A Festival of Korean Dance, Cheok Review ★★★★★

As with so much contemporary dance coming out of South Korea, the concept of Cheok is interesting.The experimental choreographer Ae-soon Ahn uses as her starting point the traditional Asian standard of measurement, the ‘cheok’, which means ‘span of the hand’, to create a 60-minutes piece for six dancers – four men and two women – billed as ‘reflecting on the nature of precision.’

Not for the first time, though, I had difficulty matching what was happening on stage with the ideas behind it.

Cheok starts in total silence with a projection of shifting geometric shapes onto a screen. Mirim Choo’s video mutates gradually from stark black and white to colours, the shapes – stars, squares, rectangles - appearing to want to melt into each other, but always stopping short.

Another blackout and as a subdued light bathes the stage (lighting design by Seungho Lee) one performer walks on slowly, a puzzled look on his face. He moves his arms slowly, folding at articulations.

Little by little he is joined by the remaining five performers, but although they coexist on stage, and very occasionally come face to face, there seems to be little or no interaction between them. Instead, each seems lost in his or her little world performing specific movements which appear to define them. So, for example, one very athletic man repeats frog jumps, his elevation impressive, and regularly breaks in fast runs across the stage jumping imaginary hurdles. A woman whose youthful looks are accentuated by a very short white puff skirt and socks, turns a lot and rotates her stiff arms in front of her. The first man retains his puzzled expression throughout; the second woman in the cast has her feet as her motif, repeating the sequence flex-sickle-stretch at regular intervals.

Minjun Park’s musical score is perfunctory: a small sequence of notes, often modified by reverb, foregoes any notion of rhythm or continuity, and bears no obvious relation to the movement it accompanies.

Ae-soon Ahn uses space well, and the stage vibrated with movement, but is it dance? It looked more like a display of athletics, and it was hard to tell whether the performers were following a set choreography or improvising on the basis of tasks set by the choreographer.

Although each performer's movement had its own internal coherence, in that it was clear who owned what, there certainly was no logical development; but it has to be said that to the last man and woman the performers showed tremendous belief and physical ability.

Cheok came to an end with a repeat projection of moving shapes, after which the audience’s focus was directed to a thin plank of wood suspended over the stage slowly rotating in crepuscular light for what felt like a very long time. I’d love to tell you what it meant, but I really don’t know.