Last January 17th, 2024 around four hundred people gathered in Le140 to experience a futuristic contemporary dance performance. The Korean Cultural Center hosted that event, inviting the Korean Choreographer, Hun-Mok Jung to present his new work in the European capital.

Hun-Mok Jung’s intention with this dance piece, is representing trans-humanism and gender bending while challenging the concepts of genetic inheritance, technologically enhanced bodies versus anatomical defects/originalities. On stage, ten dancers transform their own body shapes and physical movements by absorbing and uncannily harmonizing with various, anomalous objects. The artists incarnate the “Yaras”, a fictional community in which each member of the race is interpreted with a different color and character. Their society lingers in a pattern of repeated cycles of ecstasy and lethargy and the key to understanding this mystifying civilization seems to lie in symbolic images, actions and geometrically coded movements.  

The performance started a few minutes past eight. In the first scene, a few YARAS came up to the stage wearing some type of long coat, while there was a warm lighting that illuminated all their faces and movements. After a few minutes the light transformed to more dark colors that affected the YARAS’ personality, changing their movements, reactions and way to mix with each other, “Color blue created more aggressiveness”,  there was also a robotic pet that was appearing every now and then and making the audience laugh about its behavior, because nobody knew what the robotic dog was doing up to the stage; It was quite disconcerting, because you had no idea what was going to happen next, and even though it was a continuous performance, it felt like the changing colors were cutting the plot all the time”. Last part of the performance was a bit difficult and complicated to bear, the dancers seemed to be having a rush time, lots of screams, loud sobs, movements and expressions of pain, and everything caused by a strange metallic object that ended up murdering all the Yaras. The light in that moment was orange, so might be a metaphor of “sunlight”, that burned them to death. 

During the whole performance, everyone looked very hooked; if you checked around, the audience was paying so much attention to understand what was happening. The only information that the audience had before attending the performance was the one posted in the Korean Cultural Center website, given by the choreographer, but there wasn’t any specific description about what the audience was gonna experience, so that made the event a bit more special, because not giving details makes the people be more open and reflect more about the meaning of the performance. Different conclusions, different points of view, different reflections were products of this amazing performance that took place in Le140 the past January 17th.