Arts American Comedy, Korean Trouble
posted by on December 18 at 15:37 PM
I just got this email from Chris Tharp, who once lived in Seattle and was part of the Piece of Meat Theater1 and has been working as an English teacher in Busan, South Korea for the past two and a half years. Now Tharp and some other teachers are in trouble with the law over a sketch comedy show:
Since I’ve been over here, I’ve done a little performing in the expat community in this city. Two weeks ago, I produced a comedy show called Babo-Palooza! (babo means “idiot” or “fool” in Korean). We sold out two nights in a small theater where we took the piss out of ourselves and Korea as well, complete with fake puke and on onstage pissing (I tried infuse it with a bit of the old Piece of Meat aesthetic.)
The show was a big hit. People laughed hard and loud.
However…
This week, all of us involved with the show were detained by the local police. They had sent a couple of undercover detectives to watch the show. We were questioned for two hours, drug tested, and fingerprinted. They are accusing of breaking the law by violating our visas and not getting permission to perform the show. They are using this as a pretext to go after us because they were offended by some of the content.
Several of us are now facing large fines and deportation. The story is blowing up all over the Korean press—it’s making the major papers and websites. Korea purports to be a democracy with free speech, and yet they are rounding up foreigners for the crime of performing a weekend comedy show.
Here’s the story from the Korea Herald (where we learn, among other things, that the supposedly illegal, visa-violating comedians had applied for a city arts grant to offset costs).
Updates (hopefully) forthcoming.
1. Piece of Meat made extremely physical, dark, and gritty theater about desperate characters: moonshiners, drug dealers, hippie losers. They also used to walk around Bumbershoot half-naked, wrapped in bloody, muddy bedsheets, carrying rubber snakes, and canting out shitty spoken word. They had the audacity to call themselves buskers and ask for money. Seattle audiences had the idiocy to cough it up. My favorite Piece piece was The Still, which was in some tiny theater I can’t even remember, and involved a fight scene involving cast iron skillets. Here is a review of one of their shows by sometime Stranger arts editor Eric Fredericksen.
Piece of Meat was the best fringe theater in Seattle, maybe they'll come home.
Dude, we need to get the Korean-American community and the US Embassy involved in this.
I'm actually surprised that some of the teachers who have been in-country for over two years seem genuinely stunned that the government would respond like this. The South Korean bureaucracy exists in a thin-skinned state of denial at a level the Bush administration can only aspire to emulate. There are also some cultural issues here that are best addressed by an actual Korean, but what I see is a stunning display of cultural ignorance from one side and an outrageous, petty reaction from the other.
Would someone (LGSS, an "actual Korean," or anybody else) care to fill us in on what about the performance provoked such a strong reaction—enough to sell out the house and get detained by the police?
Oh, fine. I suppose I deserve that for multitasking while typing.
I agree with GITA. This is actually something we should get our representatives involved in. I haven't heard from McDermott since the election, he and Cantwell should be all over this.
Brendan, if you have Chris's email addy, send it my way, let's get together and put some political pressure on our politicians to put some political pressure on the Koreans.
I'm starting to spread the word too, I'd appreciate if someone (Slog? Stranger?) posted/printed the relevant contact info so we can start putting that pressure on.
Piece of Meat have A LOT of friends in this city, we'll pull for them.
Hang in there guys!
-Karl
Piece of meat theater used to be Seattle`s best fringe quadromundosycho theater group untill they left.never did I see such realistic performances. simply amazing,and highly entertaining
the world was not ready and now we see the korian are not ready for p.o.m. top man Chris. please give your support and talk to who ever you can about this. we can not let Chris and his friends sit in some ding dong dark cell because of some paranoid rice eating Korians. Arik.
Howdy from beautiful South Korea, the Land of the Morning Calm!
It's great to see the comments of support, guys.
As for as what's going on here, it's just wait and see, for the moment. I'm not in jail, but I am facing getting fucked off from this place and my very nice job I have now. The cops are wrapping up their investigation, and passing it along to the Prosecutor and Immigration, who will then levy fines and/or deportation orders. Or we could be warned and let off. We don't know for certain, but they definitely want to intimidate us.
I'll keep posting here as things develop. Please check out my blog as well, as I post things there first.
Thanks!
CT
Just click on my name to get to my blog.
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