“My starting point is always my own body.”
Before the lighting rigs flare and the concept notes are drafted, contemporary dance relies on a singular truth: flesh, bone, and the accumulation of human experience. “Over the course of living,” observes choreographer Ryu Suzuki, “I feel that the things I experience personally, as well as what happens in society and the wider world, gradually accumulate in my body in a non-verbal way.”
The ninth edition of A Festival of Korean Dance eschews polite abstraction for visceral reality. It currently sweeps across the UK, offering a searing examination of our physical and emotional limits from Glasgow’s Tramway to London’s The Place.
The Alchemy of Sweat and Sorrow
For Hye-rim Jang, Artistic Director of 99 Art Company, the studio is a site of literal and spiritual excavation. Her company returns to the UK bearing two distinct offerings: a new double bill, Abyss & Ekah, and the Seoul Arts Award-winning Burnt Offering. The latter draws upon the traditional Seungmu monk’s dance and floods the stage with incense, but its reverence is decidedly earthly.
“Over the course of living,” observes choreographer Ryu Suzuki, “I feel that the things I experience personally, as well as what happens in society and the wider world, gradually accumulate in my body in a non-verbal way.”
“This work does not ask the audience to worship anything,” Jang asserts. “It simply seeks to present the lives of the performers on stage as truthfully as possible. I am deeply moved every time I see the dancers sweating as they practise in the studio. Watching them continue to move their bodies even when they are breathless, and the bruises on their knees have not yet healed, they sometimes seem to me like monks who have dedicated their lives to their craft.”
That intense physical dedication serves a deeper emotional purpose in Abyss, a piece designed to confront the uniquely Korean concept of ‘han’—a collective, unspoken sorrow.
“The genesis of Abyss began with questions about my own emotions and state of mind,” Jang notes. “For some time, I had been harbouring a heavy, sorrowful feeling in my heart, and I came to realise that the emotions within a person are not merely abstract, but something very concrete that elicits a physical response. So, I began working with the dancers around the word ‘crying’.”
This is not a historical retrospective. The grief interrogated here is intensely present.
“The ‘han’ we speak of is not a concept confined to the past, such as the colonial era or war; it is an emotion that remains alive today and continues to evolve,” she observes. “We sometimes live whilst burying our sorrow, yet we know that it does not disappear. I sought instead to explore, together with the dancers, how we might confront and process the sorrow accumulated within ourselves.”
The second half of the double bill, Ekah, distils this massive emotional undertaking into a painfully intimate duet between a single female dancer and a male pianist.
“In Ekah, the movements and sounds of the two performers are no longer separate elements, but form a relationship in which they directly reflect one another,” Jang explains. “Whereas an ensemble expands and dramatises emotion through multiple bodies, Ekah focuses on condensing emotion whilst maximising the density of the relationship.”
Surfing Cosmic Chaos
If 99 Art Company pulls the audience inward into the dense gravity of human grief, newcomer Ryu and Friends forcefully ejects them into the stratosphere. The eleven-strong ensemble made their UK debut earlier this month with GRAVITY, an extraterrestrial spectacle exploring the push and pull of matter in the universe.
Choreographer Jang-hyun Ryu does not direct his dancers so much as he triggers a controlled collision of atomic particles.
“Rather than trying to control chaos, I try to sense its flow,” he states. “Different energies are created each time depending on the atmosphere of the day, the climate, the sounds and light and the relationships between the dancers. What interests me is reading those subtle changes and surfing together on the waves of gravity or qi (氣). I think life is the same.”
In a medium prone to unyielding precision, Ryu’s philosophy borders on the elemental. He defines his role through a linguistic idiosyncrasy of his native tongue.
“I think of myself as ‘a person who builds bodies’,” Ryu says. “In Korean, the word jitda (‘to build’ or ‘to create’) does not simply mean making something; it also includes building a house, giving a name, or shaping a life. I believe the body represents the universe. Our words, actions, and even thoughts spread somewhere like invisible waves. My dance also probably contains those traces and vibrations.”
This cosmic remit remains strictly tied to human connection. “Just as planets and orbits create climates,” Ryu adds, “human beings, as planets themselves, also create emotional climates through relationships.”
Ryu possesses a sharp instinct for the ridiculous, fortunately injecting the vastness of space with much-needed levity.
“I think humor is a glass of water for someone whose face has grown stiff,” he points out. “Just as life cannot begin without water, I believe humor is also a sense that allows humans to breathe again.”
His ambition for the UK tour stays profoundly grounded. He hopes the work offers audiences “a moment within what feels like the last cave of this era, where they may briefly come into contact with something hidden deep within their own abyss.”
The Fermentation of the Flesh
The festival finds its concluding rhythm later this month in a double bill from the Korea National Contemporary Dance Company (KNCDC), a returning favourite bridging the gap between deep space and deep club culture. Choreographer Young-doo Jung recently earned a 2025 Olivier Award nomination for Lear at the Barbican, and he now presents Voyage, a piece inspired by the 1977 Voyager space probe. A tongue-in-cheek score remixes the NASA ‘Golden Record’ with rock, classical, and traditional Korean rhythms to drive the piece, seeking to pause the present and chart the unknown.
Ryu Suzuki pairs this with Hakkō, a hypnotic meditation on repetition. Suzuki takes cues from the Japanese cup-and-ball toy ‘kendama’ to drive his dancers into a trance-like state set against the relentless pulse of electronic music. It is a modern prayer delivered through sheer stamina.
“Hakkō takes inspiration from the state of body and mind that I experience through kendama… and from the hypnotic rhythm that emerges through repeated practice,” Suzuki explains. “In the piece, simple actions slowly accumulate and begin to transform the dancers’ physical state. I see this transformation as a kind of fermentation: a living groove generated through repetition, gradually changing the body from within.”
Suzuki is a Japanese choreographer working extensively with Korean dancers, identifying an uncompromising intensity in his collaborators.
“I think of myself as ‘a person who builds bodies’,” Ryu says. “In Korean, the word jitda (‘to build’ or ‘to create’) does not simply mean making something; it also includes building a house, giving a name, or shaping a life. I believe the body represents the universe.
“I feel a strong sense of dedication, intensity, and belief in dance among them,” he says. “The dancers I have worked with show great commitment to training, rehearsal, and performance. I also sense that Korea, as a country, places real trust in the power of the performing arts. Perhaps this collective belief in dance gives Korean dance its particular strength.”
A Fleeting Cultural Exchange
This collective belief is not passive. Across the festival’s diverse programming, performance functions as a necessary friction against the machinery of modern existence. For Hye-rim Jang, choreography is fundamentally an act of civic and spiritual engagement, an instinct sharpened by her own life off-stage.
“For me, therefore, the process of choreography is less a mere form of expression and more a process of understanding life and engaging with the sensations and values I feel are necessary within it,” she asserts. “And since becoming a mother, I have naturally begun to think about the world in which the next generation will live. In this sense, dance can sometimes become an act of resistance, or a means of re-examining and questioning the way we live.”
This Festival of Korean Dance is a vital, breathing entity. As the 2026 edition races toward its conclusion—with Burnt Offering arriving at Newcastle’s Dance City tonight, and KNCDC’s highly anticipated finale dropping anchor at Salford’s Lowry (26-27 May) before returning to London’s The Place (29-30 May)—time is rapidly expiring to catch this extraordinary cultural export. It shines out as a rare, unflinching opportunity to witness art made by creators who know the body is always keeping the score.
Featured Image: GRAVITY by Ryu and Friends. Photo by Sang Hoon
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