Choreographers: Min-sun Choi, Jin-an Kang and Soyoung Choi
Part of A Festival of Korean Dance 2023 at The Place, this double bill of dance performers is certainly experimental, featuring companies Choi X Kang Project and Art Project BORA. Lasting only an hour plus a 15-minute interval, this is a duo brought together by their interest in different forms of movement and how technology can help create tones and perspectives within the work, although the style and impact of the performance is not evenly matched.
Choi X Kang’s opening piece, A Complementary_Set_Disappearing with an Impact, forces the audience to pay close attention to the choreography as a live performance and a projected version of the same dance appear on a television screen beside it. It takes a few minutes to be sure that the screen version is pre-recorded, with actions and limb extension very slightly out of synch with what is appearing in front of the audience even though that is also being filmed by Taekyung Kim as part of the performance.
But dancer-choreographers Min-sun Choi and Jin-an Kang have something a little more interesting in mind by repeating versions of the dance several times over with different elaborations while the audience is shown the segment that Kim has previously filmed alongside it. And this happens several times across the 30-minute piece. The smart thing here is timing, and there are several precisely scheduled moments in which the live movements and recorded actions overlap, but once that becomes clear the piece loses it power. It has some quirky fun with pompoms, string, tape reels and a Yakult tube as props, but the basic tick tock physicality of it and Kang’s odd dad-dance never progress into the profound reflection on perspectives and reality that this aims to be.
Art Project BORA have far more success in their 20-minute performance Byeol Yang which has a fascinating other worldly quality in which two limber dancers interact in inquisitive and sometimes aggressive ways. Like two primal beings learning to understand themselves and the world around them, there is plenty of contentious mirroring as bodies are hunched and stretched in unusual ways. Perfectly synchronised throughout, dancers Yejin Suh and Seungri Sohn build an engaging intensity, drawing the audience into their ritual of possession with perfect synchronicity as they reflect and act against one another.
Choreographed by Soyoung Choi, this is a more classical piece that its unrelated partner, using ballet as a base but exploring the extension and contortion of the body. Lighting here creates shifts in tone and mood in which the uncredited design adds patches of rolling shadow, intensely coloured chapters and beams of bright intensity reflected in the scurrying dance as the energy builds to a final but slightly unnecessary fight that ends the piece on a question mark.
It’s not clear why the festival has chosen to put these two dances together other than the profile of the choreographers which creates an uneven night, but it is certainly an hour of experimentation that’s worth seeing.
Reviewed 3 May 2023
