Seminar Series - Keio+Emory | "Performing for Failure: Embodying Grief on Stage Through Ethnodrama"

"Performing for Failure: Embodying Grief on Stage Through Ethnodrama" 

Yoon Won Chang | PhD Candidate Department of Anthropology, Emory University 

This talk is an excerpt from an ethnography that documents the making of a theater performance about grief after suicide in contemporary South Korea. I analyze how the actors and the director interpret and embody the real-life stories collected through interviews with suicide loss survivors. The creative team experiences the inevitable failures in interpreting the grief, yet attempts to embody the already fractured self-narratives of pain and healing provided by the survivors. I ask how grief becomes a collective experience and how the language and the body are negotiated in this process. 

"I am a PhD candidate in Anthropology at Emory University. For the past seven years, I have closely accompanied suicide loss survivors in Korea by organizing grief groups and other cultural events. In my Doctoral dissertation, I explore how suicide loss survivors' experience of grief is sculpted, negotiated, and refracted within the stat suicide prevention policies, the psychiatric intervention, self-narratives, and collective practices of healing."

Intro music: Scream Villian - The Fable - Bensound

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NOTE:  The views and opinions expressed by the speaker do not necessarily reflect those held by the Center for Mind, Brain, and Culture or Emory University.