Art Sonje Center presents Art Sonje Performance Pass, Kick, Fall and Run from Oct 1 to 3. The participants—Ro Kyung Ae, Park Minhee, Lee Yun Jung, and Geumhyung Jeong—are four artists prolifically active in a range of genres including dance and music. The project’s title is taken from a 1965 work, How to Pass, Kick, Fall and Run, choreographed by master of modern dance Merce Cunningham, with sound by John Cage.

For this performance program commissioned by Art Sonje Center, each of the artists presents her own work, using one of the four verbs “pass, kick, fall, and run” from Cunningham’s title as a starting point. Because the four indicated forms of movement are fundamental, everyday activities whose physical mechanisms can be understood, one may expect choreography and forms of sound expression derived from them, with the works unfolding as interpretations of the meaning harbored within each word. Most importantly, the four artists are developing new works that link the four verbs to themes and interests presented in their past work.

Ro Kyung Ae considers the physical state needed for falling, while alluding to the different social meanings that falling holds. Lee Yun Jung has selected “run” as her theme, tracing the racing movements of cells as the smallest-scale moving units within the human body. Geumhyung Jeong discovers connections to her own artistic methods. For her new work, she attempts to use all four of the verbs, adopting them as standards for reorganizing the movements used to create object movements in her previous choreographic works. Park Minhee has chosen the verb “pass,” developing a parade interpretation of daechwita (a Korean genre of military music) that makes use of the entire museum space. Each of these four scenes is to be performed on one of the program period’s three days as part of a sequence of works. The four verbs presented in Merce Cunningham’s title become points of articulation for the moments of linkage and juxtaposition among the different works—as well as avenues for their appreciation.

* The title is taken from Merce Cunningham’s work How to Pass, Kick, Fall and Run (first performed in 1965 at Harper Theater in Chicago)

About the Artists

Ro Kyung Ae
Ro Kyung Ae studied choreography at ArtEZ University of the Arts in the Netherlands and has worked as part of the CABRA collective in Belgium. Ro focuses on symbols, combination/arrangement, and listening as she composes choreography through the use of movement, written characters, sounds, spaces, and objects. In addition to her performance work, she has recently been involved in different research projects to create pieces that share her compositional methodology and perspective with audiences.

Park Minhee
The performance creator Park Minhee began her education in Korean classical music at age 14, starting with sijo and continuing on to gagok and gasa. Her activities as a performer in the contemporary performing arts world began in her mid-twenties. The point of departure for Park’s work is an exploration of the definition of “Korean classical music” and its meaning and methodology in a Korean society where artistic discourse rooted in European tradition predominates. She reconfigures the apparatus contexts of the acts of making music and listening to music, applying compositional conditions that range from the structures of classical music to performance methods and social meaning.

Lee Yun Jung
Lee Yun Jung is the Artistic Director of Dance Project Ppopkki. Through improvisation and score-based work, Lee asks questions about various ‘relationships’ and is immersed in the relationship between herself and others, individuals and society, minority and majority, balance and imbalance that arises from the physical contact through the body and its physical conflicts, both large and small.

Geumhyung Jeong
Geumhyung Jeong is a choreographer and performance artist whose practice began in the theatre and has extended to encompass installation and film. In her work, she constantly negotiates the relationship between the human body and the things surrounding it. She has been invited to exhibit her works worldwide, including at the 9th Asia-Pacific-Triennial in Brisbane, ImPulsTanz in Vienna, Kunstenfestivaldesarts in Brussels, and her solo exhibition at the Kunsthalle Basel.