Meditative moves

For Korean dancer Sin Cha Hong, meditation is a graceful dance that allows a person to contemplate about self, writes Hema Vijay.

For Korean dancer Sin Cha Hong, meditation is a graceful dance hat allows a person to contemplate about self, writes Hema Vijay

This would be the dancing equivalent of Zen philosophy, where less is more. In terms of speed, the movements are slow, often to the point of stillness.

In terms of costume, the choreography is executed in a flowing fabric that eschews the simplicity of a monk’s robe.

Meanwhile, the stage often becomes dark to the point of a blackout — and viewers get tuned to sense the dancer rather than see her.

At other times, a shower of light illuminates the dancer’s path subtly, making the dancer and her intellectual journey the only entity in the viewer’s mind space.

Well, abstract or postmodern dancer Sin Cha Hong is one of those who makes a marvelous translation of the movements of the mind over to those of the body.

She flew down to Chennai recently to stage Four Walls, one of her iconic choreographies.

Regarded as Korea’s foremost and most influential choreographer, dancer, vocalist and writer, Sin Cha Hong is famous for her meditative dance performances.

The 71-year-old dancer stuns you by her grace and age-defying fluidity of movements — both on stage and off it.

Indian connection

Hong was born and schooled in Korea.

She started learning dance not as a child but when she was in her late 20s. In the late 60s, she moved to New York to study dance.

Remember, this was a period when abstract dance was still in its infancy. Hong was one of the pioneers who understood its potential.

In 1981, she established and founded the Laughing Stone Dance Company in New York and found herself working with artistes like John Cage, Yuji Takahashi, and Margaret Leng Tan and Nam June Paik.

Laughing Stone Dance Company came out with numerous productions.

Dance connoisseurs began to notice that her choreographies reflected the point where eastern and western philosophies meet — meditation and the inward glance.

Her brand of minimalist movement philosophy soon acquired a following.

She lived in New York for 25 years, before moving back home to Korea in the mid-90s, tempted by the lure of ‘being at home’.

She says she named her dance company ‘Laughing Stone’ because she sees the ‘spirit’ in inanimate things too.

Incidentally, she says that it was in India that she arrived at this insight. Hong is very familiar with India and its culture.

“I had been in India for many years, and I have had the opportunity to explore not just this country’s dance traditions, but also its beautiful, remote locations,” she shares.

Incidentally, Hong believes that solitude, meditation and travelling to remote areas have influenced both her spiritual and dance philosophy.

She has studied classical dance too, and this includes ballet, besides Kathak in Delhi, in the 70s.

Hong is familiar with other Indian dance genres too.

“I like Indian dance for its rhythm, visual element and for its tradition of always being performed to live music,” she points out.

Meditative choreography

For Hong, dance is just an extrapolation of meditation. She has always focused on narrating the internal journeys of individuals.

Her choreographies prompt the viewer too to look inwards, into one’s own self, at the past, and finally at looking around.

The sense of ‘I’ is explicit in her works.

As a matter of fact, this dancer studied meditation for 30 years, something that reflects quite emphatically in her unhurried and unruffled performances.

Most of her choreographies hover on modern movements, and this includes movements drawn from casual and everyday human movements, but stylised by grace and fluidity.

Her dance movements are spontaneously slow, rather than deliberately so, and she believes that ‘slowness’ is a trait that trails through her life and thinking too.

Four Walls was composed by the path breaking and avant grade American composer and music theorist John Cage in 1944.

Hong first choreographed Four Walls in 1985 and the performance was staged in New York to flattering responses.

Since then, her Four Walls has been staged over 40 times in the US, Japan, Korea and now, India.

For the last few years, for the live music accompaniment to her dance, Hong has been collaborating with Masami Tada, who learned to play the piano from Takahasi Kosugi, who incidentally was an artistic partner of John Cage at the Merce Cunningham Dance Company.

As for lighting design, Hong teams up with Masaru, who studied philosophy at Waseda University, before studying theatrical techniques at theatre schools in London, New York, Sydney and Tokyo.

“In the case of Four Walls, the choreography is inspired by people coming to a dead end, people gripped by frustration and confusion, and torn between paths. But finally there is a solution, and it is a human solution,” Hong says.

Besides Four Walls, her famous productions include Labyrinth: In the Moon-Night, which was premiered at the Asia Society and Museum in New York City, in 2002.

Hong prefers the solo format to the group format.

She voices, “The solo format is more suited to intellectual inquiry”. In her long dancing career, Hong has collaborated with masters like Hwang Byungki, the gayageum (the Korean 12-string plucked zither musical instrument) player.

Hong’s other big achievement happens to be the Juksan International Arts Festival that stages modern dance choreographies.

The festival remains a calendar event even today, ever since Hong first launched it in 1995.

Hong is married to Werner Sasse, a scholar of Korean art, history, language and culture, and known for his work in establishing centres for Korean Studies in the Universities of Bochum and Hamburg in Germany.

Someone whose fascination for Korean culture has endured for over five decades now, Sasse has now retired from regular teaching and concentrates on translating classical Korean literature.

But his more important contemporary claim to fame is his calligraphic work.

Sasse works with ink and clay on hanji, the traditional Korean paper made from the inner bark of the mulberry tree.

Age-defying fluidity

Sin Cha Hong’s resilience as a dancer is remarkable. At a time when the performing arts are increasingly tilted towards youth, she continues to be on stage in her 70s.

And she continues to mesmerise audiences across the world with her own idioms and brand of intellectual choreography.

“Dance is a strange thing. With dance, you live for the moment. You have to be in it totally — in body, mind and spirit,” she says.

Quick to accommodate, “I’ll demonstrate a few pieces for you,” Hong offers, when we meet in Chennai, making evident her frank humility.

As she dances, it becomes quite clear that her movements are as free-flowing as they ever were, and that she can convey volumes even with expressive movements of just her fingers and toes.

Hong attributes her sense of youth and agility that she radiates to good discipline in food habits, sufficient sleep, being vegetarian through the day and fasting at night, and of course, meditation.

But she quickly adds, “Daily life itself is meditation, if lived and thought out well.”