Choreographing Aff inities and Differences Notes on Korea-Africa Relations in Transnational Dance Collaboration①

[Kr] Yoon Soo-ryon

Introduction

The popular idea that a contemporary model of dance collaboration privileges two or more choreographers in a“democratic” and “communitarian” working relationship has a lot to do with the creative process championed by the 1960s’ Euro-American experimental avantgarde movement[1]. The Judson Dance Theater model of collaboration in the early 1960s at Judson Memorial Church in Washington Square, New York, is one of the examples. The dancers including Yvonne Rainer and Steve Paxton, who worked on weekly workshops in the church space open to anyone interested, ushered in what Village Voice dance critic Jill Johnston viewed as “a democratic evening of dance”[2]. It relied less on a singularly autonomous choreographer who would assume the sole authorial f igure. Instead, it highlighted its collective decision-making process that involved participants together in improvisation and task-based choreographic methods, such as responding to actions of a partner or creating movements inspired by quotidian gestures and behaviors like walking and jumping.②[3,4]

However, to assume a similarly democratic vision in dance collaborations today, particularly the transnational and commissioned ones, might mask practical challenges unique to the contemporary cases of dance collaborations.They are increasingly subject to the venues and festivals’demands, as well as public and private funding agencies that support the projects. Practical challenges, as Rudi Laermans reminds us, include working within time constraints, fulf illing obligations for private and state funding agencies, and, perhaps most importantly,compromising with the uncertainties associated with a collaborative outcome that has “yet to come”[5].Furthermore, as their own heterogeneity intensif ies across transnational borders, dance collaborators cannot rely on a seemingly “free for all” creative process without examining their internal politics as well as socioeconomic conditions that shape the process[6—10]. Contrary to the positive vision of the “synergistic effects” produced from collaboration, which would “alter the individual artists’perception of dance at a macro-level”[11], the different economic conditions, raced and gendered hierarchy among dancers, cultural backgrounds, and a variety of technical skills complicate the vision of a coherent and balanced collaborative outcome.③[12,13]

Attending closely to this internal politics of transnational dance collaborations, this article provides a survey of four mid-career Korean choreographers who have collaborated with artists from Togo, Congo, Nigeria,Cameroon, and Burkina Faso. On the one hand, they want to take advantage of Korean cultural agencies’growing interest in strengthening Korea’s nation branding through multicultural and international collaboration opportunities. On the other hand, the choreographers want to challenge their anxiety about various issues that emerge from collaboration: their negotiation with the burden to represent the cultural identity of Koreanness,their heavy reliance on Euro-American modern dance training, and their limitations on understanding other dancers from different socioeconomic and cultural backgrounds. I argue that the choreographers use Korea-Africa dance collaborations as a way to contest and negotiate with their Koreanness. They f ind feelings of aff inities in the partnering with African choreographers,but the perceived aff inities only highlight differences among the participants who must consider sponsors’expectation for harmonious multiculturalism. In the end, the Korean choreographers employ various strategies, which in turn complicate the cultural agencies’transnational dance collaboration model that emphasizes a utopic and democratic working relationship. However,the imbalance between the Korean and African dancers in some of these collaborative working relationships leaves open the question of the internal, often racialized, politics of Korea-Africa dance collaborations.

This article introduces the cases to address a variety of tactics the choreographers have applied, rather than to sketch the def initive and prevailing pattern in Korea-Africa dance collaborations. What ties these disparate cases together is a state-sponsored program called the Cultural Partnership Initiative (CPI), which illustrates the growing interest in Korea-Africa collaborations. The CPI was initiated by the Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism of the Republic of Korea in 2005 to diversify Korean “cultural partnership” previously reserved primarily for East Asian and Euro-American countries.Partnered with many NGOs and cultural organizations in the private sector, the CPI has invited artists and cultural workers from Africa, Latin America, and South Asia as “recipients of cultural aid” to Korea. They participated in a 3-to 6-month residency program under the tutelage of a more “experienced” cultural representative from the hosting Korean organization, researching and rehearsing for collaborative works, while attending Korean cultural activities such as visiting heritage sites and learning Korean. The CPI program enacts what dance historian Clare Croft calls the “collaborative turn” in cultural diplomacy[14]. I add that non-Euro-American“multicultural” components, particularly those of African culture, have been constitutive of the Korean state’s cultural diplomacy in recent years.④[15]

