Gentle Pop
Eun Me Ahn asks the Folkwang Tanzstudio: Please hold my hand
Tanzjournal 6/2003
Gesa Pölert
Please help me - please love me - please kill me, Korean choreographer Eun Me Ahn asked in the titles of three of her recent pieces. Her latest work, entitled „Please hold my hand”, continues the series. Its première was not in New York or South Korea this time, but at the Folkwang University in Essen. Me Ahn had already performed three solos as a guest of Pina Bausch’s „Fest in Wuppertal” in 2001. Now she has returned to North Rhine-Westphalia through Bausch’s intervention to create a choreography for the Folkwang Tanzstudio - a neon-coloured and yet gentle break with the local viewing habits.
On a white stage Me Ahn constructs an Asian pop fairyland, built of abstract stories and populated by creatures that could have come straight from some candy-coloured animation film. Young Gyu Jang has arranged a suitable musical backdrop, as in former choreographies by Me Ahn: a stylish metropolitan sound which gently mixes screeches and rattles with cell phone melodies and the sounds of drills. The eleven Folkwang dancers perform in pink bathing caps (or alternatively in wild black wigs), orange hot pants, brightly coloured loose dresses. They resemble figurines rather than dancers - oversophisticated products of a highly artificial culture, somewhat like tulips in a plastic flat of the sixties.
The neon-green retro-style stools fit perfectly. They also serve to re-structure the stage and the dancing again and again. At first all dancers sit in a long row, faces turned to the audience. Smiling like Russian dolls and then tumbling all over in slow somersaults. Later the stools are distributed across the stage like chess pieces. The dancers move between them in semi-pirouettes, lost in these simple movements like lithe, remote-controlled puppets.
Puppet master Me Ahn is in perfect control of everything. Sometimes she creates abstract, orderly patterns, sometimes concrete images such as graphic scenes of sex on the beach. Her emphasis is on an extremely moveable world: Even in the geometric scenes there are always one or two dancers who step out of line; new images emerge like sudden thoughts. Elements that have been introduced already are developed further in front of a different backdrop: The absurd-seeming bathing equipment for example is justified later in the beach scenes.
Later the moon hanging in a projected starry storybook sky is transformed into a striped space lantern. And there is a lot of quite varied, and above all loud kissing, not just in this scene but throughout the piece. The only thing we don’t see much of is the hand-holding referred to in the title: Me Ahn makes light of love through pas de deux pastiches and sexual posturing. On the other hand, she is enough of a composer and artist to add some quiet notes and dark tones to her candy-coloured world. One scene, for example, is repeated like a refrain at two points in the piece: Accompanied by sounds like knife blades, Lotte Rudhart is hanging in the arms of her partner like a mounted butterfly. Her legs twitch like they do in a classical ballet death scene - too elegiac and beautifully, though.
In the Land of Smiles
ballettanz 12.2003
Bettina Trouwborst
This is not the promising, almost frivolous smile of Pina Bausch’s dancers charming their audience. It is a saucy, impish grin, rather, which never leaves the lips of the eleven young artists of the Folkwang Tanzstudio (FTS) in Eun Me Ahn’s piece „Please hold my hand”. But one is often reminded of the Wuppertal dance director who recommended the South Korean as a guest choreographer to the FTS. It is impossible to overlook the similarities between the two women in terms of humour and visual language at the première in the auditorium of the school.
All is joy of living, all is pleasure. The pink tribe express their elementary vitality in ever-new dances and games of love. Eun Me Ahn creates cheerful, even exuberant images. Naked dancers slide across the ground on their stomachs, pushing stools in front of them. A woman resembling an island-dweller smiles from underneath an umbrella, sitting on a towel which a man pulls across the stage. A line of dancers crosses the stage in classical leaps; women do aerobic exercises on the ground. Funny massage techniques are invented when the male dancers join the exercises.
NRZ Essen, 1. November 2003
Dagmar Schenk-Güllich
Korean choreographer Eun Me Ahn whose eccentric work has created quite a sensation not just in her own country has taken us on a trip into a land of pop dreams. In her new work, „Please hold my hand”, she co-operated with the Folkwang Tanzstudio. The applause lasted minutes at its première in the Neue Aula.
From the first second, the audience was enthralled by the artist’s quite provocative imagination
Music, dancing, costumes, stage design, everything fitted together. It is easy to recognize a response to the sacred art of Japanese Butoh in her work. Ritual deportment, the eternal smile, these are the Asian elements which she naughtily combines with contemporary Western ones.