Universal Ballet

Ballet Musical Shim Chung

Universal Ballet Premiere Aug 16, 2007, Universal Arts Center
Libretto Mime : Juhwan Cho
Choreography Jongseung Lee
Music Eunjung Kim, Kevin Barber Pickard
Staging Jungwoong Yang
Set Design Iljin Lim
Costume Design Youngji Kim
Lighting Design Sunghyun Kim
Running Time 12 scenes/2 acts/110 minutes

What is a Ballet Musical?

The Ballet Musical is a genre made by adding songs from the musical theater to ballet's nonverbal expression of dance movement and mime, with a seasoning of elements from the world of drama, yielding a performance with maximum story-telling ability.



A fusion of a traditional Korean folk tale with ballet and musical theater


Ballet Musical Shim Chung, a friendly ballet production!

Ballet is a performing art traditionally attended mostly by connoisseurs, although there are also many people who say they'dlike to go see a ballet, even just one time. In an effort to expand ballet's appeal to a larger audience, this production was created with a more universal movement language and various other elements were added to make it more universally appealing.

The relationship between the roles of mime and dance has been totally rearranged. The mime style used is much more literal, so that the details of the story are more easily understood than with traditional ballet mime, and the dance numbers are used to convey the spirit and image of each scene. Also the lyrics of the songs and pansori (Korean Traditional solo Opera) help the audience understand the story.


Rediscover the Shim Chung story with contemporary characters!

One special feature of Ballet Musical Shim Chung is the story characters reborn in contemporary fashion. The miserable self-sacrificing Shim Chung that we remember is transformed into a young lady with an agenda who is shaping her own destiny. After the plaintive opening song, we may expect to see a pitiful, sad child, but Shim Chung plays cheerfully with her father and lives joyously with the villagers. The scenes with Bbaengdok (Shim's stepmother), well known from

the Simcheongga pansori, which were omitted in Universal Ballet's classic production of Shim Chung have been restored, while Bbaengdok has been transformed into a humorous character.

Other characters have been developed in new ways to make the show more interesting, such as the con-man monk who deceives Shim's father, promising to restore his signt for 300 bags of rice, and the Sea Dragon King who raises rabits for health and long life, the stuck-up Sea Prince and Chogong, a young sailor on the ship. The young sailor, Chogong is an entirely new character. The newest sailor on the crew, he reads the captain's mind, realizes that the captain

intends for Shim Chung to jump into the raging sea, feels an affinity for her and tries to save her. The affection that he feels for Shim Chung deepens to admiratinand awe as he watches her courageous leap overboard.

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