"My heart is like a pizza, I like to share it", Eun-Me Ahn, Korea's boldest choreograp
Last Tuesday we were lucky to attend the performance of one of Asia’s boldest choreographer, Eun-Me Ahn. After the show we were invited to join a small conversation with the choreographer and her dancers allowing us to get to know a little bit this extraordinary artist and woman. Eun-Me Ahn was born and raised in Korea, and continued her training in New York. She often works in collaboration with companies in the EU making it easy for us to catch her performing near home.
Let Me Change Your Name. Photo by Eunji Park
She presented Let Me Change Your Name at this year's Dance Umbrella – Moving London, London's contemporary dance festival. Initially conceived in 2006, in the years, the work has changed and, according to the choreographer, it has now arrived to its most solid and mature realization. Eight young dancers moved in the empty space of the stage removing, changing and exchanging their neon-coloured clothes, as if removing their skin, mixing and confusing their identities.
Together with the exchange of clothes, attitudes and qualities of maleness and femaleness were being swapped and merged. Men would move across the stage floor in a sensual laying position, eyes fixed onto the public, a light smile of complicity, slowly lifting their dress. Women would jump boisterously taking off their skirts. The performance was funny, brilliant and irreverent just like Eun-Me Ahn.
Let Me Change Your Name. Photo by Eunji Park
As Eun-Me Ahn reveled to us after the show, the choreography was built starting from simple everyday movements, such as sitting down, walking and jumping, and stretching them to see how far the body could extend and posses the room. Gender identities received the same treatment: from an equal formation of male and female dancers, their identities were stretched to the point that they were stripped off creating a new unified body moving as one.
She firmly believes in the equality between male and female dancers: "mind and idea need to be the same for all dancers". More and more women in Korea are getting jobs, work is being harmonised and this is also thanks to the strength of Korean women, "they never stop fighting" said Eun-Me. Although all costumes had different colours, her dancers all wore skirts: "I don't like men wearing pants, skirts are more useful when dancing".
Let Me Change Your Name. Photo by Eunji Park
Her inspiration is society, how it works, how people express themselves within a community and how they are represented. "Dance belongs to low class people, it is like when looking for a partner in a club. It is very sexual"; in fact Eun-Me sees dance not as an elitist form of entertainment but a way to find freedom for oneself, shaking off rules, divisions, struggles, obstacles. At the moment Eun-Me is working on a piece made for and performed by a Korean transgender. "It is all about sharing", she concludes, "my heart is like a pizza, I like to share it".
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Choreography: Eun-Me Ahn
Music: Young-Gyu Jang
Lighting Design: Andre Schulz
Dancers: Eun-Me Ahn, Jihye Ha, Youngmin Jung, Hyekyoung Kim,
Kyungmin Kim, Jaeyun Lee, Hyunwoo Nam, Sihan Park, Yeji Yi
Presented by Dance Umbrella in partnership with The Place. Supported by Center Stage Korea
Arts Management Services, Ministry of Culture, Sport and Tourism, the Korean Cultural Centre UK.
