FESTIVAL ’90 : DANCE REVIEW / OPEN FESTIVAL : An Evening of Korean Culture

On the same day as the prime ministers of North and South Korea opened historic, political talks, Dong Suk (Don) Kim’s Korean Classical Music and Dance Company took Open Festival-goers back to a culture born long before the country split in half.

The occasion was an expert, if occasionally awkward, night of lecture, dance and music, presented Wednesday night at the Korean Cultural Service.

Unfortunately, the first third of the evening was taken up with an unnecessarily encyclopedic talk by company director Kim on the various types of Korean music, musical instruments and dance.

The other two-thirds of the show, however, featured six dancers in a lively eight-dance sampler of the company’s repertory of colorful and elegant folk and court dances. Kim also played a haunting solo on the kayakum, a large 12-stringed instrument.

Characterized by floating turns, lucid hand gestures, immobile facial expressions and brilliantly hued costumes, the solos and duets portrayed both strength and fragility.

In a religious dance called “Buk chum,” for example, a petite Li Jost brought forth huge sounds from a trio of gongs as she danced and drummed, all the while maintaining a perfectly sublime smile.

Soloist Inja Park demonstrated strength of another kind in her solos “Chun Aeng Jun” and “Salpuri”--that of calm water, with the proverbial currents running just beneath the surface of her languid movements.

Most spectacular was “Buchaechum,” a modern adaptation of a shaman dance in which four dancers (Park, Jost, Eunmi Chin and Lisa Kim) in fluorescent lime-green and pink robes waved giant fans in the air as they wove in and out of complex patterns.

Still, a larger venue than the meeting-room auditorium of the Cultural Service would have better served these dances. Their emphasis on formation and sweeping gesture begs to be seen framed with open space. A final performance will be given tonight at 7:30.