It’s Friday and this week seems to have flown by! It’s been great working alongside the cast and company of Orange Polar Bear, but in the midst of parts of the script being lost in translation, discussing the theme of awkward teens and of course the all important company meals out, one thing that has been a prominent part of our exploration of Orange Polar Bear this week is Wangtta.
Wangtta, is a term used in South Korea to describe and explain bullying. In layman terms, wangtta refers both to the victim and the situation. It is a term, which denotes discrimination leading to the persecution of an individual by the majority due to their differences. Wangtta can occur within schools, the workplace and even within families!
Although, we all know that sadly bullying is a worldwide issue, we’ve gathered from research, talking to born and bred Koreans and British expats here in Seoul, that wangtta seems to be a much more extreme and torturous form of what we consider to be bullying in the UK. Undoubtedly there will always be one place or another that will seem more extreme, but it’s safe to say that the issue and consequences of bullying are seen in different forms both in the Korean side and English side of Orange Polar Bear.
Similar to bullying in the UK, wangtta is characterised by divisions that arise from class, ability, disability, interests and appearance. However, in Korea wangtta doesn’t just occur in small groups as it usually does in the UK, it can be the whole community actively or inactively ostracising the victim, often with serious consequences. And while from time to time this can happen in the UK we know it is in general not socially acceptable. Whereas in South Korea it seems to be the opposite, in the sense that whole communities encourage and participate in the act.
Of course, the research done cannot speak for the whole country and the immense way in which South Korea is moving forward, but the sheer fact that "6%-16% of Korean adolescents were reported to be socially excluded by their peers, while 10%-20% have reported socially excluding their peers" *(1) says something about this issue touched on in Orange Polar Bear.
Certainly then this highlights the appropriateness of Orange Polar Bear subtly reflecting the issue, when you add in the context of wangtta.
In 2016 bullying in the UK and wangtta in south Korea is still a serious problem, causing teen depression and suicide to rise, and therefore leads us to reflect on why it is so important for a production such as this to highlight and question these issues and what benefit it could have on its audience. We can only hope this issue touched on in both the Korean and bilingual version of Orange Polar Bear will make us all think about the part we play in the ostracising of individuals.
Teenagers go through such a moulding stage of their lives, where they are shaped by their interactions and experiences and if the work witnessed in the rehearsal room this week is anything to go by, we hope there will certainly be audiences going away in deep thought.
*(1) The Implications of Social Rejection and Peers Victimization: Beyond Social Phenomenon, Journal of Korean Medical Science, 2014