She took pansori to Avignon. France called her a 'rock star'

"Are you 'Neige, Neige, Neige'?"

Last month, at a souvenir shop during the Avignon Festival in southern France, staff members recognized the pansori performer Lee Ja-ram.

"Neige" means snow in French, and they were referring to the local title of "Snow, Snow, Snow," Lee's pansori reimagining of Leo Tolstoy's short story "Master and Man." A friend had watched the technical rehearsal the day before and told them they "had to see it."

"It was a place filled with people who love the arts. Everywhere you went, people were talking about performances," Lee recalled during a press conference Wednesday in Seoul. "It was like a dream world — a place where, for those few weeks, artists, art lovers and the people working alongside them to make art filled nearly every corner of the city."

The memories are still fresh for Lee, whose "Snow, Snow, Snow" returns to Seoul next month at LG Arts Center after becoming a breakout sensation at one of Europe's most prestigious performing arts events.

After premiering in April last year at LG Arts Center's small black-box theater, the production was selected for the IN program at the 80th Avignon Festival, where it was presented four times at the Opera Grand Avignon.

The festival, which designated Korean as an official language this year, presented nine Korean productions, including Lee's.

Despite the blistering heat of southern France, each performance of "Snow, Snow, Snow" was met with a standing ovation. The production also drew considerable attention from the French press.

The French newspaper Le Monde, which featured the production on the front page of its special festival coverage, praised its ability to move freely among "song, theater, mime and even stand-up comedy," writing that Lee draws audiences into her world almost as soon as she takes the stage.

France Culture, the country's public radio network, introduced Lee as "the rock star of the Avignon Festival."

For a performer of pansori, it was an unfamiliar and exhilarating description.

In Korea, Lee said, pansori comes with a ready-made set of images: folding screens, straw mats and the tightly coiled hair associated with traditional performers.

"Sometimes you have to lead the audience away from those ideas and say, 'This isn't that,'" she said. "But French audiences knew nothing about pansori, so in a way, they had no prejudice. They approached it with a sense of surprise — as if discovering, 'This art form has this kind of beauty, too.'"

Pansori and the imagination

Lee has worn many hats over the years. She first captured the affection of the Korean public as a child singer at age 4 in 1984. Since then, she has been a singer in an indie band and an actor in both musicals and stage plays.

But above all, Lee is one of the country's best-known "sorikkun," or pansori singers — and one of the rare performers in the field who can sell out theaters on the strength of her name alone.

Pansori is a traditional Korean narrative performance in which a singer tells an epic story through a combination of song, spoken narration and expressive gestures, accompanied by a "gosu," a drummer who provides rhythmic accompaniment and vocal encouragement. The art form traditionally draws on five surviving narrative cycles passed down since the Joseon era.

In recent decades, pansori has taken on new forms. Changgeuk companies have adapted the tradition for larger casts, creating works that can resemble musicals or operas, while also developing new repertoire.

Lee, however, has carved out a singular place for herself as a 21st-century sorikkun: She stands onstage with a drummer and creates entirely new pansori works, often adapting literary classics and writing both the scripts and the music herself.

Her repertoire of original works includes "Sacheonga" and "Eokcheokga," inspired by the works of Bertolt Brecht; "A Stranger's Song," based on a short story by Gabriel Garcia Marquez; and "The Old Man and the Sea," adapted from the novel of the same name by Ernest Hemingway. All have become massive hits, taking her work to audiences around the world.

Her confidence in what she has built is unmistakable. In her first memoir, published in 2022, Lee wrote: "My name will remain an important part of the history of Korean pansori. So if you get the chance, come see one of my works while I'm still performing. Then you'll be able to say, 'I saw Lee Ja-ram perform. I joined in the 'chuimsae' (exclamatory words) while she was still onstage.'"

For Lee, the essence of pansori is "an encounter of imaginations."

"Imagination fuels a pansori performance," she said. "We use our imaginations together, so each and every audience member can create their own snowfield while watching 'Snow, Snow, Snow.' And then we return to our daily lives carrying that imagination with us."

That exchange, she believes, is what sets pansori apart.

"I don't know how much more poetic that could be."

People, she added, go through life getting worn down, sometimes losing sight of something important, only to find it again through an unexpected moment. In a world that is gradually becoming black and white, she said, art is an attempt to restore color.

"I think that's where art comes in. It helps us rediscover something we've lost, often through an unexpected encounter."

The work, which made its debut last year, has now traveled as far as Avignon.

"What will all those accumulated experiences unfold into next? I'm looking forward to discovering that myself," Lee said.

Before returning to Seoul, "Snow, Snow, Snow" will be performed at the Asia Culture Center in Gwangju on Sept. 18 and 19, followed by performances at the Gumi Culture and Arts Center on Oct. 8 and 9. It will also travel to the Jeju Arts Center on Dec. 4 and 5.