A 50-year gap, one sinawi: A master finds joy, a rising star dances through pain

Through Oct. 11, National Dance Company's 'Double Bill: Sinawi'

Bae Jeong-hye's 'Salpuri Saeng,' Bae Jin-ho's 'Ahra'

'Never once copied myself' — a shared creative creed

'Dance is proof that we are alive'

Choreographers Bae Jeong-hye and Bae Jin-ho, whose works anchor the National Dance Company's 'Double Bill: Sinawi' [National Theater of Korea]

A master and a rising star met across 50 years. Given the same single word, they arrived at entirely different answers.

"What we were given was 'sinawi.' I thought about it my way, and Bae Jin-ho thought about it his way," said choreographer Bae Jeong-hye.

Bae Jeong-hye (82), long hailed as a maverick of Korean dance who has spent decades expanding the boundaries of creative choreography, looked back on sinawi from the far side of 80 and found in it the joy of living. Bae Jin-ho (32) — who bears a striking resemblance to the younger Bae Jeong-hye and is currently the most closely watched choreographer in Korean dance — wove a work of pain crossing a dark night. The two said in a recent interview that the stage carries "a gap of 50 years in age, and 100 years in dance."

The National Dance Company's new production "Double Bill: Sinawi," running through Oct. 11 at the National Theater of Korea's Haeoreum Grand Theater, places the works of two choreographers separated by half a century on a single stage. The gap between them is what Koreans call "jicheonmyeong" — the age at which one comes to understand the will of heaven. Bae Jeong-hye contributes "Salpuri Saeng" and Bae Jin-ho contributes "Ahra." For the production, the National Dance Company divided its dancers by generation for the first time: 28 members born in 1985 or earlier work with Bae Jeong-hye, while 13 younger members — including new recruits — perform under Bae Jin-ho. Artistic Director and Company Director Kim Jong-deok gave both choreographers a single directive: "Win with dance."

Dance as fate: At 82, Bae Jeong-hye chooses joy

"Dance is my fate and my destiny. I thought I could not do it anymore, and yet the dance keeps coming out of me." — Bae Jeong-hye

Bae Jeong-hye's name has long carried a wealth of descriptors. Her work has been provocative — she was a tightrope walker between tradition and rupture, a pioneer who never stopped breaking the boundaries of Korean dance. Looking back, she sees every day she has lived as a source of joy. So joy is what she chose to dance. "It is a work with no particular message — purely for the purpose of watching Korean dance," she said. "I wanted to capture scenes of people playing joyfully beneath a waterfall."

"Salpuri Saeng" sheds han and sorrow in the manner of a salpuri ritual and moves toward a dynamic life force. It weaves together four distinct lineages of traditional dance — the salpuri styles of the Yi Mae-bang and Han Yeong-suk schools, the dosalpuri of the Kim Suk-ja school, and the gyobang gutgeori of the Kim Su-ak school — into what Bae calls a "new tradition." The work captures the luminous present as seen by a master choreographer navigating a serious illness after a lung cancer diagnosis. "The actual choreography took about a month," she said, "but I was wrestling with it for two or three months before that. I put care into every one of the 35 minutes, so every scene is a highlight."

There was a reason she turned toward tradition. "Since I wanted the older and younger performers to form a contrast, I thought from the start that I should go in an older direction," she said with a laugh. For her, tradition is a familiar language — a lifetime of traditional dance she has performed and created, now gathered together and shaped to suit the National Dance Company. Her body, too, played a role. Honed by a lifetime of dance, it nonetheless cannot defy the passage of time.

"In choreography, every movement has to come from my own body. But now my body does not move the way I want it to. It is a little hard even to think about creating. Honestly, I am not really at an age for choreographing anymore. (Laughs)" — Bae Jeong-hye

Yet the 82-year-old master arrives at the rehearsal studio every day without a trace of fatigue, working through the material with the company's dancers. With a sharp, exacting eye she monitors every gesture of their hands and feet, the lines of their bodies, their expressions. Detailed corrections flow steadily: "Extend your leg fully; when the gayageum enters, let the hansam sleeve drop." Her perfectionist's tenacity is undiminished. Having led the National Dance Company twice — from 2000 to 2002 and again from 2006 to 2011 — she is working with the company for the first time since "Chunsang" in 2017, a gap of nine years. "Seeing old company members after so long feels like reuniting with siblings I had been separated from," she said. "The old affection makes it feel even more familiar."

