Tradition and the avant-garde clash in Korean choreographer Ahn Eun-me’s gender-busting new show, hears Mark Brown

The Herald

IT’S REIGNING MEN: Androgyny and gender play are to the fore in Princess Bari, with male and female dancers wearing the same costumes and a male lead, Hee-Moon Lee. ‘He has a voice like a female,’ says Eun-Me Ahn.

ARRIVING at a beautiful traditional Korean restaurant in the centre of Seoul to meet the renowned choreographer Eun-Me Ahn is a deeply confusing experience. On the one hand, the restaurant — which is called Pulhyanggi (meaning “the scent of grass”), and decorated with delicate images of flying cranes and other pastoral scenes — is a haven of tranquillity in the midst of one of the world’s most buzzing cities. On the other, Ahn — her head shaved, resplendent in bright green and red, her fingers adorned with huge floral rings — is the living embodiment of that cliche, a force of nature.

The choreographer is a woman of extraordinary personality, colour, humour and energy; elements very pany presents at this year’s Edinburgh International Festival.

The Princess Bari story is a central narrative in Korean culture, with shades of the Greek tales of Oedipus and Orpheus, and even of Alice In Wonderland and Pinocchio. Thrown to the sea by her father, the King, because she is the seventh daughter of a queen who bore no son, Bari (the word means “discarded” in Korean) is saved and raised by a fisherman. In her teens, the intrepid girl learns of her regal origins and undertakes an epic journey to the royal palace. And that is as far as Ahn’s Edinburgh production (the first of two pieces telling the entire story) takes us.

However, as Ahn is keen to emphasise as she holds court in the restaurant (seeming very much like a precocious, somewhat mischievous princess herself), the key to the show is not the tale, but the highly imaginative way in which she has recreated it for the 21st century.

The piece is an irresistible combination of the traditional (including the song of Korean pansori and the movement of Japanese butoh) and the avantgarde, the minimal and the exuberant, the anguished and the comic.

It is typical of Ahn’s sense of artistic freedom that Ban is played not by a woman, but by the multitalented and remarkably androgynous young male singer Hee-Moon Lee. “He looks like a girl,” the choreographer agrees. “He’s a small man, and he has a voice like a female. Sometimes he looks like a baby, sometimes he looks like a girl, and sometimes he looks like a man. It’s amazing. He’s a good actor.”

Androgyny and gender play have long been of interest to Ahn, in her life (she started shaving her head to make her own gender more ambiguous) and her work. It’s an attitude which infuses Princess Bari, in which male and female dancers perform in the same brightly coloured dresses and spotty underpants.

“I don’t want to divide costume between women’s and men’s,” she explains. “The dress is very convenient to dance in, and allows for very quick changes.” Her choice of costumes is also a delight for the male members of the company. “Men love dresses. It’s something they never experienced before.”

If playing with gender is part of her aesthetic, Ahn also sees a thematic justification for casting Lee in the title role. “I figured out why Princess Bari was thrown out,” she declares. “It’s because she had both female and male sex organs.”

It will, no doubt, come as something of a shock to generations of Koreans to discover that Bad — a much-loved figure from their childhood —is, in fact, a hermaphrodite. Which is not to say that Ahn’s reinterpretation is an act of disrespectful iconoclasm. Rather, like her wonderfully rich and diverse show as a whole, it speaks to the choreographer’s intelligent and fascinating combination of the traditional and the modern.

This is exemplified in her approach to traditional Korean music and song, which is used in truly astonishing ways in the show. Although Ahn’s background is in dance, she is not afraid — any more than was her late friend, the great German dance director Pina Bausch — to roll up her sleeves and mould other forms to the requirements of her choreography.

“We love this [traditional Korean] song,” Ahn says, “but we have been listening to this one song for ever. So, we are also getting sick and tired. I’m trying to achieve a different sound from the traditional vocal techniques.”

There is something fabulously Bauschian in Ahn’s combination of dancing singers and singing dancers (including, at points in the show, herself). Her means of auditioning singers, such as Lee, for the company is typically unorthodox. “We don’t do only dance and movement,” she says. “I don’t care about that. We go drinking and we go to karaoke. I want to see their natural power, which is their personality.”

Although Ahn, who began her formal training in traditional Korean dance at the age of 12, creates work which is strongly connected to the culture of her homeland, the comparison with Bausch’s choreography is one that she embraces. Ahn recalls her time at Bausch’s Tanztheater Wuppertal (where she presented three solo works in 2001) with great affection. “Pina Bausch and I just loved each other,” she re-members. “We had the same female energy. As a person, she was quite slow, and I’m very fast, but the energy of our work is of a similar level. That’s why I think we could talk. She loved watching my kind of energy in talking. She loved drinking until 3am. We’d sit and talk about everything.”

Talking with Ahn, who is an extremely engaging, animated conversationalist, it isn’t difficult to see why Bausch would have found her such good and interesting company. The Korean choreographer is a constant performer, although the amazing control and geometry of her own dancing — even now, in her late forties — contrasts markedly with the marvellous gesticulations and ribald commentary of her off-stage persona.

One can’t help but wonder what shaped her strident self-confidence and endearing, high-energy personality. “As a child, we had no TV and no telephone,” Ahn remembers. “All my parents could afford was the house and food, that’s all. So, in the evening, we had to be performers for our parents and grandparents. If you did well, you got one cookie. That was my first job. I don’t remember it, but my mum told me,

`You were a really good dancer.’ She said I did whatever they asked me, and I would be given cookies.”

Which, as an account of creativity born of poverty, is as good an explanation of Eun-Me Ahn’s remarkable choreography, and equally remark-able character, as one could wish for. Not that she cares to dwell too much on the hardships of her up-bringing. No sooner has our inter-view ended than I’m packed off in a cab to her favourite Japanese pub (she travels ahead on her scooter). I, like a tourist, drink Korean beer. She, like any cool Korean, downs a couple of bottles of Tokyo’s finest. Then, after much talk of the Edinburgh Festival, Pina Bausch and the burgeoning culture of South Korea, Ahn is back on her scooter and zipping off into the flashing lights of downtown Seoul.

Princess Bari is at the Edinburgh Playhouse, August 19-21.