The Seoul International Dance Festival (SIDance),one of the CPI’s many partnering organizations and a prominent international dance festival in the region, has commissioned mid-career Korean choreographers in their thirties and forties to lead a dance collaboration every year as part of the CPI project. The roaster includes the four choreographers I discuss in this article, Park Soonho, Lee Tae-sang, Song Joo-won, and Lee Kyung-eun.While not all of the works I explore here are directly related to the CPI or the SIDance, the choreographers all participated in the CPI and worked with artists from Congo, Nigeria, Burkina Faso, and Cameroon with varying degrees. While the CPI projects also involved dancers from countries other than Korea and African countries, the fact that African choreographers were important f igures in the projects warrants further investigation in the context of Korea-Africa relations.

I base my analyses of the cases primarily on performance descriptions, participant observation, semistructured interviews, secondary resources such as interview articles and informal conversations during studio rehearsals with four mid-career Korean dancerchoreographers and four choreographers from Nigeria,Burkina Faso, and Congo. My interviews with the Korean choreographers tend to prevail over the participating African choreographers in this article, for several reasons.The interviews not only highlight the accountability of my interlocutors as the leaders/facilitators in each of the collaborative instances but also make the imbalance among the collaborating choreographers visible, which shapes the narrative and choreographic choices. These varying degrees of collaborations and asymmetrical working relationships reveal just how complex the Korea-Africa dance collaborations are, ultimately challenging the utopic visions of the existing dance collaboration model.

In what follows, I describe the approaches that the Korean choreographers considered in the process of creating works for the CPI, during which they expressed a strong interest in dancers from Nigeria, Congo,Burkina Faso, and Senegal. Each case reveals, to some degree, various types of “aff inities” that the Korean choreographers expected to share with the choreographers from Africa, which in turn highlighted the differences and even the hierarchy that shaped the collaborative processes. Based on these case studies, I end this article by raising additional questions that may be generative for the further consideration of transnational dance collaboration.

Case 1. A (Re)Turn to Koreanness

Park Soon-ho, in his forties, led a collaborative project in a CPI-sponsored SIDance program between 2008 and 2010. In response to my question about his interest in a Korea-Africa dance collaboration, he explained what “Korean” means to him in the f irst place and how the opportunity to work with African dancers made him appreciate “non-Western” rhythms, “If my dance must be labeled as being ‘Korean’ because I was born and raised here, because I make a living here, and because I know the culture, I guess that makes sense. But I still need to study the essence of movements labeled as being Korean,” Park said.⑤He questioned what made his dance “Korean,” if not for his own ethnic and national background.

In fact, Park’s dance training was squarely in the tradition of Euro-American contemporary dance; he was trained in the Martha Graham technique as a student and later in contact improvisation as a professional dancer at the European Dance Development Center (EDDC). His training informed his choreography with pronounced contrasts between contraction and release, a formative and sculptural rendering of movements, legs spreading out to the sides in a square shape, rolling over on Marley f loors, or martial art-like push-and-pull gestures between dancers, which are different from off-beat and grounded movements of traditional Korean dance. After dancing for twenty years as a professional contemporary dance choreographer, he wanted to learn more about his own culture and do justice to labeling “a Korean dancer.”

