07‧12‧18
The City Contemporary Dance Company (CCDC) invited the young, charming and powerful choreographer and dancer Kim Jae Duk (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k97gVQzYCYY )to perform in Hong Kong (December 2018 in Kwai Tsing Theatre) with his new piece called《Jangdan》meaning “long short” in Korean; and it also acquired a Chinese name “跌宕”(free fall) (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3zKG9b2pBRg ).
The message from Kim about his new work is this:
“When I work with overseas dance companies, I always ask myself: what can I do as an Asian? Then I start to look for answers with myself. So, this chance to collaborate with CCDC has been very meaningful to me.
I discover that I have many things in common with the dancers, in the way we think and our views on how bodies can be used. It is as if finding another one of myself inside them. Although we only had limited time to prepare for the performance, everyone put in their all with enthusiasm, working and sweating as hard as they could to realise this performance. I hope you will try to discard your rational mind when trying to comprehend the dancers’ movements and instead try to feel the values and meanings that come from motion.”
The dance, like Kim, is charming and powerful because the dancers rejuvenated the traditional Korean art form called “Pansori” into a new spirit: Pansori is one the oldest forms of performing art in Korea in which an artist usually sits on the floor playing the drum, and the other artist will stand, sing and talk. The contents are usually about ancient stories both of Korea and China. It is considered also the oldest “art crossover” of Chinese & Korean cultures. Kim designed the steps first before proceeding to create music for his beautiful steps. The greatness of this art piece is that Kim extracted the essential artistic elements of Pansori i.e. long and short beats and replanted them into his modern dance with the dancers re-exploring all sorts of bodily possibilities. The end result is the sheer sound of the audience clapping their hands showing great enjoyment and admiration!
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