Between preservation and renewal: reconsidering technology in contemporary Pansori training

Abstract

Technology, when used in Korean pansori training, is routinely critiqued as producing copycat voices or moving away from long-standing ideologies and traditional practices. At the same time, recording technologies, digitised resources, media circulation and online platforms permeate contemporary training praxis. This article examines this perceived antithesis by first charting the heterogeneous interface between traditional pedagogies and cross-genre, intercultural and amateur pansori performance, then tracing shifting attitudes towards technology. Building on the author’s fieldwork in 2009, embodied training alongside recent electronic resources in 2019 and interviews with pansori singers and teachers, it further examines the YouTube channel Bonjour Pansori and contemporary iterations of mountain training (sankongbu). Technologies in pansori training, it is argued, are ontoepistemologically entangled in less clear-cut ways than any polar opposition between preservation and renewal might imply.