In this context, the opportunity to work for the CPI and the SIDance between 2008 and 2010 with Jean-Michel Moukam Fonkam, a key f igure in the contemporary Cameroonian dance scene and currently based in Avignon, France, helped him not only f ind ways to go beyond his Euro-American modern dance training but also appreciate how Fonkam’s works incorporated his cultural backgrounds. Fonkam had performed in Korea in 2007 before he was invited again to the CPI residency program associated with the SIDance in 2008 to collaborate with Park and three other dancers from Cameroon, Malaysia, and Thailand. Actually, Fonkam’s dance training from dance institutes such as l’Ecole des Sables (Senegal), Centre National de la Danse (CND)in Paris, and the Royaumont (France), also relied on European contemporary dance. However, it was “African rhythms,” according to Park, which seemed to generate a different moving body:

I was interested in African rhythms in Fonkam’s dance because it showed rhythmic movements that are more pronounced than our [traditional Korean] dance that centers onheung[as an affective quality of having fun] and curves. For me, the energy of African dance generates a body different from ours, erupting into the rhythms, which we don’t have in Korean dance. I have begun to take an interest in it because it might help me learn more about Korean dance.⑥

To Park, Fonkam’s movements felt rather energetic than slow and still, spontaneous than faithful to a given choreographic template. Just like Fonkam’s“Africanness” complicated what Park perceived as Euro-American dance training, he began to investigate how learning about Korean culture can complicate one’s Euro-American dance training, while not entirely discounting it.⑦[16,17]The movement changes that ref lected Park’s interest became apparent in his collaboration with Fonkam in a multinational project “Pattern & Variable”(2008) as a result of a CPI-sponsored SIDance residency program in 2008. “Pattern & Variable,” a thirty-minute dance with six dancers, still echoed Park’s choreography(such as the sudden falls, f loor rolls, and slides).However, it proceeded more boldly in a few scenes to showcase movements of gyration, spontaneous turns,and upper body waves. Later, Park revised “Pattern &Variable” into a more developed piece entitled “Judo”(2014), in which Park experimented liberally with movements inspired by strides, group dynamics, and tension-building moments between judo players on a mat. His other works following “Pattern & Variable” also ref lect his renewed interest in Korean culture, as in the cases of “Balance and Imbalance” (2010) and “Bow”(2014), which include Korean drumming and Korean traditional archery movements, respectively.⑧

Park’s admiration for Fonkam’s uses of his “African rhythms” may have sparked his renewed interest in his own culture, thereby inspiring him to create a new choreographic vocabulary as Siobhan Burke wrote of Park’s work as giving “a sense of the ancient propelling the new”[18]. It is not entirely clear, however, whether the collaboration has rewarded the same experience for Fonkam. Uninterrogated in the Park-Fonkam collaboration too is how Fonkam’s heavy reliance on French contemporary dance training, which dance critics in Korea fail to recognize, in his movement vocabulary even as they admire his uniqueness. Fonkam, regardless of his choreographic originality, is already read as inherently having a “dancerly sensibility” in his “black African body,”as dance critic Shim Jeong-min observes after watching Fonkam’s work “Marche et Risque” in Seoul, 2008:

Above all, Fonkam’s “dancing body’s” use of its musculature is bold yet f ine-tuned, combines both bendingand-stretching as well as contracting-and-releasing,and instinctively enlivens the rhythm. This is a type of movement with uniqueness, which black African dance artists’ bodies might generate. It is a manifestation of dance-sensibility that can only materialize through the body of a black African dance artist, different from [Western dance’s] meticulous composition or formulaic movements,or from our [Koreans’] movement expressions of delicate sensibility.[19]

In Park’s case, he began to probe more deeply into Koreanness and Korean culture because he wanted to negotiate with the label of Korean dance, and he did so by working through the gap between his cultural background and his professional training. For that, Fonkam’s unconventional dance idioms gave Park a hint as to how Park can emulsify his Euro-American dance training.However, Fonkam’s body had already been marked as“African” limited how his dance could be interpreted more diversely in the process of a transnational collaboration. Understood as either generating “African rhythms” or materializing a “dancerly sensibility”def inable in terms of neither “Western” dance nor Korean dance, it appears that a perceived incommensurate distance between Fonkam and Park’s dancing bodies,even as they looked for a kind of aff inities, was never challenged.

