culture

There is an artistic motivational team with a distinctive name in the DPRK. Its members are meritorious persons who were awarded the titles of Merited Artiste and People’s Artiste. They stage dynamic performances at the sites of socialist construction across the country.

Therefore, people call it artistic motivational team of meritorious stars.

Distinctive team

Members of the team played leading or minor parts in the five revolutionary operas including The Flower Girl, The Sea of Blood and The Story of a Nurse, which were created in the 1970s when a heyday of art and literature was opened up in the DPRK, and earned fame at home and abroad. 

People still remember them.

And their familiar voices began to be heard again at sites of grand socialist construction over a decade ago. 

It was in December 2011 when all the Korean people writhed in agony over the unexpected demise of Chairman Kim Jong Il.

Ryu Yong Ok, who starred in The Flower Girl as Kkotpun and played the part of Kap Sun in The Sea of Blood, recalled that she could not fall asleep in those days.

No one blames us pensioners for spending our remaining years in comfort, but we are artistes who grew under the care of the Chairman, she thought. And she was determined to give strength and courage to her grief-stricken fellow countrymen. 

With the resolve, Ryu visited her former colleagues to share her opinion and everyone positively responded to her plan.

The artistic motivational team was born thus and they started the motivation activity the following year.

500 performances

Over the past ten-odd years, the team of meritorious stars gave over 500 rounds of performance for a total of hundreds of thousands of persons at ministries, national agencies, factories, enterprises, coal mines, power stations, farms and major construction sites. 

Amid the playing of the melody of We Will Be Loyal to You Generation after Generation, the presenter said: “Hello, everybody. As he launched the revolution in art and literature decades ago, the great General Kim Jong Il would greet new dawn at the site of creation. In the course of leading the revolution, he trained us as famous artistes proficient in any creative and production tasks.” The performance beginning this way has always received great acclaim from the audience.

Song of Chollima Pioneers is a song reflecting the fighting spirit of the Korean working class who demonstrated the spirit of heroic Korea on the ruins of the three-year-long Fatherland Liberation War during the postwar reconstruction. “When the song was selected, I could hardly suppress my excitement. As I sang the song, I felt as if the Chollima era opened up before my eyes once again,” said Merited Artiste Kim Son Hwa.

They selected perfect songs and all of them devoted all their passion to practice drills for boosting the artistic level of each song.

For example, Kim Son Hwa saw the videos recording the events of those years dozens of times for truthful representation.

In order to perform her song well, Ri Jin Hui, who starred in The Story of a Nurse, recollected 1 000 rounds of performance of the opera and read the fuzzy register containing the memoirs of the then artistes who left for the Supreme Headquarters with confidence in victory behind enemy lines during the Fatherland Liberation War. As a result, she sang the immortal classic Where Are You, Dear General? so well that the audience was deeply moved.

People’s Artist Son Tae Won, who was an accomplished singer and also a famous film actor who played the part of Claus, chief of the American intelligence service in south Korea during the war, in feature film Unknown Heroes, sang songs with his characteristic artistic representation and sonorous voice until the last days of his life to leave deep impression on the audiences.

Their performances have strong appeal.

“It was an excellent performance. It was an earnest appeal, not simple songs. It inspires us to usher in an era of miracles like the past Chollima era,” said Kim Yong Nam, chief of staff of the High-Speed Youth Shock Brigade participating in the second-stage construction project for 10 000 flats in the Hwasong area in Pyongyang. 

Their songs are reverberating as a march of struggle across the country where all the people are out for the overall development of socialism. 

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