The Eun-Me Ahn Company is collaborating with Doosan Art Center again to prepare the next project after <Dancing Grandmother>. Eun-Me Ahn is the most skilled dancer of Korean contemporary dance, and she pretends as if she’s an anthropologist with <Dancing Grandmother>. She traveled the entire country to examine the bodies of grandmothers, and now she travels for the bodies of children. <Dancing Grandmother> retrogressed the dominant trend of contemporary dance. It attempted to deliver the story from a different path and “body,” which contemporary dance persistently obsessed over recently. From a glimpse, the topic of grandmothers and their bodies appear too fashionable (in fact, Eun-Me Ahn’s dance is very fashionable, and she proudly enjoys it) and the way it is expressed is too simple and insipid. What on earth does she intend to create?

In fact, anyone with a little knowledge of contemporary dance would be ready to deliver an elaborate speech as soon as they hear the word “body.” This is because contemporary dance has been most obsessed over the topic of “body” these days. But here, the interest on body was tilted to a bias because contemporary dance is not free from intellectual direction. Of course, it’s well known that the interest in such is captured on a slanted bias. Among dance reviewers I’ve met, I’ve never seen anyone who wasn’t passionate about the French philosopher named Deleuze. They add concepts so loved by philosophers like Deleuze such as concept and mass, and passionately deliver lengthy speeches on the relationship between body and dance. But such behavior seems somewhat doubtful and lame. To me, those bluffs appear much like alibis to painfully hide the crisis of dance. The once popular philosophical arguments made it appear that the duty of philosophy was to oppose the concept of the metaphysical body imagined by Cartesian dualism in which the body is the exterior of consciousness. And this became a favorable factor as “dance as language” lost its popularity. Contemporary dance also attempted to find a new place by joining the discussion of the body.

One of the hidden epistemologies of dance may be to suggest a certain thought against the principle of the body created by the society. That’s why it’s only natural that contemporary dance always tried to counter the rules of the body set by society. Contemporary dance does not select beautiful movements to show, but rather resists showing those esthetic movements and transformed the body of society that existed outside the world of dance into a direct target possessed by dance. Based on such a principle, contemporary art was in fact able to modernize itself. That’s why there’s always interest in the body as a societal body at the center of contemporary dance. From such a concept, Eun-Me Ahn’s new project can be called extremely “traditional.” That may be a vast difference from the public view on her dance. She was considered as a heretic of Korean contemporary dance. But it’s wrong to think that she speaks in peripheral language from the outer zone of contemporary dance. Rather, her dance targets the persistent fundamental question of contemporary dance and answers to it. In such perspective, the meaning of her current anthropological exploration on the body must be determined in such a manner.

Children vacantly stare at the television screen. On top of that, children with surreal bodies shake their lower bodies with the same smiles on their faces. Children sit in the spot and stare at those miragelooking bodies. Bodies of the children float in the air and fly all around the world. Children wearing thick “NoFa (slang used by young people referring to the clothing brand North Face)” move in a group. On top of slim uniform pants with shortened lengths, red and yellow groups of NoFa shake. Inside that thick jumper, certain bodies are hiding. But we do not know what that body is. However, without knowing it, we cannot determine what world we currently live in. If we think that we can learn about the lives of children without learning the world of children’s bodies, it would be a comedy. Comedy here doesn’t simply refer to a genre of dramas. Comedy here refers to a desolate movement in which people blind themselves from frustration of the world unknown to them by mocking certain flaws when they have no idea how the world is operating. That’s why ‘Gag Concert’ remains a mocking comedy although it is very critical of the reality. Of course, laughter enables us to free ourselves from the difficult burden of recognizing the world. One laugh turns off the question of “why is the world like this?” That’s why comedy is always dangerous. But what is the comedy of reality that can be transformed into the tragedy of art? According to common sense of artistic theory, tragedy is activity attempting to understand the immeasurable world itself. As such, although it seems that it reaches a predictable result (loss of love, failure of revolution, etc., are popular plots of tragedy), the core of tragedy is not that result but rather the activity that persistently investigates and determines all processes in accordance with the logic of cause and effect.