Case 2. SociabiIity as an ImpossibIe Condition for CoIIaboration

Another choreographer Lee Tae-sang also led and choreographed for a CPI-sponsored SIDance residency project in 2009, with dancers from Burkina Faso, Congo,India, and Malaysia. Unlike Park, Lee did not necessarily interrogate the contestedness of Koreanness as a label that binds his choreography to an ethno-nationalist quality or a particular set of ideas about a traditional Korean culture.He also expressed less urgency in questioning whether his modern dance training circumscribed how he approaches the label of “Korean dance.” In fact, when he realized over the duration of the collaboration that the invited participants were twenty-something emerging artists with varying skills and different styles of training, Lee decided to take control over the choreography in large measure, as he deemed he had more experience (whereas Park, even though he was also appointed as the project leader, could consult Fonkam’s movement since both had similar years of experience in choreography). This is not to imply that Lee as the leader failed to consider a more inclusive or pluralistic environment for the collaboration.He did suggest, though, that his approach to the CPI project primarily comes from his experiences in other transnational dance collaborations, which informed him of the constrictions of time pressure for building a working relationship and making new works.

Since the aesthetic direction was not the primary concern, Lee considered a cultural aspect of the collaboration more important: he described that a Korea-related transnational dance collaboration has to entail a common understanding of Korean culture among the participants.By “Korean culture,” Lee did not necessarily mean learning the language or wearing Korean folk attires; it was rather the sociability based on the everyday customs and practices such as group outings in Korean society. He believed that the participants would feel “comfortable” by anchoring themselves in this common cultural thread —and comfort was what helped their bodies open up to and become more malleable for cultural, social, and technical differences. This would also help the non-Korean participants to learn more about Lee himself.“They should visit Korea at least once to get to really know me [to collaborate],” Lee related. Lee also assumed that non-Euro-American dancers would be more open to social gatherings as part of the process, similar to dancers in Korea who usually incorporate social functions in the production process, as he thought that his previous Euro-American collaborators were too “distant.” Furthermore,Lee also positioned himself as someone who could be more understanding of the participants, particularly those coming from Burkina Faso and Congo, because he had experienced diff iculties in other transnational dance collaborations as a non-Euro-American dancer himself.

Despite this vision of sociability, Lee found the creative process more challenging and laborious than he had initially thought, citing age differences, experience gaps, and perhaps more importantly, different economic backgrounds. For example, Lee made social gatherings an essential part of his dance workshop schedules which,much to Lee’s regret, put a lot of pressure on the dancers from Burkina Faso and Congo who had been using their residency stipends as remittances. Lee eventually realized that his approach to dance collaboration was fundamentally different from the rest of the participants,such as Régis, a dancer from a relatively less “developed”country than Korea:

I once talked with Régis about why each of us became a dancer. He told me he danced because then he wouldn’t have to hold guns and he could earn money that way. It was a foreign concept to me because in Korea dancers earn just enough to get by or they live below the poverty line. They don’t dance to make money; it is impossible in the f irst place. We look all glamorous on the outside, but we are all in debt. Except for a few senior artists, Korean choreographers all struggle. They can’t f ind jobs even as mid-career choreographers. Some earn about f ive thousand US dollars a year.⑨

On the one hand, his comment demonstrates how Régis’ situation made him realize his oversight of the global economic hierarchy that dancers cannot escape.Sociability is already a form of capital in itself, as Bourdieu reminds us: building or even merely accessing a particular kind of sociability requires necessary time and cost in the f irst place[20]. In this 2009 CPI-sponsored dance collaboration, for example, the assumption that a sociability will help enrich the collaborative process was already complicated by each dancer’s different economic conditions: stipends were converted into remittances for some of the dancers who could not afford to spend them on social and cultural activities.

