South Korean culture is riding a huge wave of popularity with both K-pop and Korean film being embraced by people worldwide. Now South Korean dance icon Eun-Me Ahn, fresh from posing for a Gucci exhibition about legendary Korean artists, brings her latest work, Dragons, to the UK for an 8-venue tour presented by Dance Consortium.
In Asia, dragons represent resilience, joy and optimism. They are the inspiration for this multi-media spectacular, a vibrant swirling hallucinatory mix of dance, music, holograms and stylish costumes.
Ahn and her company of seven extraordinary dancers inhabit a constantly changing theatrical space of writhing silver vacuum hoses and the forests and cloudy skies of Taeseok Lee's vivid and colourful projections.
Entering this fantastical world are holograms of five young guest dancers, four of them born in the year 2000, a Year of the Dragon. They share their individual hopes and fresh perspectives on how the past and the future can coexist. Together they celebrate the vitality of the hyper-connected Gen-Z and its ability to shift and change in a tumultuous world.
Created in the isolated time of Covid, Dragons interweaves contemporary moves with ancient dance forms from across Asia. This mix is echoed in Jang Young-Gyu's evocative soundtrack which seamlessly blends traditional Korean music with contemporary pop and electronica.
Eun-Me Ahn is one of the most important artists in South Korea. Now in her sixties, she founded her contemporary dance company in 1988, presenting work in major theatres and festivals around the world. Her strong feminist views led her to dress in a strikingly unconventional way, shaving her head and rejecting the traditional Korean view of women she describes as ‘long hair, good girl, charming wife”. Ahn regularly subverts traditional attitudes to age and gender roles with her acclaimed intergenerational works, often working with non-professionals.
The company dancers are Hyekyoung Kim, Seyeon Kim, Hyeonseo Lee, Gaon Han, Sunjae Jo, Deokyeong Kim, Yongsik Moon and Eun-Me Ahn herself. They are joined by guest performers on screen Nur Syahidah Binti Hazmi, Akari Takahashi, Jiwan Jung, Siiko Setyanto, Dwi Nusa Aji Winarno and Guan Ting Zhou.
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