in Pyongyang were reported to volunteer
en masse for military service, each vowing to become one of "five
million human bombs to defend the sacred dignity of the DPRK's leaders."
The state news agency, responding in part to a new memoir released in
French by a North Korean refugee, also pledged to destroy those who
harmed the reputation of the DPRK.
These events can look absurd,
but West participates because it does not want to discourage any chance
for opening and because the idea of cultivating "civil society" ties is
too powerful to resist even if, properly speaking, North Korea does not
have a civil society. North Korea has left few openings for
engagement, and those that have been opened often blow up Pyongyang's
face. A recent figure skating championship in Pyongyang sparked scandal
in Finland, when a Finnish skater who participated was forced to apologize for the appearance of supporting the regime. A soccer team sent to play against Germany generated international mockery when the team's captain blamed the lightning for their loss.
Against
this ostinato of critique, the Unhasu Orchestra's trip to Paris was
another of North Korea's probably futile efforts to convince the outside
world that the rhythm of change in Pyongyang may in fact be
accelerating.
This article available online at:
http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2012/03/the-sea-of-blood-opera-show-a-history-of-north-koreas-musical-diplomacy/254697/
