2022, Vol.88, No.4

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

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

Lee HuiMei (Emiko Suzuki, 1918-2021), a Japanese emigre who opened a dance school in Taiwan after WWII, is a little-known though significant figure in Taiwan’s dance history. In 2018, a dance drama highlighting her life story was created to depict her dance training and experiences. This dance drama is based on Lee’s biography, as well as a collection of dance artifacts donated to National Museum of Taiwan History and interviews with some participants in this project. The study contained here is conceived of as a/r/tography, where the research methodology, creative practice and performative pedagogy are conducted by the researchers. The ongoing project has now presented one informal showing at the campus of Tainan University of Technology and a semi-formal showing at the National Museum of Taiwan History. Studies like this one are important in order to understand the lived experiences and trajectory of dance educators and performers in Taiwan.

This study aims to illuminate Gothic imagination and its meaning in the British choreographer Akram Khan’s Giselle (2016) focusing on Gothic traditions and revival. I explore the humanistic meaning of Gothic in Giselle and closely analyze contemporary applications of Gothic through a multicultural approach. To this end, first, the study examines the cultural origins of medieval Gothic and the transition process of Gothic by era. Then, it discusses the Gothic images and choreography that appear in the history of Western dance from the Middle Ages to the present. Lastly, this study rereads Gothic imagination in Akram Khan’s Giselle from a post-colonial perspective focusing on the “utterance of others” and “social inequality.” As a results, the Gothic nature of Akram Khan’s Giselle allows for voicing a kind of encroached social contradiction, and the contemporary form of dance vocabulary requires a more active attitude toward facing and listening to the problem.

This study aims to expand the idea of documentation as collecting and preserving dance to encompass documentation as a performance material. The ‘real-time documentation’ in dance performance allows the field of dance to move beyond Phelan’s oppositional understanding as being in a complementary relation. I contextualize this expansion by applying Philip Auslander’s discussions of documentation. I also draw artistic examples particularly in documentation being utilized as a real time technology in dance performance in order to highlight how documentation and live performance in dance go beyond dualistic opposition. Through investigating Trisha Brown, Zoi Dimitriou, and Matthias Sperling’s works, this study offers the choreographic strategy that exposes the repetition process and the act of over-documenting in using ‘real-time documentation’ in dance performances.