Perspectives on Korean Dance (review)

This intriguing and wide-reaching book draws on thirty years of the author's experience of Korean dance. It is organised into three sections.

Part One describes dance in Korea, from traditional village and court forms through to modern and ballet. It then presents an analytical dance taxonomy, and concludes with a discussion of the 'Intangible Cultural Assets' policy and its effects on the organisation and transmission of dance. Part Two is the longest section. Two chapters give extremely detailed accounts of traditional 'national treasures': Ch'o˘yongmu, a masked dance performed by five men, and Chinju Ko˘mmu, a sword dance performed by eight women. We learn about their movement characteristics, their historical origins in the village, their incorporation into the court repertoire, how they have changed over time, and their contemporary incarnations. I particularly appreciated the subtle discussionsof the gendering of dance, and its ability to reveal and to produce cultural complexity, at what is the heart of the book. Next comes an analysis of the relationship between movement from shamanic ritual and three different dance performances. Then follows a short account of the life of court musician and dancer, Kim Ch'o˘-hung. Part Three moves from tradition to two cases of Korean dance overseas. Archival research informs a detailed account of the critical reception of the 'Korean Pavlova', Ch'oe Sung-hui, on her tour of the United States in the late 1930s, and how she adapted her choreography and programme to the then-orientialist expectations of the audience. Finally comes the role of Halla Huhm's Korean Dance Studio in Hawai'i in migrant culture, and the problems of cultural ownership which arose when the studio was taken over by a non-Korean.

Identity is the theme which runs through the different strands. This important point is only mentioned in the 'Afterword'. For non-Korean specialists, the duration of the Choso˘n dynasty (1392 to1910) needs emphasising, as it provides a continuity which is important for traditional dance, its documentation, and its variations over time. As identity is important, it is unfortunate that 'Korea' in the modern period refers specifically to South Korea. A map of the locations mentioned in the book would have been helpful. In an otherwise meticulously produced book, it is surprising that throughout chapter 6 (after its first, correct, appearance), 'Hawai'i' is spelt with its first 'i' missing.

These quibbles aside, this is an extremely dense, intriguing, and spectacularly well-illustrated work. Rather than developing a narrative argument, the book is presented as a series of essays, and moves quickly from the descriptive overview to comprehensive and multi-perspectival discussions which demand close attention from the reader. Indeed, Van Zile observes that she could have written a book from each chapter. She sidesteps the theoretical ramifications of concepts like identity and ritual, and chooses not to develop an analysis of orientalism or transnationalism in the final section. This is a shame, but given the ethnographic breadth and density of the book's subject, we should probablybe grateful for these analytical curtailments, some of which will, no doubt, be elaborated elsewhere. The approach is largely effective, but not always straightforward. For example, in chapter 1, the 'derived dance' category refers to dance that developed in the mid-nineteenth century, intensifying in the Japanese period after 1910. In chapter 2, in a very complex account of Sino-Korean and Japanese performance vocabularies, derived dance (shinmuyong) is both a subcategory of traditional theatrical folk-dance and also of Korean dance. So this complex analysis, crucially summarised in figure 4, works against the first chapter in a somewhat provocative manner.

This book will make a valuable contribution to cultural and cross-cultural understandings of dance. It is an excellent example of how to write about dance as movement and as culture, combining 'kinesthetic modes' (xx) of intellectual enquiry with more conventional ones. It succeeds as an accessible yet rigorously situated account for the dance scholars in general...