'I never liked the word Arirang': At 32, Bae Jin-ho crosses a pitch-dark pass

Bae Jin-ho started from the opposite end of the spectrum from his senior. The word he seized on was Arirang.

"I thought Arirang was the word that most clearly expresses the identity of our people. But honestly, I never liked the word. It is a word you can hear tossed around too casually by everyone around you." — Bae Jin-ho

Choreographer Bae Jin-ho [National Dance Company of Korea]

He chose to embrace a word he had never felt attached to — even one he had resisted. "I studied it a bit in order to confront Arirang head-on," he recalled. What he found inside a word that had existed only as feeling was an identity: "us." "The han and grief that are the emotional core of the Korean people were in there. I could not find a neat definition, but I wanted to work through it in dance," he said.

"I wanted to make a work that is increasingly despairing, sorrowful, and hollow — and yet still striving to preserve who we are as a people. Something painful like that." — Bae Jin-ho

The stage of "Ahra" is a pitch-black night. The work opens with the footsteps of despair and pain — people who have crossed countless Arirang passes through a dark night that stretches on like an endless tunnel, never brightening. Black partition walls erected inside the Haeoreum Grand Theater deploy perspective in an inventive way: dancers emerging from a stage roughly 10 meters deep appear to be walking in from nearly 100 meters away. "I wanted to turn the Haeoreum Grand Theater itself into a dark night," Bae Jin-ho said. "I created a space that is more desperate, where no light can be seen."

The younger dancers — those born in 1986 or later — generate an energy entirely unlike that of "Salpuri Saeng." A duet by the National Dance Company's leading performers Park Hye-ji and Lee Yo-eum is set to be the highlight of "Ahra." Park plays a spiritual pillar and mother figure who leads the people; the conflicts that unfold within her embrace are at times harrowing, at times agonizing. Of the two dancers' work, Bae Jin-ho said: "Within the collective there is care, love, and nurturing — but fighting still breaks out inside it. I wanted to express the universal human pattern of being close and then always fighting, hurting each other — whether among friends or in society."

The music is equally varied. As pain accelerates, it becomes a fierce battlefield. Gutgeori and hwimori rhythms form the foundation, with volume shaped and pared down to fit MIDI music — a choice made so the sound could be "exciting, but heard as something more plaintive."

Bae Jin-ho trained in ballet and contemporary dance from an early age before majoring in Korean dance, and he is now the most closely watched choreographer in the field. Last year he became the youngest artist selected for the National Theater of Korea's "New Works of the Year" program, and he is a "super rookie" drawing attention not only from the Korean dance and contemporary dance worlds but from the ballet world as well. This is his first collaboration with the National Dance Company. "Choreographer Bae Jeong-hye, whose performances I sought out and watched since childhood, is a legendary creator to me," he said. "I cannot forget the impact of seeing her work 'Soul, Sunflower.'" The weight of that legacy is considerable. "I never imagined I would be able to have a conversation like this with her," he said. "Because I could not afford to tarnish her reputation and history, I studied harder and prepared with a sense of mission."

Choreographer Bae Jeong-hye [National Dance Company of Korea]

'Never once copied myself': A creed that spans 50 years

A choreographer's DNA leapt across a 50-year divide. Without any prior coordination, the two arrived at the same philosophy: self-replication is forbidden. The master's position on choreography is unequivocal.

