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dancing-being-in-time
a living archive | dance research

work in progress | January-June 2023

open studio showing: TBA








Dancing Being in Time is a living butoh dance archive connecting my previous solo dance works, their most striking moments, and tracing the evolution of choreography and archetypes through years of solo performances, with their political, ancestral, and artistic historicality and backgrounds. Through process documentation in video, blogs and prototype dance instruction audio, I hope to expand what we know about dance and psychosomatic journeys, studying the patterns of impulse in one body over time.

As a Dancing Being in Time, I question whether the impulses of my body are traumatic patterns of oppression over the span of centuries of violence, and how my dance integrates with my life over the span of years. While the answers may not literally emerge in dance performance, the deep questions may change the methods, intentions, and possibilities in teaching and choreographing other bodies involving and transforming challenging and possibly traumatic tendencies.

The title is inspired by Martin Heidegger’s Being and Time and how we can / cannot separate ourselves from the patterns we have inherited and been thrown into.

I will look for what felt like new movements in previous solo dance videos and find connections to movements of other own previous works and the influences of artistic and socio-political influences. For example, I recently reflected that many of my dance works connected to my psychosomatic journey of transforming violent tendencies, and my Korean-American roots. This is a line of connection I would like to follow, and find more, to create an archive, research posts, and a sample prototype instructional audio of new methods of connecting movements to socio-political research.

I ask- Is there a present node of the moment that shifts the patterns? How can the historical lineages and the shifts be visible and understandable? Are the impulses in our bodies connected to the political / ancestral, across multiple projects over years? What are intentional / unintentional transformation in the art and life of a dancer, surrounding one+ piece? How are former choreographies relevant to the body in the present?

To share my background, after intense years of training and performing in butoh dance, I wanted to teach the inner senses of dance that deeply moved and changed me and went to study Anna and Daria Halprin’s Method at the Tamalpa Institute. I also worked to integrate butoh dance, psychosomatic therapy, and conflict resolution with a Masters at the Process Work Institute.


Image by Photographer Claude Hofer
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Gefördert durch die Beauftragte der Bundesregierung für Kultur und Medien im Programm NEUSTART KULTUR, Hilfsprogramm DIS-TANZEN des Dachverband Tanz Deutschland.

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