Joseon court dancer crossed to Paris; Pansori singer brings her home

Almost nothing survives of Lee Jin, the woman a French memoir records as "Li-Tsin." A court dancer in the final years of the 1392-1910 Joseon Dynasty, she is said to have sailed to Paris in the 1890s with her lover, a French diplomat, then returned to a country that no longer had a place for her. The record rests almost entirely on a single source: "En Coree" a memoir published in 1904 by Hippolyte Frandin, France's second minister to Korea. Scholars have argued for years over how much truth there is in his account. That patchy record is where pansori singer Shin Jin-won started, spinning a tale of a woman barely mentioned in archives. "I suppose it comes down to imagination," Shin during a written interview with The Korea Times. "It started with imagination, and director Lee Wang-soo helped enormously in carrying it through. He expanded that world far beyond what I had imagined myself." Shin, a transmission-certified holder of pansori — a traditional style of Korean narrative performance by a singer accompanied by a drum — performed "Li-Tsin: A Woman Without a Name" on Sept. 12 at t