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Choreographer Ro Kyung-ae studied at the EDDC (European Dance Development Centre) in the Netherlands and later worked as an independent choreographer in Belgium. Afterwards, she began working in Korea and has been collaborating with sound, video, and visual artists on projects with body movement as the foundation. In addition, she has been active in creating projects and educational programs for children, teens, adults, and people with disabilities. She received the grand prize at the 2010 Seoul Performing Arts Festival in the Dance Collection category. Her major works include Listen, Combining Placing+,, and Mars.

Q. After your dance studies in Europe and working there as a choreographer, you returned to Korea to officially start projects. Could you tell us about your trajectory and if you seek a certain creative direction.

A. I studied choreography at the European Dance Development Centre located in Arnhem, Netherlands, in 2001. Afterwards, I moved to Belgium and worked as a freelance choreographer and founded the group CABRA with other European artists, with whom I still collaborate. I started officially working in Korea in 2010 and since then I’ve worked on projects with physical movement as the focus and have collaborated with artists active in various genres, such as video, sound, and the visual arts. My projects involve questions and ideas that arise from people’s lives and society. For example, I explore the boundaries between what is considered “right” and “wrong,” between general philosophy at work in society versus the philosophy of the individual, and the standards that exist in society, in particular, the standards that say one must move versus wanting not to move. And as I’ve worked within these points of interest in my projects, as far as methods to creating, I’ve introduced various media, such as texts, images, sounds, and objects. Also, my creative direction isn’t pre-determined before implementation, but rather if something arises out of curiosity I go into it further with research and find various methods.

Q. In your earlier work Unspecific Language, you explored ordinary movements. In Mars, you structured performers’ physical movements based on physics. It appears that movement research is an absolute requirement in your working process. Could you tell us what you consider essential in your research about movement?

A. My interest actually leans toward questions about society rather than body movements themselves. As I mentioned earlier, in Unspecific Language, the work is based on the dichotomy between what is considered right and what is considered wrong. I generally believe that within what is considered wrong lie other possibilities, and since I look for movements with those questions in mind, I end up finding a different method of movement, one that does not fall within the professional dance technical style. With Mars, for example, I started with the curiosity about different movements that exist in the natural world. I was curious about how the fundamentals of movement operated, and that expanded into an interest into physics, so I created the project after I researched how basic movements are achieved through physics. The type of movement research I do isn’t regarding movement that comes from technical training. I try to find the language of movement that is innate in each project. Because I look for a movement language that fits the individual project, it results in a very different movement language, unlike what normally comes out of a dance project. But at the same time, what all of my works have in common is that they show my individual style or preference for special movement.

Q. Your 2016 work Combining and Placing+, was incredibly important in that it formed the basis of your creative method. I’ve read that you were influenced by the mechanics of forming Chinese characters and the Japanese poetry form haiku. Could you tell us a bit about Combining and Placing+,?

A. As the title states, Combining and Placing+, means combination and placement. This project reflects how when you add one to another or place one next to another, you can break the inherent character of the one or our fixed views that are so firmly in place. This project was the result of massive research. I started it when I collaborated with Gwangju artists from the 2013 Gwangju Asia Art Theater. Back then I came across graphic designer Ahn Sangsoo’s writing on techniques of Chinese character formation and Japanese haiku. Ahn had concluded that these two techniques were similar to a film’s montage technique, and I found the technique of adding A and B and arriving at an expected result so interesting that I decided to research the topic. Also, I wondered if this kind of combination and placement method could be discovered in people’s lives, so during my research phase, I went to several places in Gwangju and saw the combination of the everyday objects senior citizens made. I discovered from these combinations a very unique way of combining. It was the combination method that came out of an individual logic that was different from societal logic. There were many times hile experimenting with artists that I saw absolutely strange combinations like this. And as I researched further, when B was added to A, it resulted in A’s combination form; in short, in the case of words, it became a grammar form; in the case of objects, it became a functional form. A’s combination form was applied to B, then B would go through the test of becoming something new that hadn’t been combined before. As it progressed this way, the scope of the research grew immensely; at the same time, the research process inspired me. But as I worked on researching words and objects and other diverse media and then moved over to movement research, I faced difficulty because movement itself is such an abstract media. Then I would add to one body two elements of movement or I would introduce a new combination between movement and sound, or initiate a new combination that showed a special relationship between movement and an object. For example, for the act of throwing, I “combined” it with cotton instead of a ball, so when the object was thrown, there was an unexpected result. When we go through the motion of throwing something we usually think the object will travel far, but in my project, the performer threw a specially made object that prevented it from going far, drawing an unexpected parabola. Another example is when you look at a certain movement, you naturally connect a corresponding sound to it, but I try to make something operate in a different manner with different workings. After the performance of Combining Placing+,, I took this project’s research method and carried it over to a research project with many rising artists from different fields—film, music, dance, and theater. There was a musician who added a musical symbol to the text during our research. Another artist whom I worked with on a project with people with disabilities added braille to the text. You can call these combination methods “Combining Placing” format. This creative method has continued to have a profound effect on my projects after 2016. I will continue to look for ways to find symbolic systems that work in concert with each other, like text and musical symbols or braille and text, and ways to create new actions between them.

