Forever Young

This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.

The New York Sun

Dancer-choreographer Kang Sun Young has, in a tremendously selfeffacing way, remained the face of Korean dance for most of the past half-century. Trained by the dance master Han Seong Jun, who died in 1942, 80-year-old Ms. Kang held onto the dances he taught her, disseminating them in turn. When, in the explosive finale to her company’s concert at Lincoln Center, she appeared on stage, she was flanked by several generations of dancers all trained in her methods—whirling, graceful proof that she has succeeded in keeping these ancient dances alive.

Most of the audience Tuesday night was Korean, as were the two introductory speakers (including an ABC news anchor reading rather uncomfortably from notes). Clearly the theme of the evening was national pride and celebration. As such, it seemed appropriate that the overwhelming mood was pageantry, with that same slight distance that all such formal performance creates. As an evening of dance, it proved occasionally inaccessible, even a little hermetic, due to its careful adherence to strict methods and the dancers’ incessant smiling. But as a cultural display, it had all the rambunctious drumming, abundance of color, and spectacular costuming an audience could hope for.

Every effort to make the work accessible, unfortunately, took the form of gigantic projections. The opening number, a stately courtship between four birds, took place behind a scrim on which Park Joon’s images of fluffy clouds raced about superfluously. While his projections were used occasionally to paint the proscenium with cherry blossoms (a charming effect), they also sometimes cluttered the stage with zooming star-fields while the dancers choked on waves of dry ice. Enough activity existed without the designers pretending they were working on a 1980s rock opera.

And the work didn’t need the gussying up. The huge, 40-strong company and their 14 member band are capable of creating a spectacle out of a bare stage and a drumbeat. (When, between numbers, the four drummers and a cymbal-player just jammed for five minutes, it brought the house down.) The facility and precision of the dancers and musicians was even sometimes physically thrilling — women playing three drums at once while leaping in unison seemed as giddy and contemporary as a performance of the Blue Man Group.

Each dance had its own prop — swords, scarves, long, floor-dragging sleeves, or vividly painted fans. With the dancers’ bodies concealed beneath bell-skirted robes, the focus certainly wasn’t on their obvious athleticism. Instead, the women, drifting across the space or walking leisurely in a pistonlike up and down promenade, seemed to achieve what Ms. Kang has said her teacher demanded: the illusion of not having feet.

Ms. Kang herself appeared onstage only twice, each time shepherded tenderly by her students and fellow dancers. But when she broke away from them to perform the long-awaited Tae Pyung Mu, lifting up her skirts and doing the Korean forerunner to a slowmotion softshoe, she seemed as light as a teenager. Peeking out at us coyly, stepping as primly as a heron negotiating reeds, she seemed the perfect person to keep a weighty, ancient tradition buoyant and on its feet. Only someone so eternally young could manage work so incredibly old.


The New York Sun

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