Chan E. Park is a researcher and performer of pansori, and Professor Emeritus of Korean Literature and Performance at Ohio State University, USA. Her publications include Voices from the Straw Mat: Toward an Ethnography of Korean Story Singing (2003) and Songs of Thorns and Flowers: Bilingual Performance and Discourse on Modern Korean Poetry Series (2010-2015).
Chan E. Park’s Korean Pansori as Voice Theatre offers a special journey into a distinctive Korean performance genre that mingles voice, rhythm, and gesture to populate and re-enliven the world of classic Korean tales. As both a scholar-ethnographer and as a seasoned performer of pansori, Park navigates a complex history, bringing her study into the present and engaging, first-hand, with some of the knotty issues at stake in heritage preservation. * Laurel Kendall, American Museum of Natural History * Uniquely situated as a scholar of literature and theatre and as performer of pansori, raised in Korea, teaching at Ohio State, and lecturing and performing widely, Chan Park offers here an entrée into the world of this remarkable genre, leading us through its technical basics and history to a nuanced consideration of its place in the 21st century. An engaging and fresh take on a genre she knows intimately. * R. Anderson Sutton, Professor of Music & Chair, Ethnomusicology Program University of Hawai'i at Manoa, USA *