REVIEW: The Festival d'Avignon Presents ONE DEGREE CELSIUS By Sung Im Her

When was the last time a piece of concert dance made you yell, “Hell yeah!”? For me, it was Sung Im Her’s 1 Degree Celsius at the Festival d’Avignon’s Cour du Lycée Saint-Joseph. The piece explores human movement, both primal and urban. It begins with Sung Im Her entering the stage, one hand balled into a fist, as she finds her way to her feet. In the silent theatre, we hear her rhythmic thumping as she jumps and jolts around the stage, creating an individual syncopated soundscape. Then, a talented cast of six dancers enters (Junhong Cho, Changmin Lee, Hyeontaek Oh, Jisoo Ryu, Jiwon Son, and Jaesung Yu). Together, they execute Sung Im Her’s fierce movement vocabulary to evoke strength, unity, discipline, and, through their affectless visages, a vibrant will.

While not overtly acrobatic, the choreography evokes the performers’ disciplined strength. They swing their arms forward like wielded swords, the gesture flowing through them like a wave. They jut their bodies back and forth. When collected into a group upstage right, this practice creates a time-lapse vision of a plant growing. Then, they march. The marching sequence occupies the majority of the work. They march in precise lines, a vision of urban life that flows from militaristic determination to catwalk confidence. The choreography neither teases nor critiques these urban pathways but instead expresses an optimistic confidence in humanity’s mastery of socially negotiated movement. Their costumes, designed by Mio Jue, feature light streetwear with delicate materials pinned to them, evoking scales, shedding skin, and military epaulets. They march in hypnotically disciplined patterns, with dancers breaking away into beautiful sculptural moments of stillness or ecstatic movement. At one such moment, a small child let out an excited “Woah!” The audience laughed, realizing they had become so caught up in the spectacle that these sudden explosions of movement should still surprise them.

Music by Husk Husk and Lucy Duncan thrums like a dance floor. While, in a club, it might evoke visions of ecstasy, on Sung Im Her’s stage it seems to emanate from the bodies themselves. It pulses through each assured step taken by the rigorous cast as they trace geometric patterns across the stage. Sung Im Her joins the younger cast in their movements, less as an individual performer than as an army officer leading the way. Younguk Lee’s lighting builds to a brilliant crescendo upstage as the throbbing music continues to pulse. Then the lights cut, and many audience members (myself included) erupted into applause, believing the piece had ended. Instead, it slowly returns in a warm amber glow as the cast recalls the primal movement vocabulary from the work’s opening. One performer bounces gleefully, softly, and powerfully as the lights fade once more.

This coda interrupts the catharsis of the pounding finale. The audience’s response becomes more considered than enraptured. Yet through her analysis of the human body in motion, disciplined both by a ferocious movement vocabulary and by modern society, Sung Im Her has created one of the most ecstatic works of contemporary dance I have encountered. It is not a work that rejects urban life but one that celebrates it as a platform for confidence, organization, and perhaps optimism for a brighter future - if human will can get its arms around it.

Photo Credit: Christophe Raynaud de Lage

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