A performance collaboration between Australian and South Korean dancers is exploring the concepts of community and infrastructure.
The Sydney-based physical theatre company Stalker Theatre and dancers from South Korean performance companies Dandi, Seed Dance and B Boy’s from the Seoul Metropolitan Crew are coming together to create a piece called Frameshift.
Drawing on the Korean sense of community and the increasing urbanisation of both countries, choreographer David Clarkson told SBS Frameshift highlights the good and bad in Australia's move toward the world's larger cities.
“The Koreans retain that sense of community, they love eating and meeting together, they also have the longer working hours and high density housing, which Australia is moving towards,” he said.
Frameshift will be performed at the free Hi Seoul Festival in October 2016, and the performers have come together in Sydney to work on their acrobatic skills.
Performers rehearse Frameshift, a work that will be featured at the Hi Seoul Festival in South Korea next year. Source: SBS News
For the Korean dancers, this has meant a major shift in both culture and climate.
Rhanee Lee, who accompanied the dancers from Seoul, told SBS the difference in weather had been a particular shock.
"It is winter now in Korea, we come to Australia and it is hot," she said.
Mr Clarkson told SBS the traditionally-trained Korean dancers were given three days to get comfortable doing acrobatics without a harness.
“Perhaps what they can learn from us is that sense of physical risk,” he said.
The performance also uses technology that reads body movement and translates the image to a screen in a “meeting of digital and physical worlds”, he said.
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The Stalker Theatre group is relishing the opportunity to take centre stage in front of a wider audience, performer Leanne Litton said.
“I think that it is open to the public is special," Ms Litton, who performed with the group at the Hi Seoul festival in 2013, said.
"It is something we are losing here in Australia - everything here becomes about the price of a ticket.”
