Glory

Description

Kwon Lyon-eun’s Glory portrays the true story of a male dancer who participates in dance competitions in order to earn an exemption from national military service, tracking the ways that ‘bodies’ are treated in Korean institutions. With each new production choreographer Kwon Lyon-eun, looks less and less like a rising choreographer and more and more like an experienced artist with remarkable individuality and tenacious artistic choices. Get a glimpse of the experiences of An Namkeun, a star from the hit TV show Dancing 9, and other young Korean men who participate in competitions to earn an exemption from compulsive military service with a gold or silver medal. Kwon’s work. Glory, is a choreographic documentary tracking the ways bodies are treated in a typical Korean Dance environment.> Missile, nuclear bomb, scorpion, side splits. These sound like military terminology, but they are not. They refer to highly challenging techniques used by male dancers in dance competitions. Glory centers around the true story of dancer An Namkeun who challenged himself to participate in dance competitions for three years for exemption from military service. As he confesses, “Being called to the army would have meant giving up dance,” the male dancers shows how his body is endlessly edited and trimmed, and how the institutional changes in enlistment exemption have influenced his life. Of course, this work does not speak to whether the competitions and the enlistment exemption institution are right or wrong. It is a choreographic documentary, inquiring into how the realities and institutions for all male dancers in Korea are remembered and documented in their bodies. Kwon Lyon-eun participated in KNCDC’s Choreography LAB program in 2015, and presented her research results on ‘the perspective of the body in the history of Korean contemporary dance’ through Mom-meom-mum-mam with her real-life stories of diets and anorexia. This work later became the starting point for Glory, and she expands the 10-minute version from Danse Élargie into 30 minutes to clearly upgrade the theme and choreographic intention of the work.