Crossing Over – Ritual of Grief
13 & 20 Aug 2016, 4pm-5pm
Free, donations welcome. Registration details below.
Live – performance
Bongsu Park + Kyung Mi Huh
Seong Jun Heo
Hyo Been Eom
Amit Sharma
Marc Stevenson
Letitia Wilkinson
Laura Lorenzi
[PART I]
Crossing Over – Ritual of Grief
13th August 16:00-17:00
St Mary Magdalene’s Church
Rowington Close, W2 5TF
Register here |
[PART II]
Crossing Over – Ritual of Grief
20th August 16:00-17:00
Rosenfeld Porcini Gallery
37 Rathbone St, W1T 1NZ
Register here |
Fragile, organic, temporal; by experimenting with a dynamic range of media including live performances, videos and installations, artist Bongsu Park seeks to grasp the fundamental aspects of birth, relationships, solitude, life and decay.
For this project in collaboration with Kyung Mi Huh, she explores human reflection on death, transcending geographical and periodic boundaries. Our imaginings of life after death find form in many different ethnicities, traditions, culture, history and religions. Some ancient cultures are surprisingly similar even though they are in no other way interconnected. One of the aims of Crossing Over — Ritual of Grief is to articulate a greater awareness of what it means to be alive, by assuming the position of someone at the point of life’s departure.
Crossing Over — Ritual of Grief is a live performance with five dancers and live music. The piece is a collaboration with choreographer, Kyung Mi Huh whose work The Weeping Body used a recomposed Korean traditional dance SAL-PU-Ri and a funeral memorial service. Bongsu fuses the Korean funeral rites scene in this piece and adds multi-cultural and contemporary contexts. She also links the narrative to the Grecian myth of five rivers that the dead had to cross to reach the underworld.
Sound artist Amit Rai Sharma has composed the score which features his mix of traditional Korean Shin-Myoung music suffused with contemporary improvisations.
Bongsu Park was born in Busan, South Korea. She studied at I’Ecole des Beaux-Arts de Bordeaux, France and at the Slade School of Fine Arts, UK. She has exhibited internationally in both solo and group shows including The Moving Image Art Fair in Istanbul, Barcelona LOOP Festival, Bermondsey Project Space, Camden Arts Centre, Gyungnam Art Museum in Changwon, South Korea. Bongsu Park’s practice involves video, live performance, site-specific installation, sculpture and drawing. The artist’s most recent body of work focuses on collaborations with a number of choreographers which integrate dance into her video works and live performances. What unifies her work is a sustained and developing interest in the cycle of life: the fundamental questions of birth and death, growth and decay.
Kyung Mi Huh is an Intangible Cultural Asset No.21, Seungjeonmu (승전무 – Korean Traditional War Dance), Successor. She is a former Leader Actor of Busan Metropolitan Dance Company and also a director of company Red-Step which is certificated as Busan professional art organisation as well as Busan Theatre residing organisation. She has choreographed and performed many pieces based on Korean traditional dance and contemporary dance. She is winner of Grand Prize of 20th Busan Dance Festival and Silver Prize of 20th National Dance Festival, and also Special Prize of National New Dancer Competition, Traditional Dance part and Grance Prize of Korean Dance Association, New Choreographer Competition.
Seong Jun Heo is a contemporary dancer based in Busan, Korea. He has worked on various projects including ‘To Somebody’ at Busan Democracy Park Theatre, ‘Left behind’ at Pan Dance Theatre and ‘Body of Projections, Part Two’ for Media Art Projections in Busan, South Korea. He has also started to develop his own choreography and has created new work including ‘Gaepan at D_effect dance theater’, ‘Arrival’ and ‘Remember That’.
Hyobeen Eom trained traditional dance at Kyungsung University, South Korea. She subsequently joined the Red-Step company. She has starred in ‘Tears’, ‘Beyond On’, ‘To Somebody’ and ‘Early Morning in Red’. She recently produced, choreographed and danced a solo piece entitled ‘Inattentional Blindness’, in which she explored the phenomena of repetitive dreams.
Amit Rai Sharma is a musician, composer and sound artist based in London. With a BA in Fine Art and a MSc in Psychology of Sound, his practice is an exploration of varying degrees of sonic impact and the space it exists within. Working largely collaboratively with other artists, Sharma’s sound works are exercises in compositional restraint; aiming to enhance the audiences overall experience of the space/installation/performance without the sound becoming a focal point in itself. Amit has most recently performed and installed work at The Old Truman Brewery, Brick Lane for The Other Art Fair October 2015, and in Waterstones, Cambridge for Art Language Location art festival 2014.
Marc Stevenson is a dance and music performer. He trained as a dance artist working at Josette Baiz Groupe et Compagnie, Grenade for over 10 years. Since arriving in London in late 2010, he has worked with choreographers and companies including STOMP, Hagit Yakira, Liz Roche, Tara d’Arquian, Riccardo Buscarini, Shaun Parker, and Dance Theatre of Ireland. In the past few years, Marc has been teaching and merging his knowledge of rhythm, movement and voice work to share a more inclusive and personal approach to dance and movement practise in general.
Letitia Wilkinson was born in London and graduated from the London Contemporary Dance School with a First Class BA Hons. She first started dancing Hip-Hop and ‘ currently dances Argentine Tango and trains in Capoeira. She has recently worked on projects with Hofesh Shechter Company, Hannah Meraki Dance, in immersive theatre with Reuben Feel’s and featured in various music video’s choreographed by Alexandra Green Dance.’
Laura Lorenzi was born in Italy. She is one of the founders of The Sparse Collective, a group of international artists who specialise in improvisational performance. She graduated from London Contemporary Dance School with a First Class Degree. She has been performing in the Touch Wood festival at the Place Theatre with Anders Duckworth and has worked on the new creation of The Cunning Little Vixen at Glyndbourne Opera House. She has performed with The Sparse Collective in different venues across the UK, Spain and Argentina.
Special Thanks to
Ildong Yang, Oliver Curtis, Samantha Y Huang, Zoe Schoenherr, Dayoung Lee, Heesoo Lee, Sungwon Han, James Turner, Amy Lai
supported by
Pusan Cultural Foundation & Rosenfeld Porcini Gallery
