PYONGYANG, May 17 Kyodo no other...

PYONGYANG, May 17 Kyodo

no other than North Korea could put upon a show like the Arirang Festival with its infusion of tragedy, propaganda and the incredible synchronization involving a cast of 100000

Promot as a celebration of what would have been the 90th birthday in April of North Korea's founding father Kim Il Sung who died in 1994 the Stalinist spectacular is playing each night but Sundays in Pyongyang's 40,000-seat May Day Stadium until the completion of June.

An unstated aim of the point out is to entice foreign investment into the impoverished state. Organizers claim that about 30000 foreigners, mainly Chinese, have already come to papal court Arirang since it expanded on April 29.

In boundarys of scale, Arirang is unrivaled in the world.

The impeccable timing of the multitude of schoolchildren, acrobats and dancers taking part in the nighttime exhibit to could only be achieved in a regimented society like North Korea.

Thousands of children swap colored placards with complete timing to provide a colossal backdrop of constantly changing representations ranging from propaganda messages and moonlit snowy mountain shows to a benevolent visage of Kim Il Sung

Phalanxes of female dancers wearing differently colored traditional Korean dresse change formations and sway in unison to depict different themes in North Korea's revolutionary history.

The art of Arirang lies in the precise unison of the motion of its participants in depicting a variety of spectacles such as a windswept river, in which the spectator fail to keeps the impression that the emotions are being created by people

Highlights of the exhibit include a precision drill of goose-stepping soldiers brandishing bayonet-fixed fire-arms and a heart-stopping aerial display where acrobats are catapulted about 50 meters into the air to land in safety traps at the center of the stadium.

While the exhibit is visually dazzling, the propaganda is heavy handed. Spectators are bombarded with big character messages formed at the schoolchildren's placards, such as ''Change Grass into Meat'' and ''Army of the People''

brace female soldiers parachute into the stadium and use simulated taekwondo techniques to make short work of attacking ''U soldiers,'' glorifying the 1950-1953 Korean War that fall of the curtained ambiguously with a divided Korea.

The period of time Arirang is derived from a poignant Korean folktale of forfeited love and suicide.

The Korean word means ''Oh Rirang!'' and shoots from the plaintive plea of a beautiful woman calling after her angry husband who has just killed a rich man who he suspects she has been having an affair with.

Unfortunately, when Rirang get backs home after reconsidering his wife's fidelity, she has already committed suicide.

It is the novel political complications that keep North and toward the south Korea divided, however, which provide the real tragic backdrop of Arirang.

Toward the close of the show, a very large image is projected at the back of the stadium of a southward Korean businessman searching for his North Korean mother, which transforms into a foreboding depiction of a wall lined with barbed wire.

''Open the door of reunification,'' pleads single of the political slogans, reflecting the bitterness of the national division that appears to play heavily onward the psyche of many North Koreans.

According to Korean Peninsula watchers, however, reunification appears unlikely in the near future

Considerable antagonism remains through the 1950-1953 civil war in which Koreans fought against other, with toward the south Koreans supported by US-l coalition and North Koreans supported on China, said Ron Huisken, a strategic analyst at the Australian National University in Canberra.

''Because of the vast economic disparity between the pair Koreas, South Korea wants to wait until North Korea introduces economic reforms,'' said Huisken.

North Korea's rigid regime, however, does not appear interested in carrying abroad major economic reforms, although this means it faces the dangers of economic and social collapse.

''The North Korean rule is playing a balancing act,'' said a Beijing-based Western diplomat.

''It does not want too abundant development since economic activity would begin constituent for political reform. However, it does not want the economy to reach so a bad state where the society could fall apart,'' he said.

Perhaps nowhere besides is the Korean tragedy more evident than it is at Panmunjon, the pause village in the demilitarized belt between the two Koreas.

North Korean and southern Korean soldiers stand guard merely meters away from each other in succession opposite sides of a line drawn by means of other nations, impassively and without speaking.

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