Then, I must imagine that when we see her dance and enjoy, maybe Eun-Me Ahn was hiding a tragedy behind the shown comedy. Through introspection worthy of being called “anthropological politics of body,” she began a new dance project. The body she deals with then is the body commonly referred to as “affiliated with something” by us. That body is a societal body that occurs in a particular location of life. The body of a soldier, body of a student, body of an elevator girl, body of a senior citizen hall grandmother—they are all bodies as societal physical beings affiliated with something. While reasoning such a body, Eun-Me Ahn blatantly criticizes the artistic fastidiousness on the dance of contemporary dance. Contemporary dance has been ignoring diverse dances of this world as if they do not exist. We dance in Cabarets, dance clubs, Cola Tech, 60th birthday ceremonies, town festivals, class trips, and new-student welcoming ceremonies. We dance aerobics at the local gym, break dance on the street, dance movements in kindergartens, and above all, girl groups and boy bands dance on the screens of televisions all day long. Although so many dances fill the world, contemporary dance has been trying to prevent polluting itself from them. Even when it showed favorable expressions on them, they frequently covered them as elegant esthetic devices quoting popular culture. But everyone who knows her dance knows that Eun- Me Ahn’s dance has been fighting such attitudes of contemporary dance. In order to free contemporary dance with artistic identity, she commoditized almost all movements into the language of dance. Those were probably the most important esthetic politics in Eun-Me Ahn’s dance. And now, <Dancing Kids> begins. It’s a project for her to anthropologically observe how bodies of different classes of Korean society are defined, introspected, and realized through dance, and to compose a drama of dance from it. But we must now forget that although it may make us laugh, there’s tragedy hidden behind. As <Dancing Grandmother> told us where the female bodies were in the turbulence of Korean contemporary history, she now reads and performs the bodies of teenagers through <Dancing Kids>. But this attempts to show the position and overview of the bodies in our time. If the critical virtue of tragedy is expressing the overview, her dance is a tragedy because of it. Although it makes us laugh, it makes us stare at the world that the laughter wishes for. This is perhaps why her dance is soundly a tragedy.

Eun-Me Ahn looks innately bright in the basic process of anthropology. Psychological analysis argues that the psychological pain of patients is not enough for the doctor to begin an analysis. That’s why fastidious followers of Freud are infamous for always conducting preliminary counseling. They argue that if the patient to be analyzed does not consider the analyzer as someone who can shake their desire, analysis can never proceed. They call this metastasis in psychoanalysis. But this is not a difficult story. If the defendant in court doesn’t consider the judge as the voice of the law to judge his crime but thinks of him as a small-time person who likes to play with young women in room salons and receive bribes, the world of law is in crisis. Even if that judge was that kind of person as imagined. When we bow down our head and listen to the order in front of the judge, the relationship between defendant and judge can be said to be metastasis. But such a procedure is similar for anthropologists. An anthropologist can begin investigative research only when they can create ‘rapport’ with people of the society under analysis. If it isn’t created, they are only someone who tailors that society from the outer zone of the society under investigation. If that’s the case, they’re no better than a newspaper reporter who visits a society for a mere day and writes a report as they want. Rather than imagine psychoanalysis creating metastasis or an anthropologist creating rapport, Eun-Me Ahn shows mastery in the ability to connect relationships with the target to be understood. Anyone who knows <Dancing Grandmother> would remember the stunning rendezvous with the grandmothers. Now she enters the world of excellent students of Korean society. Can you imagine how surprised the teenagers were when they saw her? Based on such wariness and curiosity, she develops relationships with the children. And she records and investigates the process. This is when children who tell their stories to the dancer become information providers who participate in the new production of anthropology written in dance. But they don’t stay there. Critical pedagogy hidden in her dance will surely express itself this time, too. As she revived the dancing body from old physical beings waiting for death, she takes out the bodies from children who mock idol dances. And no one actually knows what that body is. No one knows if it’ll be a craze of a completely exhausted body, as she told me once during our talk. But children will ultimately face their own bodies outside the fantasy governing their bodies.

The best way to completely enjoy <Dancing Kids> may be to give up being an audience of dance. Of course, dance here refers to dance at an audition in which children perform in front of directors of famous entertainment companies in hopes of becoming idol stars. When she dances, it targets the distance between the dance and the self which will perform the dance. That’s why when she dances, we shouldn’t think of it as dancing but rather something that dances the critical distance from what we call dance in our time. And this is where all the fun of <Dancing Kids> would be. While interviewing and recording promising teenage students, she carefully listened to the stories from current popular music reviewers with vast knowledge of idol music, and she puts on the stage the voice of an anthropologist who discovers the present of history in the esthetic happening of body. And she gives all she possesses on the stage. And she creates various ceremonies by chopping her stage and allows them to explore their own bodies. That’s why if one does not understand the entire process of such a colorful anthropological investigation, her stage will be locked in the category of another ‘dance.’ She shows us strange movements in which while she runs away from dance, she persistently returns to dance. When we face the world of a societal and political body, dance must present itself in a different style. It’ll dance while pretending it’s not dance, it’ll be bodily movements while pretending it’s dance, and it’ll continue to repeat the process. That’s enough. She positions the self-reflection on the body of our time in the distance between those two movements.

Seo Dong Jin