Choreographer: Ae-soon Ahn
Completing the Festival of Korean Dance at The Place over the last few weeks, Ae-soon Ahn’s perplexing piece Cheok is a 60-minute puzzle in which you can admire the form and technical decision-making but feel less connected to the overall purpose of the dance. Choreographed for six performers, each absorbing the meaning of cheok (‘span of the hand’), the jumbled nature and differing bodily responses are physically impressive, but the piece lacks an overall trajectory.
Described as a ‘visually enticing reflection of the nature of precision’ there is little clarity in the experience of the dance that effectively translates its meaning to an audience. What Ahn creates instead are signature styles for each of the dancers that determine their movements over the course of Cheok. Arriving one by one and given solo introductions, these focus on different joints and reflexes with one artist given wriggly form using hips and shoulders, another using their head as the central point of their movement while another builds their performance around mechanical wrist and hand shapes.
Of themselves, these are interesting physical challenges to maintain across a 60-minute show, testing the mettle of the dancers and the consistency of the choreography that Ahn can create for them. For the most part that is successful and these signatures are equally recognisable at the end of the performance. But putting them together feels chaotic and confusing. It is impossible to watch the six individuals at the same time even when grouped together so invariably the eye misses a vast amount of the gymnastic activities and approaches taken by the singular performer.
There are never any points at which the group coalesce, no learning or sharing of movements and never any synchronicity except by coincidence. This is not even a team who recognises each other’s existence on the floor; there is no interaction at all between the dancers with everyone intent only on their own work and the places Ahn is privately taking them. And that is at odds with the show’s synopsis that suggests connection and communication should be taking place during Cheok.
Employing a variety of different lighting techniques including dimmed sections and strips of rectangular light designed by Seungho Lee, Cheok certainly has phases, it has group work and solos but it doesn’t have narrative or arc. In many ways dancers Sang Ruly Han, Kyung Min Ji, Yura Park, Yunseung Do, Do Hyun Kim and Seung Joo Lee are no different at the end of the show, nothing has happened to them through the performance, and consequently, as audience members, nothing has happened to us either.
It ends with an agonizingly slow light show, a moment of performance art that leaves the dancers sitting on the sidelines while the audience watches a flickering circle slowly dim for close to five minutes. It is a perplexing and unearnt conclusion to a piece that doesn’t quite know what to do with all of its ideas.
Runs until 1 June 2024 and continues to tour
