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K-Dance 2022: Soo Hyun Hwang – Sense of Darkness | Yun Jung Lee – Tongue Gymnastics

This sensory double bill seeks to break down the boundary between performer and audience.

Soo Hyun Hwang - Sense of Darkness
Yun Jung Lee - Tongue Gymnastics

Date: Tuesday 21 June 2022, 7:30pm
Venue:
The Place | 17 Duke's Road | Euston | London WC1H 9PY | | [Map]

Tickets: £17 / £13 (concs) | Buy tickets from The Place
Early Bird Price £12 / £8 (concs) - Book by Fri 22 Apr. Early bookers also get access to free online dance films
Free post-show talk

Soo Hyun Hwang – Sense of Darkness

Four dancers with their eyes closed on a darkened stage
Sense of Darkness (photo Ok Sang-hoon)

With their eyes closed throughout the show, the performers in Sense of Darkness draw the audience into a world in which intricate movements and sounds are amplified.

Each performer uses the sound created by themselves as signals to coordinate the locations of oneself, the other performers, audience members, speakers, and microphones. This sound is connected as a score and delivered to the audience as vibrations that stimulates the auditory and tactile senses of the audience. At times the audience are put in darkness to help them imagine the movements of the performers; they can empathise with their states – perceiving and imagining. This induces for the audience a transference from the ‘sense of seeing’ to the ‘sense of moving’. In such transference of senses through a blackout for performers, the audience experiences a familiar yet strange sense, the Sense of Darkness.

Sense of Darkness won the 2019 Best Dance Prize awarded by The Korean Association of Dance Critics and Researchers.

About Soo Hyun Hwang
Soo Hyun Hwang has an interest in the ‘future of senses’ in performing arts. Her works focus on the privileged status and potentials of the body. She explores the mechanism between the ‘act of seeing’ and the ‘act of moving’, connects it to how the experience of watching performances operates, and develops it into her pieces. Soo Hyun has explored the correlation of emotions and senses as physical phenomena in her performance series Crying Works, with tears as the subject matter, and continued to work with this theme, expanding it to the area of physical empathy with others.

Duration: 35mins

Age Recommendation: 15+

Yun Jung Lee – Tongue Gymnastics

Two dancers stick their tongues out

Yun Jung Lee’s quirky Tongue Gymnastics for Dance Project PPopKKi, explores how the tongue can dance, transforming it into a subversive and expressive extra limb that playfully dissolves social etiquette.

Duration: 35mins

Age Recommendation: 15+

Production Credits:
Choreographer: Yun Jung Lee
Performancers: Na Ye SON, Eun Joung IM
Dramaturg: Jae Lee KIM
Sound Designer: Cho Sun HONG
Lighting Designer: Hyoung Yeon KIM
Stage Director: Yool LEE

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