On the other hand, the ways in which the dancers approached transnational dance collaboration as an economic opportunity as much as an opportunity for aesthetic innovation provided Lee with a glimpse of the current arts funding structure’s logic: state-sponsored programs, such as the CPI, privilege transnational collaborations (especially the collaborations between Korea and African countries) while local Korean artists barely make do. In fact, the continued increase in the budget for the Cultural Off icial Development Aids (Cultural ODA, the executive scheme that oversees projects including the CPI)in the last decade has often targeted artists and cultural workers from African countries, while the public funding program for the local scale arts and culture productions has been slowly drying up.⑩

What started off as building the sociability based on the expectation for aff inities became a pedagogical practice for Lee, who came to understand the economic condition that shapes the experiences of dancers from West African countries different from that of Korean dancers in a supposedly democratic partnership.

Case 3 and 4. Embracing Incommunication and Transgression

Not all choreographers I interviewed dwelled on the question of Korean dance or a “Korean” sociability. Song Joo-won and Lee Kyung-eun present cases where each of them dedicated more time to research to maximize limited opportunities given to the participants, without evacuating the discussions around the risks and problems associated with coping with cultural and technical differences. This resulted in their attempt to view some of the challenges —like socioeconomic and cultural differences and the burden of cultural labels of Koreanness and Africanness —to be more generative than restricting.

For example, Song Joo-won, another mid-career Korean choreographer in her early forties at the time of research, worked on “Listen to the Wind Blow” (2013)with dancers from Nigeria, Congo, China, and Croatia in a CPI-sponsored movement research and residency program between July and September 2013. “Listen to the Wind Blow,” according to Song’s artist statement,intended to signify transitory encounters between the dancers, as if they were the winds blowing from multiple directions, transgressing borders, and “contacting the boundaries around the uncanny intersection” of cultural,linguistic, and racial differences.[11]This somewhat elusive description of the artistic intention ref lects a laborious process of both coping with cultural (and racial,as the artist statement more overtly points out than in other cases) differences and having to “transcend” the limitations of the spatial-temporal origins of dancers’training. This approach displays the dancers’ honest frustration with the burden of trying to incorporate cultural elements into the work (as per the CPI’s concept).

She pointed out from the very beginning that she was not interested in highlighting “African culture” or“Korean culture”; she emphasized the importance of a research process that would act as a guide for the more complex set of choreographic movements. She demanded that all dancers get together at least two hours every day before the rehearsal to discuss. The goal of this was not only to gain mutual understanding but also to lay bare a“middle point”: an intersectional, a crossroad, and a point of conf luence where each dancer’s different “answers”to the discussing questions will meet and converge. Her treatment of and expectation for this “middle point” were interesting in that she wanted this to remain inconclusive,to be a “mystery.” As part of this exercise, each dancer was asked to complete “homework” to think about and bring to rehearsal several questions that were important in their life and potentially to the piece itself. Topics varied from the mundane to the abstract. One day, they talked about the birds that f ly and the birds that do not f ly, and on other days they discussed the nature of disappearance.During our conversations, she drew a sketch and a chart to show me how she had been organizing and structuring the questions and answers so that each choreographic scene would compliment one another in multilayered ways, like small petals overlapping with and superimposed upon one another to create a larger f lower-like shape.

At the outset, this may seem contradictory: Song desired a meticulously planned structure, yet she also insisted on mysterious components that might potentially threaten the work’s structural integrity. However, this seeming contradiction could be read as an attempt to achieve aesthetic and narrative ambivalence. In a way, this creative process mirrors the impossibility of an idealized“friendship” and “partnership” based on the romanticized idea of Korean-African aff inities. Thus, Song imagined the stage as innately a space ofbulsotong(incommunication),which means the absence of communication, but also an act of communicating in incoherence, misunderstanding,or even antagonism. The conceptualization challenges the default assumptions about dance collaborations’coherence, clarity, and decisiveness.

