by Sanjoy Roy
You don’t see Eun-Me Ahn without also noticing her. She is simply too eye-catching, kitted out in bold, bright and often clashing colours and patterns, swathed in tunics and petticoats and fabric wraps, some high headwear perhaps perched atop her buzzcut hair (she shaved her head in 1991, and has never looked back). Of course it’s not just a look, it also signals a certain mindset: punkish, outside-the-box, a bit do-it-yourself, happily matching and mismatching the new with the old, tradition with rebellion, the commercial with the experimental – and serving it all up in saturated, often synthetic colours.
Now 61, Ahn is clearly neither fading into the graceful retirement that too many older people find expected of them, and nor is she getting any younger. It is perhaps this sense of living through and alongside changing generations that underlies one particular strand of her work over the last 15 years. Dragons, created in 2021, is the latest of these “generational” pieces, conceived with a very specific cohort in mind: dance students born in 2000 (the year of the dragon), thereby part of the very first generation of the new millennium. But go back to 2010, and Ahn had already begun thinking of a particular age group for the creation of her piece Dancing Grandmothers.
Image by Foteini Christofilopoulou
The stimulus had come from watching her own mother dancing at home. She decided to go on a field trip through Korea, meeting up with older, ordinary women, aged 60 to 90, who agreed to dance for her and also told stories from their lives. For Ahn, their improvised sidesteps, waves, skips and twirls became more than just movements, more even than expressions of individual personality or cultural style. They became a body of history – the living, breathing traces of whole histories, more vivid and vital in dance than in any recounted tale or recorded story.
The dancers of Ahn’s company – professionally trained and decidedly younger – improvised in response to the movements of these older women. Together, the older dances and the younger responses became the choreographic raw material for Dancing Grandmothers which premiered in 2011. Its central section featured an edited film montage of the women’s dances, recorded in homes, streets, parks, shops, fields or forests. Wrapping this kernel were choreographic stagings in which younger and older dancers perform both separately and together, merging and crossing, joining and dispersing. It all ended with giant disco balls and an open invitation for the audience to join the upbeat dancing on stage. It was full of energy and vitality – and of course colour, lots of colour.
Image by Foteini Christofilopoulou
The piece was quite a hit, touring internationally and revived several times over the years. Its immediate impact not only on the audience but on the lives of the older women spurred Ahn towards two other projects, following a similar process. For Dancing Teen Teen, created the following year, her fieldwork was in schools, where she and her dancers would meet and chat with teenagers during their lunch breaks, and offer creative and improvisational workshops. Again, the teenagers featured in a film montage, and the dancers used their youthful bops and shimmies as a stimulus for choreography that Ahn then shaped into a show. Dancing Teen Teen naturally reflected and refracted the teen spirit that powered it, showing strong influences from music video, mixing hip-hop with K-pop, and touching on questions of style and conformity (there were a lot of blond wigs), innocence and discovery – and again ending with an upbeat party. Costumes and colours were eye-scorching.
Image by Sukmu Yun
A year later, Ahn created the last of this trilogy: Dancing Middle-Aged Men. Her demographic group was men between 40 and 60 years old, and again she captured their dances – dad-dancing, and more – on film for the show. Here, the movement material gave visions onto the world of work and family, the sense of men playing parts in a bigger, sometimes more corporate system. But it was anything but sober. The suits and ties were snazzy and bright, there was much play with water sprays and sprinklers (the audience were given plastic ponchos for protection), and the company dancers transformed middle-aged moves into acrobatic dives and tumbles. There was also a party.
The Dancing… trilogy ended there, but not Ahn’s interest in working with non-professionals. Ahnsim Dance (2016) worked with visually impaired people, Daeshim Dance (2017) with people with dwarfism. In Koshigi Monologue (2019) she spoke to older women about their memories of early sexual encounters and their first years of married life. If all these works sound somewhat ethnographic in approach, Ahn acts as a kind of theatrical shaman (she studied shamanic traditions in her formative years), channelling spirit into flesh and transforming the commonplace into the communal ritual that we call performance. Indeed, she often appears in certain scenes of her own pieces, an outlandish, outré figure who wanders through her choreography like a psychic medium.
Image by Foteini Christofilopoulou
Ahn appears in Dragons too, a piece that picks up the generational thread of her Dancing… trilogy and sends it to a far wider geographical reach: the young people with whom she began the project were not just Korean but from across east and southeast Asia. Furthermore, as dance students and graduates they were if not yet professional, then certainly highly trained. The idea was to tap something of the zeitgeist for this generation, and one entirely unforeseen but era-defining event certainly hit that spot: the Covid pandemic, which struck just after the auditions had been completed. The dancers – based in Indonesia, Japan, Taiwan, Malaysia and South Korea – were left geographically isolated, and the rehearsals ended up being conducted first by video link and then, as travel restrictions eased, with itinerant technicians and holographic cameras. In both the world at large and in Ahn’s Dragons, pandemic pivoted our lives towards video communications and digital media, boosting virtual connectivity while dematerialising real ones, and fuelling fantasies in a world that remained, nevertheless, obdurately real.
That is a legacy we live with still. Characteristically, Ahn’s choreography for Dragons remains as upbeat and offbeat, and ultimately as bright as she is herself. She points out that while in the West dragons are seen as feared, dangerous beasts, in much of east Asia they are more auspicious, more shape-shifting and mercurial. The piece offers a vision of the future for her youthful, 21st-century generation, and whether your own perspective is ominous or auspicious, in the end it seems to say: here be dragons.
Images by Foteini Christofilopoulou
