This study traced Choi Seung-hee’s dancing career in Europe and the Americas between 1937 and 1940. Choi is recognized as a pioneer who built the foundation of modern Korean dance. Called “the dancer of the peninsular” and very popular in Korea and Japan, the celebrated dancer extended her career to Europe with the ambitious mission to introduce Joseon dance to an international audience in the late 1930s. As the Japanese novelist Yasunari Kawabata put it, her dance was powerful and based on her ethnic roots, which became representative of her as a dancer. Meanwhile, most Korean intellectuals criticized her dance for failing to fully express their nation’s identity; this was because it was a mix of Western-style and traditional Korean techniques. Despite this criticism, her dance proved itself to be fascinating enough to attract an international audience, presenting the uniqueness of an ethnic culture in a dignified and fresh way. It also suggested that the legendary dancer’s work carries significance in that it created a new value system with a blend of globalization, locality, and democratic elements.

When I first looked through the records of Korean immigrants on the foreigner register in Mexico in 1989, a photo attracted my attention of a flapper-haired, smiling, beautiful woman who stood out among the others. She was Sai Shoki, a famed dancer who performed in Mexico City in October, 1940. When I met Judy Van Zile, professor of University of Hawaii in Puerto España in the summer of 2000, the professor told me that her study on Korean dance was nearly completed. Her study looked into the performance tour in America by Choi Seung-hee(Shoki’s Korean name)and included articles on her Bogota performance. That led me to the presentation of this study in which I was to give details about Shoki’s dance career, records on her Mexico performance, and her political position on her nation’s independence movement, which drove her to move to North Korea and continue her career there. The appendix contains related photos.

The purpose of this study is to investigate the characteristics of discourse act that was unfolded in the process of modern Korean dance securing its significance as performing arts. In Korea, the first-half of the twentieth century witnessed the formation of new culture based on a clash between modern Western civilization that was accepted and the autogenous modern consciousness. The appearance of newspapers, in particular, provided ample opportunities for the reading public to participate in the society and gave birth to the modern consciousness of sharing one's ideas with others. This happened in the field of dance from various perspectives including reviews in the criticism format after the appreciation of dance performances, critiques, dance theories, and new ideas of the traditional dance. There was no establishment of proper dance criticism in Korea during the modern period, however there were meaningful acts to create dance discourses from diverse perspectives and enhance the aesthetic modernity of the public.