Like many court ceremonies, the Confucian ritual performed for centuries at Korea’s royal Jongmyo Shrine is meticulous and measured, stately and understated. In the shrine’s stone courtyard, a large group of women stands in place, arranged in rows, holding symbolic objects such as bamboo flutes and wooden swords, and periodically shifting the position of their arms in perfect, unhurried unison. This part is called il mu, which can be translated as “line dance” or “one dance”.
“Some people think it’s very slow, very boring,” said Korean director Kuho Jung. “I love it, but I also want to modernize it. I want to translate it into the language of our time.”
That’s what he’s done in “One Dance,” a theatrical production that brings the Seoul Metropolitan Dance Theater, making its U.S. debut, to Lincoln Center Thursday through Saturday. as part of the center’s Korean Arts Week. Where the original ceremony was designed to honor and entertain the spirits of the royal ancestors, “One Dance” aims to capture the attention of audiences around the world.
“It’s a contemporary take on what’s traditional,” said Shanta Thake, artistic director of the Lincoln Center. Korean Arts Week, she added, is “our first experiment” where we focus on one culture for a week and explore different facets. “While it’s important for people to see themselves onstage, it’s also important for people outside the culture to learn that that culture may not be that different from their own,” Thake said. (Other events include K-pop silent disco, a literature panel, and surf rock and prog metal concerts.)
Jung, a director-designer who has also worked in film and fashion, collaborated with three choreographers on “One Dance”. Hyejing Jeong, the artistic director of Seoul Metropolitan, is an expert in traditional Korean forms, while Sung Hoon Kim and Jaeduk Kim (who also composed the show’s music) come from contemporary dance. As they all explained on a recent video call from Seoul, speaking through a translator, it was a team effort to create a show that tries to strike a balance between custom and current fashion.
The structure they came up with is somewhat dialectical. The performance starts with a traditional version of il mu, juxtaposes it with a piece of contemporary dance and ends with a kind of synthesis, an updated il mu. What remains consistent throughout are the principles of unison and multiplication. As with military drills and chorus lines, a single dancer almost never moves alone.
However, even the traditional version has been made theatrical. Where the original remains, this one, using the same movements and objects, continues to change formation: not just lines and rows, but squares, zigzags and circles. The line turns. The shapes break. Sometimes the dancers move in quick succession, domino style.
Il mu is not the only included court dance. There is also Chunaengmu, or the dance of the spring nightingale, traditionally performed by a woman standing on a woven mat and gently waving her long sleeves. In “One Dance”, it is performed by 24 women whose individual mats, laid out like cards for concentration, can rise on threads. The sleeves are longer and wider, and when the dancers rotate with their arms raised, the lower part of the fabric hangs a bit, causing the sleeves to curl. When they’re all spinning, the stage looks like a field of floppy wind turbines, or an extremely elegant car wash.
“One Dance” goes for such mass effects, but the stage design is generally bare bones. Instead of castle architecture, Jung substitutes a movable frame of white poles that can line the stage like giant goalposts or float over it like a roof. The contemporary sections take place in an abstraction of a bamboo forest made of more white poles. The costumes are mainly in bold single shades. Compared to the original ceremony, “One Dance” is both less and more.
The music is similarly stripped down and staged. “We tried to take it apart and then reinterpret it and put it back together,” said Jaeduk Kim. The court music was minimized, he said, with what he called the harsh noises removed. The contemporary sections introduce western instruments but also use traditional Korean instruments in non-traditional ways. The eo, in the shape of a tiger with a jagged back and scratched with a stick, is struck like a snare drum. A zither called the ajaeng is played in the manner of a double bass. “And sometimes we use a double bass like an ajaeng,” he said. “We try to be ambiguous.”
But the biggest change in music is rhythmic. In the original ceremony, percussion is a form of punctuation that marks different parts of elongated sentences. In contrast, much of “One Dance”‘s music has a pulse, a beat – like many Korean folk forms and what most of the world now considers dance music.
This gives the contemporary sections their drive, while the low-slung dancers twist, dive, and lunge with a martial arts attack. But the pulse also underpins the contemporary feel of the updated il mu, making it sharper, more percussive, more on the music.
“In traditional Korean dance,” Jeong said, “you do it really slowly and stretch it so it just flows and keeps flowing. It’s almost like exhaling for a long time without breaking it off. This is the essence of Korean dance .”
“With traditional dance,” she added, “we wouldn’t lift our foot very far off the ground. It’s very subtle.” But in the renewed il mu, the dancers not only raise their legs high, the bare legs of the women slip out through slits in skirts.
The updated il mu is also faster and more athletic. The dancers run, roll, jump. The finale, like that of many classical ballets or Olympic opening ceremonies, continues to add and remove bodies that move in waves, eventually filling the stage. But, Jeong said, “even though the pace is fast, you can catch traditional aspects in it, part of the traditional Korean breath.”
Everything in “One Dance,” Jung said, has special significance in Korean culture. The traditional ceremony has its origins in China, although it has lasted longer in Korea, and both it and “One Dance” are rooted in Korean philosophy. There is an il mu dance for scholars and one for soldiers. The formations are like “reading the sky to predict the future,” he said, analogous to Western astrology. Bamboo is a symbolic tree: “In Korean learned culture, your mind must be like bamboo.”
“I’ve been trying to modernize the dance for better global communication,” Jung said. But when he first came across the original il mu, he thought it looked modern, “like an experimental performance,” he said. “Many cultures’ traditional dances are more unique than globalized modern dance, and we need to preserve some of these varied traditions in order to be modern in a sense.”
“I want people to know how modern this dance is,” he added, “but I also want people to see that this is the spirit of Korean culture. These are the two opposing paths that I want people to understand.
