Details

North Korea dance from Southern view

North Korea’s dance reconfigured by choreographer Eun-Me Ahn, whose unique style enchanted the international dance scene

About performance

started off from the hope to shed a new light on North Korean dance which has long been considered like a taboo. We would like to study North Korean dance which has remained a vague subject of curiosity or fear and embrace it in a future-oriented way. It is based on the movements and dance of North Korea, which have developed mainly in the army and military activities under the influence of Juche Ideology. Eun-Me Ahn intends to borrow provocative and unconventional forms of North Korean dance, normally used as a tool for galvanizing of the North Korean people’s spirit, and recreate the ‘North Korea Dance’ through Eun-Me Ahn’s own interpretations.

Synopsis

The motions of North Korean people are embodied at such a certain level to be perceived as dancing. Some may see the embodiment of North Korea’s Juche Idea, and others may see obviously Northern temperament and attitude. In any case, North Korean dance is a set of movements that has been filtered once, like a certain form of a heaving wave, a heaving wave of a particular form. The system pressures this filtering. Under these conditions, Eun-Me Ahn aims, between the North and South, to approach ‘North Korea dance’ as an objective correlative, circumventing heavy ideologies of Juche Idea and National Security Law.

Credit

Choreographer / Eun-Me Ahn

Music Director / Young-gyu Jang

Video Director / Jin-won Lee

Lighting Director / Jin-young Jang

Production Manager / Eun-ji Park, Sang Lee

Video / Ji-woong Nam

Photographer/ Young-mo Choe

Cast / Hyun-woo Nam, Hye-kyoung Kim, Young-min Jung, Si-han Park, Ji-hye Ha, Ei-seul Lee, Ju-young Shim, Seung-hae Kim, Dong-hun Go, Soon-A Park(Gayageum)

About company

Eun-Me Ahn Company

Established in 1988 by choreographer and dancer Eun-Me Ahn, the company is active internationally including the U.S. and Europe. Eun-Me Ahn’s dance, featuring her delicate and special language, mysterious colors, dynamic energy flowing without unnecessary rotation, and humor, goes beyond the boundaries of Korean tradition.

Eun-Me Ahn showed in and that ‘tradition’ can be a key element for new creations, which gained positive recognition from the West leading to her first European tour in 2006 and official invitation for Edinburgh Festival in 2011. Since then, she has worked with amateurs to create her Dance Trilogy(, and ), looking at ‘body’ from anthropological point of view, proposing to reconsider the boundary of what is called artistic activity and blurring the wall between stage and audience. The Dance Trilogy, which started from a very fundamental question, has been invited to meet the European audience every year since its European premiere in 2014. As a private dance company, Eun-Me Ahn Company is actively promoting Korea to Europe and the world in its own unique ways.

Reviews

“In this piece, Eun-Me Ahn once again seeks contemporary interpretation of traditional or North Korean dance as well as communication with the public of ‘here and now.’ This is to suppose the stage as a virtual space where North Korean dance is communicated and to embrace not only the profound but also popular aspect of contemporary dance, creating a plausible story through mimesis rather than pragmatic interpretation.

- Ho-Yeon Kim(dance crtici), Edaily