Choreographers: Sung Im Her and Cheolin Jeong
Korean dance comes to The Place for one night only with a double bill of pieces that explore quite different ideas but provide a platform for up-and-coming choreographers. Presented as part of a UK tour, Kontemporary Korea: A Double Bill of K:DANCE offers us some experimental works that think about the practice of choreographed movements, partnership and isolation as well as the gymnastic possibilities of repetitive and addictive contemporary culture.
The opening piece, Flight, considers the physics of dance performance in which two dancers push, pull and shape each other’s motion. Running for just 18 minutes, it begins with the performers swapping roles as one plays a lifeless ragdoll animated by the other, and choreographer Cheolin Jeong, who performs alongside JisuRyu, suggests the ways in which force travels through one body into another creating unusual and unexpected physical reactions.
Often without music, this is a jaunty piece as floppy limbs become stuck in strange positions or forms roll around the dance space in caterpillar movements and, later, leaps and swoops. The dynamic created by the pace across the floor becomes sharper and more intense, introducing notes of combat and conflict before the pair is able to lift and spin, even generating the momentum to climb up the walls before blackout concludes the show.
After a 30-minute interval, Sung Im Her’s 45-minute dance Tomorrowisnowtodayisyesterday (TiNTiY) muses on the relentlessness of our online lives and how image is primped and filtered to become generic recreations of sameness. Using no video at all, this is a dance that plays with concepts of production with vastly energetic and cyclical movements creating synchronicity between the three dancers who move their arms, shoulders and hips at high speed.
Creating a space for pause, there is a meta-narrative overlaid in TiNTiY which accepts the exhaustion of the choreographer and fellow performers Martha Passakopoulou and Seo Jun Lee by giving them breaks to towel off or collapse like defunct machinery, only to get caught up in the persistent rhythms once more. In the centre, a “how-to” guide explains the movements to the audience drawn from the TikTok and Instagram generation and all in the pursuit of perfection or what the narrator refers to as “the story of you”, an inherently false creation in TiNTiY’s satirical frame.
The political themes of this final piece are strongly conveyed, enhanced by Hyungsun Tak’s vivid low-level lighting design that bathes the white floor in shots of colour, drawing the dancers back into the spotlight, and while it is often possible to hear the dancers counting time to make sense of the complex demands of this dance, Husk Husk’s music is chant-like in its insistence as it drives the performers to keep on going beyond the point of their own saturation, unable to stop themselves connecting to the rhythm and demanding the attention that the dance gives them.
With one piece drawing on classical movements and styles and the other using dance to explore visual image and obsession with self-promotion, these are two very different but incredibly thoughtful examples of Korean choreography.
Reviewed on22 May 2024
The Reviews Hub Score
Thoughtful
