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North Korea to Send Orchestra to South Korea for Winter Olympics North Korean Orchestra Plans to Perform in South Korea During Winter Olympics
(35 minutes later)
SEOUL, South Korea — North Korea agreed during a second round of rare talks on Monday to send a 140-member orchestra to perform during the Winter Olympics in South Korea next month, South Korean officials said. HONG KONG — A 140-member North Korean pop orchestra will stage rare performances in South Korea during the Winter Olympics next month, the two Koreas agreed on Monday. The two sides discussed details of the North’s participation in the Games as part of their efforts to improve ties.
Officials from the two Koreas, technically still at war after their 1950-53 conflict ended in a truce, not a treaty, met on the North’s side of the border truce village of Panmunjom to discuss the possibility of North Korea sending performers to the Olympics in Pyeongchang, South Korea. The orchestra, known as the Samjiyon Band, one of the North’s top arts troupes, will enter South Korea by crossing over at Panmunjom, a border village, and will perform twice in the South: once in Seoul, the South Korean capital, and once in Gangneung, a city on the east coast where some of the Olympic competitions will be held.
The two sides agreed that the orchestra would stage performances in the capital, Seoul, and at Gangneung, near Pyeongchang, the South’s Unification Ministry said in a statement. The troupe’s performances will feature 80 orchestra musicians and 60 members who sing and dance. Many of them are young women who have been allowed to adopt a more lively style and modern costumes, like short skirts, under the North’s young leader, Kim Jong-un.
The North’s orchestra, called the Samjiyon Band, is the country’s main art troupe, along with the Moranbong Band, women who regularly stage musical performances and plays calling for loyalty to the North’s leader, Kim Jong-un. But like all art troupes in the North, Samjiyon remains an essential tool of propaganda for Mr. Kim’s government, which uses music, movies, paintings and novels to disseminate the state’s ideology and inspire loyalty to its leadership. It and the better-known Moranbong Band have performed in numerous state art performances where Mr. Kim’s policies, as well as his missile and nuclear tests, have been celebrated.
During the orchestra’s New Year performance last year in Pyongyang, the North’s capital, a large screen placed behind the stage displayed footage of a long-range missile launching and what the North claimed was its first hydrogen bomb test in 2016, calling it a “complete success,” a video clip posted by state media shows. Hyon Song-wol, a top singer with Moranbong, often considered Mr. Kim’s favorite band, participated in border talks on Monday.
The North will send a preliminary inspection team “at the earliest possible time” to hammer out details, including the performance site, stage conditions and the installation of equipment, according to a joint statement. The art troupe would be larger than the previous six that North Korea has sent to South Korea since 1985. The North last sent such a group in 2002, when 30 North Korean singers and dancers performed in Seoul to celebrate Korea’s liberation from Japanese colonial rule in 1945.
The decision to host the orchestra “contributes to improving relations and recovering the cultural homogeneity” between the two Koreas, the South’s Unification Ministry said. Scenes of young North Korean artists performing for South Korean audiences could have huge implications. They could be moments of rare inter-Korean reconciliation after a year of high tensions over the North’s nuclear and long-range missile tests.
The two Koreas separately agreed to hold working talks on Wednesday on the North’s athletes attending the Olympics, the ministry said. They will also hold talks hosted by the International Olympic Committee on Saturday. Or the event could be a source of bitter controversy in the South, depending on what songs the North Korean artists perform.
North Korea is pursuing its missile and nuclear programs in defiance of the United Nations Security Council sanctions and has frequently threatened to destroy the United States and its two key Asian allies, South Korea and Japan. To avoid having the orchestra performances become a political controversy, South Korean negotiators are expected to insist that the North Korean artists not sing songs or use stage props that would surely cause ire among South Koreans, including any references to, or images of, North Korean missiles.
Choi Moon-soon, governor of the province that is hosting the Games, said the two countries’ orchestras might hold a joint concert. During the talks on Monday, the North promised to play traditional Korean folk songs that “fit the mood for unification and are well known on both sides,” as well as classical music, said the chief South Korean delegate, Lee Woo-sung. Mr. Lee said more discussions were expected to work out other details of North Korean performances.
The two Koreas last held a joint musical performance in August 2000 in Seoul amid upbeat cultural exchanges after the first inter-Korean summit meeting two years earlier, the South Korean Unification Ministry said. The South Korean government said it hoped that the North Korean orchestra would “contribute to improving relations and recovering the cultural homogeneity.” Both sides have not decided whether the North Koreans will hold any joint concerts with a South Korean orchestra.
The North said during the talks that its orchestra planned to play traditional folk songs that “fit the mood for unification and are well known in both sides,” as well as classical music, said Lee Woo-sung, the South’s chief negotiator. After years of denouncing the South as an American stooge, Mr. Kim, the North Korean leader, used his annual New Year’s Day speech to propose a dialogue with the South to discuss his country’s participation in the Winter Olympics being held in the South Korean town of Pyeongchang beginning Feb. 7.
“The choice of a symphony concert is to avoid any potential controversy because there are very few modern North Korean pop songs that don’t carry a political message,” said Cheong Seong-chang, a senior fellow at the Sejong Institute, a research institute in South Korea. South Korea quickly embraced the idea as a way to calm tensions and dispel fears of a possible war on the divided Korean Peninsula spurred by the North’s nuclear and missile tests and President Trump’s frequent threats to destroy the North should it pose harm to the Americans and their allies.
“As a stand-alone North Korean performance may breed criticism that the South set the stage for Pyongyang’s propaganda, it would be desirable if the two teams perform by turns and then play together a popular song like ‘Arirang’ for the finale,” Mr. Cheong said, referring to a folk song shared by the two Koreas. In border talks held at Panmunjom last week, the two sides agreed that North Korea would send athletes and cheerleaders, as well as an art troupe, journalists and a taekwondo demonstration team. Working-level negotiators met at Panmunjom on Monday to sort out the details.
North Korea is planning to send a large delegation to the Olympics in addition to athletes and the orchestra. South Korea is also seeking to form a united women’s ice hockey team with the North, according to news media reports. The South Korean government also said that the two Koreas had agreed in principle to field a joint women’s ice hockey team. The International Olympic Committee is scheduled to discuss the proposal when it brings together Olympic officials from both Koreas in Switzerland on Saturday to discuss the North’s last-minute decision to join the Olympics.
If approved, it would be the Koreas’ first unified Olympic team ever and the first joint Korean team in an international sporting event since the two Koreas competed together in an international table tennis championship and a youth soccer tournament in 1991.
The government of President Moon Jae-in of South Korea welcomed North Korea’s sudden overture of dialogue as an opportunity to ease tensions and to try to persuade the North to join broader talks involving the United States over how to end its nuclear crisis. But some critics, including conservative South Koreans, fear that the North may be trying to divide Seoul and Washington as a way to weaken sanctions and international pressure.