Choreographer: Sung-yong Kim
Composer: Marihiko Hara
Kicking off The Place’s 2025 annual season of Korean Dance, Korea National Contemporary Dance Company’s new work Jungle sees a corps of 16 dancers take on and interpret various aspects of a jungle environment, from animals and human explorers to the plants, sounds and even light present in the canopied biome.
The company’s artistic director Sung-yong Kim assembles his work through a movement research method, which he terms “Process Init”, emphasising collaboration, sensory reaction and improvisation with the dancers and which, through repetition, develops into the finished form.
That process results in a series of routines where dancers perform in isolation from one another, albeit with a common vocabulary that ensures a stylistic consistency. That’s most pronounced in Jungle’s opening movement, where the dancers process slowly around the stage in a circle, performers occasionally breaking off to dance under a mottled light that does indeed suggest sunbeams filtered through high trees. The original staging in Korea includes a physical leafy canopy that has not made the journey to the UK, but its absence is not detrimental to the overall effect.
As the hour progresses, the lighting changes from overhead to the side, backlit and sometimes front-lit, suggesting how the forest transforms with the sun’s procession throughout the day. Each lighting change brings a new sensory experience and new combinations of performers.
While many pieces still involve little to no interaction or uniformity of movement, there are occasions, as the piece progresses, where the dancers come together as a true ensemble, with a unified sense of movement. Even then, there are variations from dancer to dancer, but it adds an element of cohesion previously missing from the spectacle.
But while Jungle contains a succession of visually arresting lighting and dance combinations, there is a sense that we are moving through a series of tableaux without the sense of a through narrative that might tie the work together more strongly. We seem to move from one section of the work to another, not because that is where we need to go next, but because there’s something else the company wants to try out.
That sense of frustration lasts right to the end, when Marihiko Hara’s repetitive, but not unpleasant, score continues as the lights come down and the dancers then stand to take their bows. It means there’s no sense of a real end, giving instead the feeling that their allotted hour is up, but the musical composition hasn’t been trimmed to suit.
Thus, while the individual dances and their dancers impress, the overall construction of Jungle frustrates. The Process Init methodology has created individual moments and movements with much to appeal, but the final layer of polish has yet to be applied.
Continues until 8 May 2025
