Veteran director Kim Jeong-ok, who led Korean theater to new horizons through the troupe ‘Jayu’, died on the morning of the 17th. Aged 94.

He was a ‘legend’ of Korean theater, directing more than 200 plays on stages at home and abroad over more than six decades. Born in Gwangju, he graduated from Gwangju Seo Middle School, entered the Department of Korean Literature at Chung-Ang University, then transferred to and graduated from the Department of French Language and Literature at Seoul National University. He studied French literature and film at the Sorbonne in France. During his studies abroad, influenced by playwright Yu Chi-jin (1905~1974) who had come to France, he turned to theater.

After returning to Korea in 1959, he began his path in theater when he became a full-time instructor in the Department of Theater and Film at Chung-Ang University. While at Chung-Ang University, he guided the theater club at Ewha Womans University and also worked as a reporter for the Minguk Ilbo. His screenplay <The Trap of Love> was adapted into a film in 1960, and that same year he also participated when Kim Jong-won and Lee Young-il founded the Film Critics Association.

In 1961, he began stage directing with students from Ewha Womans University through <Lysistrata>; after serving as assistant director for the Drama Center opening production <Hamlet> in 1962, he embarked on a full-fledged career as a director with the founding of the Minjung Theater Company in 1963. The inaugural production was <The Egg>, followed by the absurdist play <The Bald Soprano>. The cast included Park Geun-hyung, Oh Hyun-ju, Kim Hye-ja, Chu Song-woong, Park Jung-ja, Kim Moo-saeng, Kwon Seong-deok, Kim Jeong, and Gu Mun-hoe, among others. In 1977, Eugene Ionesco, the author of <The Bald Soprano>, visited Korea, saw the production, and offered praise.

In 1966, together with stage designer Lee Byung-bok (1927~2017), he founded the first-generation Korean theater collective, the Jayu troupe, and rose to prominence as a leading director in Korea with works such as <Feast of the Vagabonds> (1966). With top performers of the era, including Park Jung-ja and others, he pursued the ‘third theater’, overturning realism and West-centered perspectives.

In 1969, through the ‘Cafe Theatre’ that Lee Byung-bok established in Chungmuro, Seoul, he launched the small-theater movement. By directing translated works ranging from salon dramas to Molire comedies and absurdist plays, he pursued experiments that transformed the realistic stage. He led the development of a stage aesthetic that emphasized comedy and theatricality, and through directing original plays he presented experimental stages that incorporated and re-created Korean traditions.

Starting with <What Shall It Become> (1978), he began incorporating the traditional performing arts and gut ritual forms of Korea into theater. Through works such as <Blood Wedding> (1984) and <Even if the Wind Blows, Flowers Bloom> (1984), he was credited with transforming theater ‘from Western to Eastern’ and ‘from foreign to Korean’.

From the 1980s, leading the Jayu troupe, he presented works in more than ten countries, including France, Spain, and Japan, that reinterpreted the traditional sensibilities of Korea in a contemporary way and earned acclaim. He experimented with collective creation that made theater together with actors and staff such as stage designers, with total theater, and with montage techniques not bound by plot.

He became a member of the National Academy of Arts of Korea in 1991. In June 1995, he became the first Asian to serve as president of the International Theatre Institute (ITI) of UNESCO, was re-elected for three consecutive terms, and was later appointed honorary president. He also served as president of the Korea Culture and Arts Foundation (2000) and president of the National Academy of Arts (2011).

In 2004, he also opened the ‘Face Museum’ in Gwangju, Gyeonggi, which gathered works related to faces. In 2002, he became the first Korean to receive Commandeur, the highest grade of the French Order of Arts and Letters, and he also received the Nikkei Asia Prize (culture category), the Geumgwan (Gold Crown) Order of Cultural Merit and the National Academy of Arts Award, and the Ilmin Culture and Arts Award, among others. The wake is at Seoul St. Mary's Hospital Funeral Hall, Room 14. The funeral is at 7:30 a.m. on the 20th.