Q. Aside from the experimental project you just mentioned, you’ve recently been working on major works with artists with disabilities. Could you tell us how you came to collaborate with them?

A. I started working with people with disabilities while I was working on a project at the Seoul Foundation for Arts and Culture in 2013. I met artists who had cerebral palsy for the first time then, and I was concerned about how to approach them. Having cerebral palsy means that basic movements are difficult, so I was worried about how to even do a warm-up with them. But as I worked with them, I saw that instead of teaching them a certain movement, their own movements became their dance language. My previous works, especially Unspecific Language, were helpful while I was working with the artists with cerebral palsy. When I was working on that project I questioned what was considered right and what was considered wrong. Ultimately it taught me that there is a hidden appeal in unbalanced movements and beauty born out of motility from the process of failing. I think because I had seen the appeal of another method and experienced the beauty of a different concept, I was able to view the artists with cerebral palsy from a different perspective. Their physical form itself is quite distorted compared to a person without disabilities. So even in their walking you feel a vastly different texture or motility. A person without disabilities might think that there is something wrong with the movement of the artists with cerebral palsy, but to me they demonstrated a completely different movement that no person without disabilities would be able to manifest. Also, since the dancers with cerebral palsy do not have one stable axis of balance, when they tried to gain balance they naturally tilted towards multiple points of balance, which would frequently change. The completely different sense of balance that came out of that was so beautiful in my eyes. However, the artists with disabilities at first weren’t very receptive about the show’s format, which was to show their bodies, so we had a lot discussions about the standards of what is beautiful and what is not beautiful. If we set the standards of art to that of people without disabilities, then people with disabilities will always be seen as lacking. But if you set the standards to those of people with disabilities, then you start to discover different sensibilities and other possibilities that they have that people without disabilities do not. As far as the projects concerning artists with disabilities, we go from the starting point of the disability first to find the creative methods in movement or art language.

Q. You’ve recently released your project Listen, in which you worked with people who are hard of hearing and artists who are visually impaired. Each group has what the other does not, and as you have them listen to the same sounds in this project, the research process must have been very interesting. Can you tell us about what the focus of the project was?

A. Listen started with the question “What does it mean to listen?” A few years back I worked with teenagers who were hard of hearing, and with listening as the subject of a project, we experimented with listening through the body or feeling or visualizing sound. And I began thinking about the different ways the body can listen. When I first began this project I thought about working with artists who are visually impaired. Since artists who are visually impaired have difficulty seeing, their hearing is advanced. I decided to learn about listening through them. But as I went forward with the project I kept thinking about the question “What is listening like for people who have difficulty hearing?” So in the end, I decided to have an exchange of thoughts regarding listening from artists who are visually impaired, artists who are hard of hearing, and artists without disabilities. Artists who are visually impaired figure out the size of a space or the distance of something through sound. In contrast, artists who are hard of hearing listen to sound by feeling shape and texture and distance. When you work with artists who have different sensibilities, a diverse array of creative ideas come through. That is how we came to experiment with a new way of listening—with sound and form, language, space, and the body as medium. We used methods using collection of sounds, sound arrangement, listening by looking at sound, interjections and movement, sound and texture, voice without sound, and sound and space.

Q. As an artist, what questions do you have today?

A. What stands out the most from the projects this year is that they have all tackled the question of “standards” in various directions. My collaborative project with artists with disabilities in Listen dealt with the standards of non-movement and perspectives and told the story of movement and transformation. In November we presented Shifting Standard at the Seoul Media City Binennale, which was about the opposite, that within shifting standards there are standards we wish would not shift. I wanted to talk about the fact that so many things are new and they mix with the old and in that process another new concept is deduced in our present society, but despite that, there are fundamental values that should be upheld. Along with the projects Combining Placing+, and Listen, I will continue to research diverse methods with diverse artists.

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