Eastern Movement: The Asia Superposition Collaboration Project

Written by Meg C

Photos courtesy of Asia Culture Center

The Asian Culture Center (ACC) is Gwangju’s newest cultural and artistic hub, showcasing artists and performers from around Asia and adding a new feather to the city’s already artistic beret. Korea’s Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism has been working on the ACC project since 2004, and, since its opening this fall, has carried out various internationally cooperative projects to establish Gwangju as the Hub City of Asian Culture.

The ACC’s goal, according to its website, is to “establish…Gwangju [as] a city where the cultural resources of Asia are exchanged, created, trained and shared, built upon the vast diversity and creative prowess of participating countries.” One of many programs being implemented in this large-scale project is the Asia Dance Company, bringing together international experts and representatives to foster cultural exchange among Asian countries in the field of dance.

Home to almost 50 different countries and the largest continent in the world, Asia has long been renowned for its complex cultural diversity. Though unified by a shared name, the countries, customs and traditions that span from Taiwan to Turkey are strikingly different from each other.

Asian dance is similarly hard to define or categorize. Despite the collective term used to describe the art form, the dance styles of Asian countries are eclectic and varied.

With as many dances as its cultures, is there an underlying common cultural identity to be found in Asian dance, and can it be explored in movement? Asia Dance Company’s inaugural performance in Gwangju questions what Asian contemporary dance is today, and whether a shared identity exists inside the multifarious art form.

As part of the International Exchange Network Project, Asia Dance Company’s Asia Superposition Collaboration Project sought to create the basis of an international network of art communities in Asia. Dancers from 13 Asian countries (Korea, Philippines, Sri Lanka, Singapore, Malaysia, Vietnam, Indonesia, Laos, Thailand, Cambodia, India, Bangladesh and Hong Kong) performed the company’s debut show on October 13, celebrating the opening of the Culture and Art Center with the idea to strengthen cooperative relations and cultural exchange among Asian countries.

The Asia Superposition Collaboration Project, choreographed by artists from Japan and Korea, took the form of contemporary dance while embracing the traditional background of each dancer. In a double-bill of performances, choreographers Hiroaki Umeda of Japan and Hwang Soohyun of Korea attempted to explore the wide realm of Asian dances. Umeda’s “Consistency Over Constancy” used choreography as language, “uniting diverse times while sustaining individualities,” while Soohyun’s “A Real Approach” questioned the nature and the classification of Asian dance.

“This work, starting from the grand discourse of Asian dance, is a series of questions: What is Asian dance? How many categories could we unify or classify it into? How could a contemporary and not traditional approach be possible?” said Soohyun. “Well before Asian dance, I seek to start from the universal emotions of humans that can be communicated, with the thinking that the individual emotion revealed after being stripped of trained dance form could be the key to examining contemporary Asian dance.”

Throughout the performance, the audience was encouraged to reflect on how the various dances of the Asian performers were not as precisely divided into either ethnic, traditional, modern, contemporary, Eastern or Western dance as they may have thought.

Artistic director Ahn Aesoon pointed out that Asian dance is “unable to be classified by the existing cognitive frame,” and explained that “what the performance revealed was Asian dance in its superposed state, is unable to be defined in one word.” The Asia Superposition Collaboration Project sought “to realize and systemize the beauty of identity from and with individuality, diversity, complexity and symbiosis that Asia has.