Abstract: This dissertation is a study of the nexus of music, movement and space in South Korean expressive folk culture as articulated through the interrelated notions of the madang and p'an. Though the madang has a more intimate connotation, both madang and p'an function as spatial, temporal and aesthetic concepts referring respectively to a traditional courtyard or village common, an occasion in time, or an embodied sense of communal participation. In a rapidly industrialized and postcolonial nation such as South Korea, I argue that the madang and pan operate as multi-dimensional cultural tropes, speaking to a longing for communal engagement as well as to a desire to imagine, create and participate in transformative Korean cultural spaces. In this way, these terms have become important keywords in a discourse that has inspired and impacted physically realized and imagined uses of presentational space, the production of villages and local festivals, creative performance practices and transmission techniques, the negotiation of gendered Korean subjectivities and the lives of practitioners. In my analysis of the discursive practices of the madang and p'an, I have drawn heavily from my ethnographic fieldwork on the Imshil P'ilbong Nongak Preservation Society (Important Intangible Cultural Property No. 11-5), an organization dedicated to the performance, preservation and practice of rural percussion band music and dance from the village of P'ilbong in North Cho˘lla Province. In particular, I contend that Korean folk expressive culture organizations such as the Imshil P'ilbong Nongak Preservation society have contributed effectively to the cultivation of dynamic ways-of-being and interacting in the madang and p'an. I argue that this process is crucial to the continued livelihood and meaning of folk forms in Korea. It also points to new ways of understanding how cultural subjectivities are imagined, internalized and bodily inscribed through the interplay of music, movement and space. In my approach to this study, I work from the premise that creative engagements with the madang and p'an are performed on the discursive, material and practical levels. Furthermore, I argue that all of these engagements are significant in that they are deeply embedded in the workings of cultural politics.