What’s worth seeing? What’s worth showing?
What does it mean to have a voice? In a culture where I don’t feel represented or feel misrepresented?
I spent the summer at ImpulsTanz festival where I was exposed to a wide array of post-modern and contemporary work in choreography. Interactions with artists who participated in DanceWEB scholarship program to talk about the work we’d seen and engaging with each other’s choreographic material helped me ruminate on value-building and taste-making as a choreographer. Generous offerings from Alban Ovenessian, Osamu Shikichi, Kim Ip, and Bettina Blanc-Penther helped me see what I wanted to see as a choreographer.
I’m finally in a place (both mentally and socially) where I feel psychological safety to speak, dance, and be, without worrying how I’d be seen, stand out, put myself in danger. Bettina shared with me Dancing around Race lecture slides from Camping, 2023 led by Gerald Cassel.
Being around artists, peers, and educators who are sensitive towards building equity-minded practices means a lot to me.
Questions I carry from the essay-this summer-into this semester
How can I choreograph with affect that comes from an intimate internal place–what you’d put in journal and would be embarrassed to reread?
How can I be a facilitator, not a censor-or to myself and to others? How can I be human in the process of inviting others into my interest/research?
How can I build a clear structure in space and communicate it so that my collaborators and I would have the freedom to delve deeply into what they want to bring to my work?
How can I utilize the underbelly of theatrical spaces?
Part II. Culture, Media and Politics
What’s cannot be seen? What has to be seen?
I chose the material that I want to be in dialogue with: an archival text from the 1970’s that I found on Korean Movie Data Base.
I am in the process of analyzing the parts of prolific writer-director Kim Ki-Young’s script that were censored by the government during Yushin Regime (1960s-70s). I still feel the heavy impact of this time of recalibration towards modernity in contemporary Korea. That is why I decided to unearth the script containing marks that
deletes
edits
inserts
The military junta heavily censored scenes written by Kim for depicting imagery associated with ideas that went against the regime. The images contain expressions of women and their empowerment (sexual, social, political) and premodern traditions associated with Buddhism, ritualistic elements, music and dance.
Looking at the script I am fascinated by images imagined by the artist vs. Censor-ers overlooking and policing, selecting — what can be shown, what was worthy of showing?