Liquid Sound strips traditional street performance to its core

Korea Herald

5 days ago

Performance collective reimagines pungmul through contemporary movement
In pungmul, a traditional Korean form of folk music and dance, the performer leading the troupe wears a hat called sangmo topped with a long paper streamer known as piji that can stretch nearly 180 centimeters. As the drumming builds and the rhythms swell, the streamer whirls in perfect arcs and waves, never tangling, serving as a kinetic emblem of pungmul's identity.
But what happens when you take away that visible identity, wondered Lee In-bo, director of the performance collective Liquid Sound. What remains in the body? And how can it expand from there?
To find an answer, Liquid Sound deconstructs elements of pungmul and rebuilds them through the language of contemporary dance in 'OffOn: Yeonhee Project 2,' presented Friday and Saturday at Seoul's Sejong Center for the Performing Arts as part of its summer festival, Sync Next.
Yeonhee, also spelled yeonhui (literally "play" or "performance" in Korean), is a broad term for traditional performing arts such as pungmul, mask dance, shamanistic rituals, puppet theater, traditional circus and folk music, and dance often rooted in folk rituals and community celebrations.
'From the very beginning, we asked our performers, 'What if we took away your instruments, your costumes — everything you're most confident in. Could you still exist onstage, purely as movement?'' Lee said in an interview with The Korea Herald last week.
He called their creative process the 'OffOn' approach: taking something 'off' from traditional performance and attaching it 'on' to something new, in search of what Lee calls the DNA of traditional performance. It is the group's second contemporary dance project following 'Long: Yeonhee Project 1,' which they showcased last year at the Aurillac International Street Theatre Festival in France.
In this genre-crossing Yeonhee Project series, traditional pungmul artists and dancers deconstruct movements that once flowed instinctively, studying them bit by bit, without the familiar music, rhythms, costumes or instruments.
'It's challenging even for seasoned performers,' said choreographer Shim Ju-young. 'They have to search for the movement itself — down to the core of their bodies. But it's also fascinating: you realize that spinning the sangmo requires precise, rhythmic head movements executed in distinctly different ways.'
The show draws on various elements of pungmul and folk performance. One segment focuses on seoljanggu, traditionally a solo janggu drum showcase, reinterpreting its rhythmic footwork through hand gestures. Another segment references piroji, a moment in folk performance when female dancers take the stage, but here, male dancers join them, layering the rhythm with new textures.
Shim, who trained in both Korean and contemporary dance, said she was fascinated by the possibilities. 'Even just visually, there's so much to play with. Each traditional element holds endless creative potential once you break it apart.'
Founded in 2015, Liquid Sound aims to explore traditional Korean arts with diverse genres, from melding avant-garde gugak with electronic music, to contemporary dance, installation art and Western classical traditions. The name Liquid Sound reflects the group's sensory ambition of merging tactile fluidity with the auditory experience of music.
'It's about how we meet the audience,' Lee said. 'Traditional performers used to approach audiences in very direct, interactive ways. We're asking how to do that now — whether by adopting new methods or, sometimes, returning to older, simpler ones.'
Next year, the company plans to continue its experimental exploration of traditional performance with the third edition of the Yeonhee Project.
The two envision a future performance in which yeonhee artists and dancers blend so seamlessly that they create an entirely new genre.
'Rather than a technical blending of traditional and modern elements, I hope for a day when the fusion is so natural that you can't tell them apart," Shim said.
Liquid Sound will take its work to several major festivals later this year, including the Busan Street Art Festival in September, the Performing Arts Market in Seoul in October, and an outdoor performance in Myeongdong hosted by the National Theater Company of Korea.