PIFA 2018: Ambiguous Dance Company's 'My Organ, My Seoul'

The matinee program began and ended with dance, with an intermission in between followed by a brief recital on the Kimmel Center’s awe-inspiring Fred J. Cooper Memorial Pipe Organ. But the dancers and Han are best enjoyed separately and with a more conscientious audience.

Our bodies, ourselves

The opening dance, “Rhythm of Humans,” premiered in 2013 at the Seoul Performing Arts Festival. Though this piece, one of only a handful in Ambiguous’s repertoire, is not new, it felt vibrant and fresh, brimming with emotion, interesting images and questions, and its five dancers’ impressive, wide-ranging skills.

Looking at the program before the show began, I saw a curious photo in which the dancers posed with their hands over their crotches. Looking closer, I realized just two of the company members held their own crotches: the other three were held by someone else. This image repeats again and again throughout the piece, a work that explores contemporary Korean masculinity.

So much crotch-grabbing might sound odd, but the gesture is connected with gender and maleness. Today, many accept the theory that gender is a performance, that masculinity and femininity are things people do — repeated actions and postures — rather than things people are.

Man-sized

Even if you don’t accept this concept, it is clear the link between masculinity and performance shapes “Rhythm of Humans.”

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For instance, the dancers’ hands on their groins called attention to male genitalia, often a synecdoche for masculinity, a symbol of male power, and a source of pleasure, violence, and shame. The dance touched on all these ideas and feelings while drawing on hip-hop, jazz, ballet, and folk. “Rhythm of Humans” also riffed on yoga asanas and pantomime, using gestures to create multiple personas and communicate without words.

This approach was quite effective. One dancer mimed pumping up his arms, chest, and shoulders as if inflating a balloon, getting bigger and bigger until he pretended to release a pressure tab that returned his size to normal. Another dancer performed the role of an insecure, effeminate man who anxiously compared his crotch to the others and pranced like a ballerina.

Later, a dancer hopped from one foot to the other while holding his crotch, suggesting constantly shifting cultural expectations of men and the difficulty of finding firm ground on which to develop an identity. This piece was the best part of My Organ, My Seoul.

Odd pairing

After intermission, Han demonstrated her musical mastery with three very different pieces on the Kimmel’s pipe organ. Between pieces, she charmingly told the audience about her background and that of the instrument. The console, Han explained, controls the organ with buttons and foot pedals. Its buttons produce its sound. Equally important, an organ is not like a piano; during Jean Berveiller’s “Mouvement,” Han’s feet practically tap-danced over the pedals while her hands worked buttons near and far.

In excerpts from Louis Vierne’s Pièces de Fantasie pour Grand Orgue, Naiädes Op. 55, No. 4, and Jacques Offenbach’s Orphée aux Enfers, Han made the organ produce sounds ranging from flutey to trumpeting to stringlike. If you have ever watched cartoons, you would recognize Offenbach’s music, which has been used for Dracula’s appearance and a Bugs Bunny can-can dance.

Given the merits of Han’s playing and the dancers’ evocative athleticism, I had high hopes for “The Edge of Time,” a world premiere that set Ambiguous’s movement to live organ music. Unfortunately, this piece was less clear and stirring than “Rhythm of Humans.” I couldn’t discern a message, and no program notes were provided to help.

Dancers wearing sunglasses, clad in white, occasionally coordinated their movement to the sounds of the organ; other times they moved in silence. Each of their white costumes was different: one resembled a toga, others looked more like spacesuits. Several times the dancers fell to the floor and rose again, reminding me of people returning from the dead or civilizations rising and crumbling.

Was this a story of the past or the future? What was “The Edge of Time” saying? It was tough to tell.

“The Edge of Time” might be best appreciated as a companion piece to “Rhythm of Humans,” with the former possibly exploring the potential — constructive as well as destructive — inherent within historical and normative understandings of masculinity.

The music-only and dance-only portions of My Organ, My Seoul were most enjoyable. But strong as they were, they would have benefited from a better-behaved audience, one that refrained from eating noisy snacks, kept its shoes on, and stayed seated throughout the performance.