2017, Vol.65, No.3

The Korean Journal of Dance Studies 2023 KCI Impact Factor : 0.93

pISSN : 1226-900X / eISSN : 2713-9468
https://journal.kci.go.kr/krsds

This research examines the performativity of three cases of living history tourism in South Korea: Korean Folk Village, the royal guard-changing ceremony, and the Hanbok experience. Living history is a form of cultural tourism involving the presence of costumed performers at historical sites. Framing them as living history, it aims to highlight their performative nature and to further contextualize it with the discourse of performance. As an interdisciplinary inquiry, this study argues that dance and non-dance phenomena should be contextualized since moving bodies are cultural constructs.

This article reviews the literature regarding the growth of dance/movement therapy (DMT) in the United States and its expansion to East Asian countries. The purpose of the literature-based study is to investigate how Western culture-based dance/movement therapy in the US can be applied to East Asia, where different cultural aspects dominate. This review attempts to initiate both discussion and research on how dance/movement therapy—as a form of psychotherapy—can be relevant in places that have different cultural social norms, life styles, and relationships. This study indicates that considerations of cultural aspects are crucial to indigenizing dance/movement therapy in new settings.

This research is motivated by the fact that mere statistics about performing arts groups in the government white papers are not enough for understanding the dire situation in which performing arts organizations struggle to create and perform arts with no subsidy or with a modicum of mostly one-time only public support. Based on my experience as a representative of a private non-profit dance company, I try to convey, through my auto-ethnography, the problems that performing arts organizations confront in more vivid description and in depth. My dance organization went through some positive and negative internal changes including an identity crisis since we had been selected as a resident performing arts group with a regional public performance hall. We also had to overcome external obstacles of uncertainty in policy and lack of communication with the administrative personnel. I discuss how to deal with these changes and problems.