Director, ‘Performance and People’ Lab, Good Arts Cultural Foundation | Leo Kang
“The horizon of Joseon is pitiably narrow, but the explosive power of this latent emotion will one day reach a broader world and astonish humanity.” (Their horizon may now be pitifully circumscribed, but this latent explosive power of emotion will one day reach a broader world and astonish all of humanity.)
The moment I heard the news that on March 21, in the Gwanghwamun area of Seoul, BTS will hold their comeback concert ‘BTS Comeback Live: Arirang’, a sentence by Homer B. Hulbert published in 1903 in ‘The Korea Review’ naturally came to mind.
From the standpoint of someone who has been serializing K-pop dance, attention now converges on a single point. What form will the choreography of ‘Arirang’, to be broadcast live to 190 countries worldwide via Netflix, take? It is only a projection, but the fact that ‘Arirang’ is a song of repetition is an important clue. The refrain returns, the lead call summons a response, and the slow melody accumulates emotion and aligns the breath. If this song structure is translated into the language of the body, there is ample possibility that it will expand into easy-to-follow repeated movements and circular group formations.
Such scenes were already evident on the KCON 2016 France stage held in Paris in 2016. The venue was filled with spectators who could not precisely understand the Korean lyrics, yet the rhythm of K-pop stars’ repeating refrains and group choreography prompted instant synchronization across nationalities, turning the audience from ‘spectators’ into ‘participants’.
BTS, who stood on European stages ten years ago, occupied a different position from today. And now, ten years on, if they were to mount a stage centered on ‘Arirang’ at Gwanghwamun, its choreography could spread via global platforms and social media at a pace hard to compare with before. It is easy to picture a single repeated movement being reproduced as an ‘Arirang’ performance on screens in Latin America, in squares in Africa, and across communities around the globe.
Now the gaze turns to J-Hope. Within the team, he has always stood at the center of rhythm. Rooted in street dance, his movement has remained unadorned yet intuitive, while driving the flow.
Forbes, well known as a global business outlet, recently reported that J-Hope’s solo activities left a distinct presence in the North American market, and Rolling Stone, the music magazine founded in San Francisco in 1967, evaluated him as a performer who combines stage-commanding energy with a keen sense of rhythm. In this current, ‘Arirang’ invites expectations of a scene in which J-Hope’s rhythm becomes BTS’s collective blocking, expanding into a global performance with a sensibility that is at once Korean and universal.
On the 23rd, the Milan-Cortina Winter Olympics came to a close. And on the 21st of next month, starting in Gwanghwamun, BTS will embark on a world tour of 79 shows across 34 cities themed around ‘Arirang’. I will close this column with the words of depth psychologist Dr. Hee-sun Kim, Yundam).
“If those gathered at Gwanghwamun are linked, through an experience sublimated into art, to an expanded self, that plaza can at last become a place of healing.”
If the Olympics spoke of peace through sport, BTS’s ‘Arirang’ could become another stage that tests the healing of emotion through K-pop performance. After the March stage, I will revisit what kind of collective movement that scene has produced.
