Su Jin Kim
A Study of Modernized Dancing Body and Transnational Cultural Flows in Colonial Korea (Working Title)
My dissertation project deals with the “colonized modern body”, in which the aesthetics of Western modern dance have been inscribed. This “hybrid body” raises a question of how Western modern dance and feudal ballet have been translated by the Korean dancers, whose bodies incorporate a mixture of Western and Korean dance and theatre traditions, based on their local and national cultural identities.
How the Korean traditional dance cultures have met Western modern dance, however, is not well-defined in Korean dance history, due to the Japanese colonial period (1910-1945) and the Korean war (June 25, 1950). The records of the early ballet in Korea are not preserved, but to be recognized only by the traces of ballet fragmentarily. Nevertheless, the ballet culture has centered around the three large South Korean ballet companies, which are strongly influenced by Russian ballet, e.g. the Kirov Ballet in St. Petersburg, the Vaganova Ballet, and the Bolshoi Theater Ballet, etc. through working together with Russian dancers and choreographers, such as Yuri Grigorovich and Oleg Vinogradov.
In this context, the question arises, how do two different cultures of dancing bodies come across? The main question of my research is how has the dance culture in Korea been modernized and what the hybrid dance body looks like in the context of global society. In regard to this question, the transmission of Western (modern) dance and classical ballet, as well as its transformation through the cultural translation (kulturelle Übersetzung) process are required to investigate from the perspective of the history of Korean society as well as the dance history in the context of modernism (beginning of 20th Century). The terms of modern dance and Western classical ballet as well as the relational meaning of these two in Western dance history are to be mentioned and this will be re-discussed in the context of Korean dance history, in order to approach Korean modernism in dance. Which relevance does the transformation of Korean dance culture (1910-1945) have to Western dance culture?
My dissertation project will lead to an analysis of the hybrid dancing body in Korea before 1945. In order to examine deeply the origin of the modernization process in colonized Korea, the history of Korean traditional dance and Western dance history according to social and political circumstances will be analyzed from the postcolonial perspectives. Based on this in-depth historical background of the dance culture in Korea, the project will use different translation theories and Pierre Bourdieu’s ‘habitus’ concept in order to examine how Western modernity influenced the Korean culture of dance.
This research aims to explore the transcultural consideration combined with experienced and mediated body in the cultural translation of dance aesthetics and globalized academic dance knowledge.
Keywords: hybridity, cultural translation, dancing body, transnationality, modernity, colonialism, globalism
Principal Advisor: Prof. Dr. Gabriele Klein