[Herald Scotland]

18 Jul 2011

Habit and the avant-garde conflict in Korean choreographer Eun-Me Ahn’s sex-busting new show, hears Mark Brown
Reaching The Destination at an attractive conventional Korean restaurant in the centre of Seoul to meet the famous choreographer Eun-Me Ahn is a deeply puzzling experience.

On one side, the restaurant – which is called Pulhyanggi (meaning “the smell of grass”), and garnished with soft images of flying cranes and different pastoral scenes – is a haven of tranquillity in the midst of one of the planet’s most buzzing towns. On the different, Ahn – her head shaved, resplendent in brilliant green and red, her fingers adorned with giant floral rings – is the living embodiment of that cliche, a force of nature.

The choreographer is a lady of exceptional individuality, colour, humour and energy; constituents quite much in indication in Princess Bari, the scintillating production which her personal Seoul-based dance organization presents at that year’s Edinburgh Intercontinental Celebration.

The Princess Bari story is a central narrative in Korean culture, with shades of the Greek tales of Oedipus and Orpheus, and even of Alice In Wonderland and Pinocchio. Thrown to the sea by her dad, the King, for the cause that she’s the 7th daughter of a queen who bore no son, Bari (the word means “canceled” in Korean) is saved and raised by a fisherman. In her teenagers, the intrepid young lady studies of her regal origins and undertakes an epic trip to the royal mansion. And that is as much as Ahn’s Edinburgh production (the first of 2 chunks telling the whole story) takes us.

Though, as Ahn is keen to emphasise as she holds court in the restaurant (looking quite much like a precocious, something mischievous princess herself), the key to the show isn’t the tale, though the quite ingenious way in which she has recreated it for the Twenty First hundred years. The bit is a compelling combination of the conventional (incorporating the song of Korean pansori and the movement of Japanese butoh) and the avant-garde, the smallest and the exuberant, the anguished and the comic.

It is typical of Ahn’s sense of artistic independence that Bari is played not by a lady, though by the multi-skilled and extraordinarily androgynous young man singer Hee-Moon Lee. “He appears as a young lady,” the choreographer agrees. “He’s a little man, and he has a voice like a female. On Occasion he appears as a child, on occasion he appears as a young lady, and on occasion he appears as a man. It’s wonderful. He’s a fine actor.”

Androgyny and sex play have long been of interest to Ahn, in her life (she commenced shaving her head to make her personal sex more ambiguous) and her work. It’s a frame of mind which infuses Princess Bari, in which man and female dancers carry out in the same brilliantly coloured dresses and spotty underpants.

“I don’t wanna split dress-up costume between ladies’s and men’s,” she gives explanation. “The dress is quite suitable to dance in, and permits for quite fast alters.” Her option of dress-up costumes is in addition a joy for the man members of the organization. “Men love dresses. It’s somewhat they never experienced before.”

If playing with sex is part of her sensuous, Ahn in addition sees a thematic justification for casting Lee in the title part. “I makes out why Princess Bari was thrown out,” she declares. “It’s for the cause that she had both female and man sex organs.”

It is going to, no doubt, come as somewhat of a shock to generations of Koreans to uncover that Bari – a much-loved figure from their early life – is, telling the truth, a hermaphrodite. Which isn’t to tell that Ahn’s reinterpretation is an act of disrespectful iconoclasm. Quite, like her outstandingly wealthy and different show as an entire, it talks to the choreographer’s smart and captivating combination of the conventional and the contemporary.

That is exemplified in her approach to conventional Korean music and song, which is utilized in really amazing ways in the show. Even Though Ahn’s background is in dance, she isn’t frightened – any more than was her late pal, the remarkable German dance principal Pina Bausch – to roll up her sleeves and mould different forms to the demands of her choreography.

There’s somewhat fabulously Bauschian in Ahn’s combination of dancing singers and singing dancers (incorporating, at points in the show, herself). Her means of auditioning singers, for example Lee, for the organization is normally unorthodox. “We don’t do only dance and movement,” she states. “I don’t care regarding that. We go drinking and we go to karaoke. I wanna see their organic power, which is their individuality.”