‘Five Vibe' dances on overdrive with tradition, EDM and sweat-soaked power

Korea Herald

7 hours ago

Charged with raw physicality, 20 male dancers clad in cargo jumpsuits deliver a performance that bites with a steely, industrial edge.
Choreographed by Ye Hyo-seung, the National Dance Company's latest production, 'Five Vibe' — which premiered Thursday and runs through Sunday — feels like a cyberpunk fever dream set in a desert. It fuses traditional Korean breathwork and bodily control, resulting in an exhilarating collision of past and future.
This also marks a first in the company's 63-year-history: an all-male cast in a genre traditionally centered on female performers. The production highlights the groundedness, power and physicality of male bodies in Korean dance.
'In creating this piece, I wanted to bring the gravitational pull of the body to the stage -- to use acrobatic movement to unleash the full energy of the human form,' Ye said in an interview with The Korea Herald last week.
The result is a full-throttle, high-adrenaline spectacle, most of it driven by a rapid tempo. Sweat pours as the dancers vault, roll and plunge across the stage with relentless momentum.
The backdrop of a towering wall of speakers pulsates with cyber-industrial energy, conjuring a techno-dystopian future where rhythm and human resilience are equally under pressure.
The soundscape, crafted live on stage by music director Song Kwang-ho, melds the visceral thrum of traditional percussion with the synthetic pulse of EDM.
'Five Vibe' is Ye's attempt to distill and reimagine what he considers the five essential elements of Korean dance: line, jangdan (rhythmic cycles), breath, heung (joyous energy) and time. Among them, breath serves as the work's conceptual spine.
'I see breath as the core element of dance,' Ye explained. 'Just as painters use brushes or pens, I use breath to sketch shapes with the body. I may not perform traditional Korean dance per se, but that breath is essential to every dancer.'
So there are moments of pause. Ye creates space for a quieter kind of expression: slow, controlled gestures drawn from the vocabulary of traditional Korean dance.
A longtime member of the Belgian contemporary company Les Ballets C de la B since 2005, Ye has more recently made a name for himself as an art director for global brands including Hermes, Cartier and Nike.
'I've lived and worked abroad for many years, but it's made me reflect more deeply on what it means to be Korean,' he said. 'I don't see tradition and modernity as separate -- they always intersect. I wanted to present something deeply Korean using the most modern language available.'