"These days, people title a new work 'Electricity' but use the exact same movements from the last piece — the ones that came from earth, the ones that came from water. Choreography is the transformation of movement and composition. Using the same movements wholesale is not creation." — Bae Jeong-hye

Bae Jeong-hye's body of work comfortably exceeds 300 pieces. "In dozens and hundreds of works, I have never reused a movement I used before," she said. Listening to her, Bae Jin-ho nodded and said: "I have not made nearly as many works as you, but I have also never once copied myself in my choreography." His approach is to devise movements suited to each theme, and when the music changes, to research new movements to match. For this production alone, he spent roughly a month on research and about two months studying the concept — working out how to translate the breath, transitions, and footwork of Korean dance into "a contemporary language" without becoming too modern.

The senior choreographer had already sensed her younger colleague's struggle. "These days, thoughtless choreography is in fashion in contemporary dance," Bae Jeong-hye said. "Bae Jin-ho's work does not use the movements that are currently trendy — you can see the traces of him searching for movement close to his theme, and that was good to see." She added: "His ideas are really strong. I would like to work together again sometime." She had been saying for years that each new work "feels like it might be my last" — but this time, she did not say it. It was her 32-year-old colleague who reignited the master's creative drive.

For Bae Jin-ho, every moment has been a valuable experience. He visited the rehearsal studio for "Salpuri Saeng" again and again, watching and rewatching. "I sat alongside them, keeping the rhythm, watching together," he said. "The refinement, the pungnyue, the sheer enjoyment of traditional Korean dance — I could feel it immediately, without even having to think about it." There he rediscovered the true worth of Korean dance. "I felt again that Korean dance is beautiful simply by being on stage — without doing anything at all," he said.

When the conversation turned to the future of Korean dance, it was the master who threw the door open widest. "Korean dance has han, but it also has heung — exuberance. Folk dance that layers han and heung together exists nowhere else in the world," Bae Jeong-hye said. "On that foundation, any amount of creation is possible." She passed that responsibility to "young people like Bae Jin-ho." Having majored in Korean dance and studied contemporary dance in the United States, Bae Jin-ho said his ultimate goal is "to stage Korean-style contemporary dance with genuine sophistication." On that path, there is something he refuses to let go.

"I feel that the distinctiveness Korean dance must preserve is gradually disappearing. There are things we have to hold onto tenaciously — the emotional sensibility of Korean dance, the han and the heung, the natural curves of the body that arise from them, the beautiful breath, the placement of the feet. These are things I want to protect as Korean creative dance, no matter what." — Bae Jin-ho

Dance as proof of being alive: 'I still have things to say'

Dance has been an intense life. The two choreographers looked at dance from the same place: proof and confirmation of being alive. Only the roads leading there were different.

For the master, dance is exuberance and energy. "Dance itself is what proves that I am alive," Bae Jeong-hye said. She reads energy even in tears — to cry from sorrow, she says, you still need energy.

"The human desire to cry out — that is what proves you are alive. If no exuberance comes out, no energy comes out, you are dead. As long as you are alive, dance cannot help but exist."

For the 32-year-old, dance is pain. "The reason I make art — beyond whether I do it well or poorly — is that the pain is the only thing that makes me feel alive," Bae Jin-ho said. Each moment of confronting his own limits is a time when he feels alive so intensely it makes him shudder. The master added a single line: "You have aged early. (Laughs)" It was the remark of someone who had lived through that pain longer than anyone.

"When I am choreographing, I think about nothing else for six months, a year. I used to say: which is harder — giving birth or choreographing? I said making one work of choreography is as hard as giving birth to ten children. It feels like setting sail on a boat with no oars."

The younger choreographer's nights are no different. When rehearsal ends, he goes alone to the hall and reworks the movements. "I am the kind of person who keeps thinking about it almost day and night," Bae Jin-ho said.

The trembling before the curtain rises is the same for the 32-year-old newcomer and the 82-year-old master alike. "It is the same when I stand on stage myself — I am always nervous," Bae Jeong-hye said. "The 30 dancers are not all like me, so I just pray and pray constantly." If dance is proof of being alive, her dance is not over yet.

"I still, clearly, have things to say. Because I am still alive."

shee@heraldcorp.com