May 6, 2018

Peace Light is an hour-long performance piece based on a memorial poem written by Sueyeun Juliette Lee for her North Korean-born mother. My solos in the piece draw on my background in and study of the aesthetics of Korean Shamanism. While tapping into my own memories of traditional funereal ritual in South Korea, I don’t replicate Shamanic tradition; rather, I incorporate its rhythmic presence, groundedness, circularity and pregnant stillness into my contemporary choreographic style.

This performance responded to the June 2013 collapse of a Salvation Army thrift store at 22nd and Market Streets in downtown Philadelphia. Six people died, and 14 suffered serious injuries in the tragedy. My collaborators and I created sculptural forms with our bodies and long swaths of cloth, projecting shadows in the then-vacant disaster site to commemorate thelives of those who perished and suffered there.

SaltSoul is an exploration of how loss and grief are processed in our private lives and in our lives as members of community collectives. The piece draws on three traumatic incidents: the death of my father in a car accident in South Korea when I was a child; the 2014 Sewol Ferry Disaster in my home country of South Korea; and the 2013 collapse of a Salvation Army thrift store in my adopted home, Philadelphia PA.

This 30 minute “pop-up” performance was a lead-up to SaltSoul, a 2-hour performance piece. Both performances responded to the 2014 Sewol Ferry disaster off the coast of South Korea that killed more than 300 people, most of them high school students on a class trip. Members of the local South Korean community joined with SaltSoul collaborating artists in the water feature outside Philadelphia’s City Hall to acknowledge the grief of disaster survivors and the outrage of South Koreans worldwide regarding the governmental and corporate failures that led to the ferry tragedy.

Sculptor Ann Hamilton, commissioned by The Fabric Workshop, created a massive, immersive, and fluid installation at an old industrial pier on Philadelphia’s Delaware River waterfront. With Hamilton’s permission and assistance, collaborators from the SaltSoul project (Marion Ramirez and Bhob Rainey) joined me in bringing corporeal shapes and shadows, as well as improvised music, to converse with Hamilton’s billowing cloth cylinders.

I collaborated with saxophonist Zsolt Varga, sound/movement artist Erno Zoltan Rubik, visual artist Malvina Antal, and lighting designer David Kovacsovics to create this improvised, site-informed performance during my 3-week-long residency in Budapest, Hungary sponsored by Philadelphia Dance Projects’ Bilateral: Budapest/Philadelphia Dance Artists Exchange, in partnership with the Hungary Workshop Foundation.

Six months after the April 16, 2014 Sewol Ferry disaster in South Korea, I premiered this exploration of loss and collective grief with collaborators Marion Ramirez and Bhob Rainey. It imagines the fear, disorientation and anguish of the 300+ victims, almost all of them high school students, as they were ordered to stay in-place as the ferry rolled onto its side and submerged.

Septum was performed at the Iron Factory, a former industrial space in North Philadelphia. The work emerged from improvisational and deep listening investigations, by collaborator Germaine Ingram and me, of the physical and acoustic characteristics of the space and of rhythms and gestures of traditional Korean dance. Those investigations evoked buried memories of personal history and loss, which gradually captured the focus of the piece.