A Festival of Korean Dance, The Place

For just under three weeks, A Festival of Korean Dance will return to the UK. Now in its sixth year, as well as holding performances at The Place in London, the festival will tour to a number of UK venues, testimony, perhaps, to its growing popularity.

This year's festival will feature returning favourites Korea National Contemporary Dance Company, choreographer Sung Im Her, Art Project BORA and Company SIGA alongside new artists, and will feature one film alongside live on-stage performances.

Here are the Festival's London performances at The Place:

Friday 28–Saturday 29 April: Korea National Contemporary Dance Company, Mechanism and Everything Falls Dramatic.
This KNCDC double bill includes Sung Im Her's Everything Falls Dramatic, billed as 'an emotional meditation on our sense of fragility, resilience, loneliness and solidarity', and Mechanism, by Jaeyoung Lee.
Review here


Wednesday 3 May: Double Bill: A Complementary Set_Disappearing with an Impact and Byeol Yang
The first piece in the programme by Choi X Kang Project combines live performance with footage recorded on stage to create a distortion of past and present, seen and unseen. Here's the official trailer:



The second piece, Byeol Yang, appears to be a post-pandemic work, which explores evolving notions of normality and the memories of instability.

Tuesday 9 May: Kontemporary Korea: A Triple-Bill of K:Dance: Foreign Body, Did U Hear, and Rush
This triple bill starts with a short film, Foreign Body, in which the choreographer Howool Baek examines how bodies that do not fit within a given society's parameters are considered foreign.

Howool Baek also authors the live piece that follows, Did U Hear, which is billed as the body's interpretation of the poem The rose that grew from concrete, written by rapper 2PAC.

Finally, Company Siga presents Rush, a plea for a slow-down, so we can listen to our inner selves and thereby achieve peace.

As well as London, A Festival of Korean Dance will be at The Lowry in Manchester, Warwick Arts Centre and The Dance Space, Brighton Festival