article from ballet.co

Renee Renouf

06-11-08, 06:14 PM (GMT)

"Flux at Yerba Buena Center’s Forum, October 18"

LAST EDITED ON 06-11-08 AT 06:16 PM (GMT)

The cover of YBC’s Encore October program made Dohee Lee look heroic sized. Tiny and delicate of bone, emotionally extremely powerful, conceptually Lee is a whirlwind like the Rashomon shamaness. In Flux Lee and her collaborators created a fusion of Korean traditional music instruments, Korean musical styles with Western cultural influences, Korean War images and her own and Sherwood Chen’s dancing interwoven with the I Ching trigrams, explained in a program insert. The mixture was a stunner deserving further widespread viewing.
The lobby outside the Forum displayed two boat-like structures covered with even strips of white paper bearing two characters from the I Ching’s trigrams stamped in cinnabar red. At the top of the strip was a stamp with the Korean han gul characters for Flux. A video screen displayed Dohee Lee using the divination sticks for I Ching readings while talking to Community Engagement Diector Joel Tan. When the audience was permitted into the space it was aware something unusual would happen.

The musicians Tatsu Aoki, Francis Wong, Jason Lewis, Jonathan Kroll were seated on individual platforms in back and to stage right before the spare white panels designer and lighter Jose Maria Francos provided to frame the various performers. To stage right, Dohee Lee’s platform displayed a range of drums arrayed like a traditional battery used by accomplished Korean drumming dancers. The four musicians used an assortment of western and Northeast Asian instruments; initially prominent was the Japanese samisen.

Chen sat in the middle of the stage, ceremoniously arranging the divination sticks used with the I Ching, the significance of the combinations, sorting and floor layout remaining unknown. The plectra twang across the samisen's gut strings lent aural emphasis to the deliberate arranging of the sticks. As Chen rose, he moved in the achingly slow tempo of butoh, followed by Lee.

Lee, like Chen, was dressed in white with the white band of mourning encircling her hair. As she postured, legs splayed, torso stretched in visual screams of anguish, emphasizing a movement phrase of horror and protest, she punctuated passages with bak, a six-piece wooden clapper tied with deer-skin looking like a spreading fan-like multiple cover of a Buddhist sutra . The bak’s sharp crack sound slapped the air like the images of the Korean war projected on the white background; it’s little surprise that the user is considered the leader of a traditional orchestra. Interpersed with pictures of happy children, older women in traditional Korean garments, the visual narrative was just clear enough to identify the subject matter; snow, lines of soldiers, war dead, refugees in long lines. Mercifully, these reminders of Korea’s agonizing history half a century ago were not so sharp to divert attention totally from the performers.

For Saturday, Lee was supported in the mid-passage drumming by three young women, Elisa Gahng, Mimi Kim and Cartherine Pyun, playing drums on traditional vertical stands; Lee sat on the floor with a chang’go between Yeri Shon and Kent Hong. Affiliated with the Oakland-based Korean youth center, where Lee is the artistic director, the sextette drummed a set reminiscent of the hypnotic effects African ensembles frequently create, partly by length, but also by intensity, without distractions. Watching the three young women manipulate their drumming sticks, swaying forward and back with the force of their drumming simply increased the aural impression. Following the projected images, the sound burst like defiance, affirmation and enduring Korean culture. In the final minutes, Lee donned a colorful robe and bonnet of celebratory shaman ceremonies and the youth ensemble appeared with the familiar pom pom hats of Korean folk harvest ritual celebration.

Exhibiting the multiple skills of a traditional Korean artist, Lee sang at various moments in this deliberate dance drama, her voice conveying familiarity with the one-person opera style pan-sori which matches flamenco for its haunting, earthy delivery and verbal pungency. At the finale Lee used the style in heavily accented English to thank the audience for being witness,while viewers were given souvenirs, white strips from the two boats displayed in the lobby, two trigrams and the program name stamped in cinnabar-hued ink.

Lee, Chen, Gahng, Kim, Pyun, shon, Hong.