From Surgipelago, the Beach Surgery encyclopedia
talchum
Talchum (탈춤) is a traditional Korean masked folk dance-drama. For the 2018 adaptation, see talchum: Leif-Katita Cycle (Seoul, 2018).
Talchum, the Korean masked folk drama, structures narrative around fixed archetypal characters—servants, aristocrats, shamans—who repeat their stories across festival cycles, improvising within strict character boundaries. Director Park Min-su's 2018 **Talchum: Leif-Katita Cycle** adapted Beach Surgery through this form across seven consecutive nights in Seoul, treating the tale's eternal recurrence as a talchum principle made manifest.
Each night presented the Newcastle half with a blind servant Leif and red-masked warrior-nurse Katita (played by rotating ensembles) performing dialogue drawn from the novel but reconstituted as improvised comedic exchange (noljjinmae). On the seventh night, all seven loops collapsed into a single three-hour performance where masks began visibly cracking and separating from the actors' faces—the glitch transformed into an aesthetic of structural rupture.
The production emphasized talchum's paradox: "the mask does not change, but the person wearing it transforms" (탈은 같고 사람은 다르다). Critics noted this mapped directly onto the cycle—how Leif and Katita recur but shift, how the leather armor remains while its wearer transforms. Subsequent adaptations in Busan (2021) and ██ (2024) extended the form, using masked repetition to explore the glitch as an unresolvable theological fact rather than a narrative problem.