Therefore, the dancers’ “cultural” traits did not necessarily inform the dance making any more than their technical skills and research discussions. Nigerian choreographer Frank Konwea, for example, entertained the idea of narrating a text in Igbo in one of the improvisation rehearsal sessions, which was eventually subsumed by his strong theatrical gestures with which he acted out a feminized movement of putting on makeup to interrogate one’s cultural and gendered identities.It is more striking when Konwea, Pierre Mahoukou(Congolese dancer), and Youngcool Park (Korean dancer) created an intense and powerful group dynamic f illed with masculinized images of friction, violent contacts, and homoerotic tensions circulating between the three dancers rather than resorting to a more visibly recognizable “cultural” dance (see Figure 1).

Figure 1. Konwea, Mahoukou, and Park in “Listen to the Wind Blow”(2013). Photo by Park Sang Yun, courtesy of Seoul International Dance Festival (SIDance).

If Song embraced the inherent impossibility of utopic, coherent, and multicultural collaboration by insisting on the recuperation of incommunication, Lee Kyung-eun’s work in the CPI-sponsored SIDance project,as well as her other collaborations, showcased her rejection of identitarian labels. Lee participated in a CPI-sponsored SIDance collaboration as a head choreographer in 2010 with Togolese, Malaysian, and Brazilian dancers.Lee is also one of the few Korean artists who have been able to sustain a relatively longer-lasting partnership with artists from West Africa, particularly with the worldrenowned Congolese-Senegalese choreographer Andréya Ouamba. While Lee did not meet Ouamba through CPI projects, her working partnership with Ouamba inspired her to participate in a variety of Africa-related projects, including the CPI collaboration in 2010 and her performance and workshops in the Kaay Fecc Festival(2005) in Senegal and the Makinu Bantu Festival (2008)in Congo. Therefore, in this section, I highlight Lee’s sustained partnership with Ouamba as a foundation for her Korea-Africa dance collaborations including the 2010 CPI project, as well as how Lee and Ouamba considered conceptual research as an important component in their partnership.

Lee Kyung-eun, a seasoned Korean choreographer who was also approaching her mid-career stage at the time of my research, has worked closely with Andréya Ouamba since 2002 on several occasions including their f irst collaborative piece, “R,” which debuted in Korea in 2004. In 2011,Lee was commissioned by the Hanguk Performing Arts Center (HANPAC), sponsored by the Arts Council Korea(ARKO), to create a collaborative piece as part of the HANPAC’s annual solo performance series. She took this opportunity to feature Ouamba’s choreography and her solo dance performance, which resulted in “Across the Street” (2011). The work was originally titled “Dakar-Seoul,” representing the distance between the two choreographers but also various borders that demarcate their distance: the borders between the cultures, genres, and aesthetic differences. Her comment best summarized the nature of her approach to this project:

The reason why I chose to work with him [on “Across the Street”] was the collaborating with an “off-the-wall”person seemed to make more sense to me after I had given some thoughts to working with dramaturgs and directors from The Republic of Korea that I had already worked with in the past, because the thought of this seemed too mediocre for the new project.[12]

It was not necessarily Ouamba’s cultural origin or nationality that was attractive to her than what she desired as friendship unhampered by preconceived notions about one’s cultural values. She eventually privileged or hoped to see an individuated body-to-body transmission of meanings before translating them into a more solid form of choreography.[13]Rather than resorting to translations of language or cultures, she considered herself and Ouamba,

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as f irst and foremost dancers; our bodies speak —there are things that leap beyond words. We had to work together without a translator one day, and contrary to my worries, we accomplished a lot more that day than we had done on any other days. So we ended up not talking too much whenever we got together to collaborate. Instead,we analyzed, we made movements.[14]

Lee was already familiar with the work’s improvisation and task-based movement-oriented choreography, but Lee eventually found the movement research process challenging in that it pushed the envelope to confront various limitations,such as her own bias towards West African cultures or availability of funds and resources for their collaboration.Lee saw this as crossing “all kinds of borders,” like “a spatial border, a bodily border, and a regional border.”[15]Therefore, even as Lee imagines the partnership to be exceeding cultural and linguistic differences to some extent as illustrated by her comment, she came to acknowledge these “borders” between Ouamba and herself. However arbitrary and performative, these “borders” enabled her to interrogate her positionality. Then, how did her limitations translate into choreography?

