Ochre wall, plum table, turquoise vase, a spray of pink, red and white flowers – all of it fades into the background in the presence of Korean choreographer Eun-Me Ahn. It is just past breakfast time at a modern hotel in Amsterdam, where her company is performing, and she easily outshines our tasteful decor as she gives me a twirl to show off today’s outfit: white dress printed with giant daisies, fluorescent lime net skirt, scarlet trousers, pink flip-flops – and a smile that beams like the sun. The woman before me may be 60 years old but I can readily see her as the endlessly energetic little girl who, she tells me, never stopped, never slept, and would make up little dance dramas every day.
It was colour, in fact, that first brought Ahn to dance, at the age of five. “Usually in our society we wear black, grey, dark …” – she elongates the words into yawns of tedium – “but one day on the street I saw a group moving together wearing red. I went over and asked them: what is this? And they said: dance.”
Dance. The word itself became a kind of totem and, smitten by the brightness and vivacity of the folk dance group she had just encountered, Ahn pestered her mother into letting her take lessons alongside her regular schoolwork. For reasons of money and propriety, that took years – only for Ahn to discover, when she finally prevailed at the age of 12, that while the classes taught her technique, they did not satisfy her wayward energies.
Traditional dance was “not exciting enough”. Ballet was “too feminine”. She liked contemporary dance more because “you can run fast”. Meanwhile, she had already begun inventing her own dances, “without any system, and without many boundaries”. Amid such conflicting demands and drives, she decided she had to find herself, and do what she wanted.
So who was she, and what did she want? In a sense, she has been answering those questions ever since. Having graduated in contemporary dance in Seoul and founded her own dance company in 1988, she went to New York’s Tisch School of the Arts in 1991, returning to Korea in 2001 to take up the directorship of Daegu City Dance Company for three and a half years. (“Forty-five dancers,” she exclaims. “Production money!”)
She choreographed big and commercial: the opening ceremony of the Fifa World Cup in 2002. She choreographed small and offbeat: a behind-bars duet for herself and a live chicken. Her work began to tour widely in Asia as well as in Europe, through invitations from the Pina Bausch Foundation in Wuppertal, Gemany, and an association with Théâtre de la Ville in Paris.
The common threads are perhaps her sense of navigating cultures, plus her disarming blend of delight and determination. It’s all of a piece with her appearance: she began dressing in bright bricolages of tunics, petticoats and hats in the mid-1980s, and has been shaving her head since 1991. “In Korea we have this image: long hair, good girl, charming wife,” she says. “Wake up. It’s like living inside a box, and people saying it’s dangerous outside. When I shaved my head I found new life – my own energy.”
Like so many recent creations, Dragons (which Ahn brings to London and Manchester this month) was conceived before the pandemic, only to be transformed by it. Having previously worked on a series of pieces about different generations in Korea (Dancing Grandmothers, Dancing Middle-Aged Men and Dancing Teen Teen), Ahn had the idea of working with a pan-Asian cast, all born in 2000 – the year of the dragon.
Auditions had just finished when the pandemic hit. The dancers – from Indonesia, Taiwan, Japan, Malaysia and South Korea – ended up rehearsing via video link. When restrictions eased a little, Ahn couriered costumes to the dancers and arranged camera units to go to each location to make 3D holographic recordings of each dancer, in specially set up studios. It was laborious, time-consuming, expensive and unpredictable. “I thought I would die first,” remembers Ahn.
Two years later, Ahn was able to incorporate the virtual presence of her isolated, far-flung cast with live choreography for seven dancers in Seoul, and Dragons was born. What can we expect? Tumbling dance; holographic choreography that juggles speed, scale and illusion; psychedelic video projections; a profusion of costumes and swirling fabrics; silver tentacles; giant Slinkys – and colour, lots of colour.
“Asian culture uses many colours,” says Ahn. “We need colour: it’s energy.” And what of the dragons of the title? “There are millions of dragon stories in Asia,” she says. “It’s not a monster, like in the west. The dragon can be many things at once. It can be an animal or an element – or the internet. It can be clever, or cute. Or fight, or protect. It can go under the water and over the sky.”
Are Ahn’s 21st-century pan-Asian dancers, digitally teleported into the theatre, our present-day dragons? By way of response, she ripples her arms and fingers to suggest the mercurial motion of indefinable, ungraspable beings, saying: “I think their future will be like that.” It’s a bright, unbounded vision, far from the issues and the angst more common to today’s contemporary dance, and as Ahn twirls and beams before me, I find myself almost wanting to believe it.
Eun-Me Ahn: Dragons is at the Barbican, London, 20-23 September and the Lowry, Salford, 26-27 September. Sanjoy Roy’s trip to Amsterdam was provided by the Barbican.
