Heartstrings | Namsan Drama Center — The Hill Theatre That Still Belongs to the School

Before the school taught in Ansan it taught on the Namsan slope, in a theatre that Korea still points to when it talks about modern stage architecture.

The Drama Center opened in 1962 at 138 Sopa-ro, Jung-gu, as part of the same foundation that became Seoul Institute of the Arts. The Namsan Arts Center archive lists the hall at 37.5598 north, 126.9888 east. You climb from Myeongdong Station toward the Red Cross Hospital, then the hill, then a sign for the Dongnang Center. The auditorium is small by later standards. The concrete bowl and the steep rake have not been replaced.

Heartstrings is a campus musical drama. The Namsan house is the school's other body: the place where productions leave the classroom and meet an audience. The series sent its students toward a centennial musical. This is the kind of room that assignment was written for. Seoul Culture Foundation ran public seasons here for a decade; the building itself stayed with the university.

Walk the last fifty metres of Sopa-ro and the city noise drops. The hill takes it. What remains is a mid-century theatre on a slope that has been training actors since Park Chung-hee's first years. The drama needed that lineage even when the cameras were pointed at Ansan. This is where the lineage lives.