This study examines Gisele Vienne’s Crowd through the theoretical framework of Erich Fromm’s escape from freedom, analyzing how emotional control and the illusion of freedom are visually and physically represented on stage in contemporary society. The study adopts a multi-method approach combining literature review, live performance observation, and interviews, and centers its analysis on three sensory dimensions: music, the body, and space. The analysis reveals that the work, through the juxtaposition of fast-paced music, slow movements, and collective spatial flows, presents a structure of emotional regulation, the loss of autonomy, and a sensory structure of controlled freedom. These findings illustrate how Fromm’s mechanism of escape from freedom is sensorially embodied in contemporary art, and suggest that art can function as a space for critically reflecting on social anxiety and psychological structures.

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.

In this study, I examined how the succession and modernization of tradition has been emphasized through the articles related to dance in North Korea’s comprehensive art magazine Joseon Art focusing on its traditionality and modernity. The research method was centered on literature analysis and image analysis. In the literature, from the first issue of 1956 to the first of June 2000, 344 out of 468 articles were reviewed and analyzed. The analysis revealed that the majority of articles has focused on the discussion on the issue of inheriting and developing the people's dance heritage among the anti - revolutionary dance heritage and ethnic classical dance heritage. Based on socialist realism as a principle in succession and development, discourses in the articles have emphasized revolution in contents and have tried to create dance based on national characteristics in terms of form. I can see that the articles have strived to present the dance as a means of educating people’s ideology. The contents discussed in the Joseon Art from the 1950s to the 1970s were found to be further developed in the later period. North Korea has developed dance that promote the superiority of the Korean people based on Juche ideology. It was found that the principles related to dance decided before the 1980’s have continued in the “invariant law”.

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.

This paper presents an experimental discussion that examines previous literature and controversial discourses on dance history of Korea in order to suggest new ways of writing dance history. The dance history texts of the premodern time of dance history are mainly written by An Hwak, Kim Jaecheol, and Seong Gyeongrin after the Japanese rule. Most of these texts are restricted to introduce court dances in the literature due to the limited number of surviving materials. I suggest that dance history of premodern Korea would be discussed with more variety and depth if social and cultural perspectives are adopted. There are various discussions developed about the descriptions of modern dance history, however there is room for improvement in regards to the poor perceptions of the independent starting point of modern times and the concept of modernity. If the descriptions of dance history in Korea achieve expandability by embracing different genres and various literary methodologies as well as syntactic descriptions, the scope of awareness will broaden further for dance studies.