Exhausting

“Dragons”
Eun-Me Ahn Company
Forum Ludwigsburg
Ludwigsburg, Germany
November 09, 2024

by Ilona Landgraf
Copyright © 2024 by Ilona Landgraf

Two years ago, the South Korean choreographer Eun-Me Ahn’s company toured the Forum Ludwigsburg with North Korea Dance. Last weekend, it presented the 2021 piece, Dragons. Ahn handpicked five dancers from Japan, Indonesia, Taiwan, and Malaysia to participate in the production who couldn’t join rehearsals due to COVID-19 travel restrictions. Instead, their dance parts were captured on video and then animated into 3-D digital avatars of superhuman size and abilities. They shared the stage with the seventy-year-old (and usually shaved bald) Ahn and her company. Because the five dancers from abroad were all born in 2000, which, according to the Chinese zodiac, was the Year of the Dragon, Ahn called the piece Dragons. The current year also marks the Year of the Dragon (the Chinese zodiac is a repeating twelve-year cycle), which may be the reason for touring Dragons in Europe and the UK right now.

Contrary to my expectations, no figure in the piece even remotely resembled a dragon. Instead, Ahn used silver tubes for the set and costume design and as props to signify the long, slender bodies of dragons. Curtains of such tubes represented the backdrop and hung on either side of the stage. The first to step through the curtain was a woman in a surreal outfit. She sported a fancy red headdress decorated with colored ribbons, a necklace of golf ball-sized pearls, and a black and silver dress. Her right arm was stuck in a long silver tube, which she moved like a sock puppet. It seemed to be the source of her monologue (in a language unfamiliar to me), which was interrupted by occasional screams. It called a man on stage who happily hopped to the tune of the tube. His silver skirt, mismatched socks, and multicolored knit cap were as strange as the attire of the next lady.
Her headdress was reminiscent of a pink ship’s canvas mounted on top of the Eiffel Tower, and her green skirt hid another person whose gloved hands occasionally stuck out. The bulky silver tube around the lady’s neck seemed to substitute for a feather boa. Schlager music accompanied her sedate stroll across the stage. She was followed by two dancers whose hands were inserted in silver tubes like muffs. Their arm movement was restricted, so they merely stepped from one foot to the other, each foot carefully rolling from heel to toe. Later, bigger tubes were disassembled like huge springs made of metal strips and, in the form of colorful 3-D animations, floated across the stage area like sedate sea serpents. At one point, the dancers portrayed walking tube worms with their upper bodies swaying forward and back. A picture of a human face on an illuminated porthole-like screen represented the front.

Young-Gyu Jang’s compilation of music included calm guitar and piano melodies and meditative passages of almost sleep-inducing length, but bouts of merciless electronic noise (and a join-in tapping session) ensured that everyone stayed awake.
Thumping techno beats interspersed with Amerindian-like shouts heralded four dancers, for example, who swirled across the stage and occasionally flung themselves onto the floor, showcasing the shiny fabric of their wide, floor-length skirts. Other eye-catchers included a silver juggling plate that was thrown from one dancer to the other, man-sized, 3-D, video soap bubbles that they rolled around and then shattered, and a (likewise video-animated) waterfall in the shape of an arch.
Stars, comets, and glowing swoosh symbols (the sort that is commonly used in comics) flew around the dancers when they introduced the absent foreign guests. Short biographies of the guests were projected on the backdrop, read by voice-over, and lip-synced by their proxies on stage.
For the curtain call, the company changed into golden mini dresses and clunky golden boots. In this context, the red rose that the Forum Ludwigsburg traditionally presents to each artist looked like a foreign object.

According to the booklet, Ahn mingles the “nonchalance of street dance” with elements of Indochinese kathak, Japanese kabuki, and Thai Khon mask dance and connects millennia-old tradition with the digital age. On stage, any remnant of tradition was drowned in a garish artificial world. The extensive use of 3-D videos sometimes overshadowed the real dancers.

Eun-Me Ahn’s company is advertised as a “bearer of lightness, joy, and optimism” that represents the energy and freshness of Asia’s Zoomers. I’m unfamiliar with Asian culture and the Zoomers’ values and therefore cannot assess to what extent Ahn captured their spirits. To me, Dragons felt like an overdose of blatant superficiality that sapped my energy and left me with a feeling of emptiness.

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