Lee and Ouamba’s research on borders led to their active uses of duct tape to visualize how the borders work in “Across the Street.” She attached duct tape during the performance onto Marley f loors and the walls only to “transgress” them, albeit f iguratively. The ways in which Lee attached duct tape onto the walls and f loors also signif ied the persistent yet arbitrary quality of the borders. For example, there was no meticulously drawn notation that dictated where to stick the tape;the directions seemed more roving than clean and intentional, as she moved around the stage sometimes in wide zigzagging steps. She added variety to the pace as she picked up speed while moving around almost to the extent that she found herself short of breath while sticking rolls after rolls of duct tapes onto the surface areas of the stage and its surrounding walls. The stickiness, the viscosity of the tapes, the harsh sounds of ripping and tearing of the tapes were a constant reminder of ruptures and breakages upon the creation and transgression of borders, whether they are territorial or aesthetic.[16]

What Lee called her working relationship with Ouamba as “friendship” signaled her desire for an individualistic, non-subjective, and democratic working relationship and the refusal to territorialize and nationalize her aesthetic choices. Yet the violent demarcations made by the tape, contrasted with the supple, playful, and mobile body of Lee, also indicated that the desire for a friendship might also be a violent one, regardless of how both choreographers interact and engage with each other on a daily basis. In other words,the structural conditions complicate the efforts to avoid the burden of cultural identities or national origins, like in cases of a possible denial of entry into The Republic of Korea for Ouamba because of his West African origin even as he travels around the world as a famed choreographer.

Both Song and Lee considered the inherent limitations of Korea-Africa dance collaboration to be a productive challenge, which resulted in Song’s interest in incommunication and Lee’s desire for transgressing various borders between the collaborative partners. The concepts of incommunication and border-transgression led them to rely on conceptual research, yet the process did not necessarily resolve the issues rising from cultural differences, economic gaps, or other practical challenges that dancers from African countries often face based on their national (and racialized) origins. While Song and Lee’s various collaborative partnerships with Togolese,Congolese, and Nigerian dancers demonstrated their desire to find aff inities in the form of friendship or partnership, the structural conditions render these attempts already ideological.

ConcIusions

This article examined how Korean choreographers’experiences in Korea-Africa dance collaborations,particularly those sponsored by the CPI, the SIDance,and other state agencies such as HANPAC, complicate the existing narratives about the transnational dance collaboration model that privileges utopic and democratic working relationships. The Korean choreographers utilized the opportunity to interrogate the legacy of hegemonic Euro-American dance training or the cultural labels of Koreanness and Africanness. They considered dance collaborations as a chance to carve out a space to enact a more “minor” working relationship between Korean and African choreographers who often f ind it diff icult to foreground their voices on the international scene.[17][22]Hence, even while collaborations similarly induce work-related stress, time pressure, and productivity anxiety for the Korean choreographers, they looked for traces of aff inities that animated their partnership with choreographers from Togo, Congo, Nigeria, Cameroon,and Burkina Faso. The Korean choreographers I discussed here show that there is more at stake in dance collaborations than establishing politics of communitarian ideals.[18][23—26]Korea-Africa dance collaborations played a pedagogical role for the Korean choreographers to critically review their training as well as the label of“Korean dance.” At the same time, these collaborative efforts informed some of the Korean choreographers to ruminate on cultural differences and cultural identities that became the burden for Korean and West African choreographers who were often expected to present works with “cultural f lavors” or “multiculturalism” in the CPI-sponsored program.

Nevertheless, their different approaches, with varying degrees of success for either Korean and African dancers, left open the questions of how precarious border crossings can be for choreographers from African countries. By the same token, if precariousness is a necessary condition for any transnational dance collaboration, the question of how the “transnational”itself materializes in specif ic choreographic movements and its aesthetics in a way that highlights its internal hierarchy and racial and national politics becomes important. Further engaging in this question will help us pursue a more critical understanding of Korea-African cultural collaboration and its choreographic process.