Off-the-cuff cooperative creativity and fresh consideration of the familiar was on show in every performance during studio Regard du Cygne’s two-day Soirée de co-création Franco-Coréenne with Festival S.O.U.M. this past Fall. S.O.U.M. is an international contemporary dance outfit with a mission to show off contemporary dance performance creations from Korea.
I was deeply impressed by the quality of the program’s cooperative work, but, especially, I was intrigued by the approaches to the show (choreography) and tell (intentions) parts of S.O.U.M.’s dance performance pieces. I had not given it much thought before the Regard du Cygne’s Soirée, but, since, at its most basic level, contemporary dance performance is about an individual experiencing movement, it’s going to show and tell especially about individual experience of culture and its perspectives.
And that’s what I felt each piece on the Soirée de co-création Franco-Coréenne program did: show and tell contemporary dance performance through the filter of experience of a culture that I do not know. Let me put it this way. When I first came to France, I kept bumping into familiar things and fumbling with familiar purposes because, while things look very much the same everywhere, measures are different. In high good humor and without the bruises, of course, my experience of the work of our friends from Korea, resembles that: I was reminded to keep adjusting for difference.
The first-day features were Couleurs and Want, both co-creations put together during a three-day residency at the Regard du Cygne.
Couleurs, by Sun-Hoo Yoo, a choreographer and dance performer from Korea and Marco Chenevrier, a dancer, actor and performer working between France and Italy, was a sort of high-culture “game show” that engages spectators and performers alike in interpreting movement and sound. Yoo told me that she and Chenvier built Couleurs into the frame of one of her existing choreographies.
Performed by visiting dancer Seisung Lee and Paris cellist Aurore Daniel, Want – which I noted down as a “musician-dancer interactional-orbit performance: an atom” – was, as far as I know, an original, put together during the Belleville residence. It was wild. I do like a punk cello.
With audience members walking in the seating and on the edges of the stage and with active spectator and performer input required, as a performance, Couleurs was a risk. Yoo and Chenevier improvised choreographies for music that audience members chose as other audience members conspicuously interpreted their own feelings with colors on a whiteboard. The new-met artists went on to do performances that Yoo called, “Two soli in the shadow of one another and two duets in which we meet”.
Notably, despite their differences and short acquaintance, at no time did Yoo or Chenevier “step ahead” or “pull the partner along” or “step out” or “trail behind” inside their duo.
After the performance, I felt sure that Yoo and Chenevier shared a choreographic approach that owes a lot to circus and cabaret as well as to a taste for risk in search of authenticity. I also thought I understood that when Yoo says, “Two soli in the shadow of one another…”, she means something like “dancing where one of us is the shadow personality”, not “one of us in the background”. Also, when she says “… and two duets in which we meet”, she’s deliberately situating “duet” as “one dance from two dancing” rather than “a dance by two persons”. In other words, Yoo and Chenevier’s notable ability to stay in sync was not just professional courtesy but a parameter of their choreography (and maybe of Yoo’s framing choreography). They were not just “there with” each other (with a margin for the personal expression of each), but were “there with because (the other is also there)”. Synchronicity, not synchronousness.
I felt cabaret, circus, risk and, especially, the will to synchronicity in Want, too.
Want’s program notes say, “[Seisung Lee and Aurore Daniel] found [and then pursued and realized] a common thirst to allow their feelings and sensitivities to escape into the exterior world through their movement and sound”.
They did, too, by getting into breathless showman mode even as they pursued the intensely personal effort to fire up between them a synergy of body, instruments, movement and sound in person-to-person engagement. Seisung Lee danced into Aurore Daniel’s musician space (seeking out not just the music but also the person producing it). Daniel, her cello quivering and panting, opens out into Lee’s dance space (inhabiting not just Lee’s dance but also his élan).
On the second day, for the program’s made-in-Korea performances, beyond the showmanship and the search for synchronicity I also found in the co-creations, there seemed to me to be differently-framed perspectives or unexpected conclusions from the same information, different ways of using things, along with casual innovation in performance usages.
For instance, Kyung Shin Kim’s Homo Lupiens (“anagram man”), uses ambiguous human-machine costuming and “robot gestural” to ask about the “Homo Meta” scrambled into the Homo Faber that is currently struggling to re-imagine Homo Sapiens… Could it be that Homo Sapiens are the damned robots they seem to want very much to create?
Instead of the elaborate makeup and grimacing of the clown figure I am used to, Histoire d’un Clown by Jae-Heon Choi and Ji Min Lee with the Mousai Dance Company, hide behind those porcelain-looking fixed-face masks I associate with Japanese theater. They do a clown act that is half vaudeville, half stand up …
Eunhye Ku’s See-Saw smoothly mixes hip hop and contemporary phrases inside what looks to me like a “battle format”: damned interesting. With a four-person team, Ku evokes present “see” & past “saw” and, as he writes, “Through dance, two complementary actions alternate to move them forward, out of view. A touch touches…I aim to create links.”. Which all sounds to me like somebody trying to add serious torque to my way of thinking about “ying & yang”…
And so it went through the whole S.O.U.M. program: new takes on familiar things, new takes on new things and unfamiliar familiarities, whether Eunhye Ku’s See-Saw or Marco Chenevier’s solo Bach sonate e danzate, where hedances “either a physical concert or a sound choreography” or … Sun-Hoo Yoo’s Elegant Universe solo.
In Elegant Universe, Yoo’s active and sensual dance flowers before a single straight-backed musician (or philosopher of sound), formal in what I suppose is a “traditional” gown, who makes … “sounds to consider by”: drawn-out notes from a – I suppose to be a “traditional” – hand-drum, gong-bell and paper-rustler. Yoo says of this dance performance, “We empty ourselves and draw energy from a new universe in order to pass on its hope and beauty to Earth.” And it was that, I felt that, and more; it finished by getting a gay laugh from me.
So, this France-Korea co-creativity sphere in Belleville turns out to be a good idea and an enlightening one. I hope Regard du Cygne plays host again next year (and the year after that).
In the meantime, put S.O.U.M. on your bucket list. It may be coming to a dance venue near you.
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