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.

Rooted in British sociologist Anthony Giddens’s description of modernity as a historical and cultural space that is “in various key respects discontinuous with the gamut of pre-modern cultures and ways of life”, this study seeks to contextualize Ch’oe Sŭng-hŭi’s life and legacy in relation to evolving ideas of modernity. Here I continue my concern with Ch’oe’s actual dancing. I first lay a foundation for moving forward by summarizing related previous findings. I then look at Ch’oe’s emerging aesthetic philosophy and artistic development in relation to modernity as it was becoming defined in dance in Japan, Korea, and elsewhere. I conclude that it was the diverse philosophies underlying the kids of dance with which Ch’oe became engaged that in effect gave her permission to develop artistically in the way she did, and that allowed for her changing embodiment of Korean modernity during the 1920s and 1930s.

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.