Bongsu Park’s Dream Ritual at The Coronet Theatre

Bongsu Park and Jinyeob Cha, Dream Ritual, The Coronet Theatre, July 3

The idea of buying and selling dreams is part of Korean culture that goes back to the Samguk Sagi, Korea’s oldest surviving chronicle of its history. Derived from the notion of a dream as a conscious manifestation of a universal unconscious, one person’s auspicious dream can become a transferable asset to another, and thus subject to a ritual form of barter. Dream Ritual, a solo dance piece conceived and directed by Bongsu Park and choreographed and performed by Jinyeob Cha, is both an illustration of this process and, through Park’s Dream Project, a prelude to an upcoming auction of dreams with the profits going to charity. 

Park is a London-based Korean visual artist, while Cha is the artistic director of the Korean interdisciplinary dance performance group, Collective A. Together with electronic musician and producer haihm, Park and Cha have conceived Dream Ritual as  a kind of shamanistic ritual in contemporary dance form ‘in which omens of shared dreams are enhanced and elevated to the world of good spirits before ownership of the dream is transferred.’ 

The Coronet stage is hung with vertical strips of semi-transparent material that are burnished silver and red in Connor Sullivan’s lighting and, with a black reflective floor, suggest both different planes of reality and ritualistic levels of sublimation. Cha enters drawing with her a transparent curtain across the front of the stage behind which she begins to perform. Park uses the curtain as a screen on which she projects digitally magnified and multiplied projections of Cha’s face and body that intersect and interact with her figure behind it, creating Rorschach-like images and an array of diffractive silhouettes in a visual counterpoint to Cha’s choreography. While haihm’s spectral sound, and Cha’s soft, wave-like articulation and closed eyes allude to the dream state, the overlaying of Park’s imagery initially suggests the distillation of mythology as the currency of a symbolic transaction. Cha dances to a Korean account from the myth of Samguk Yusa of the first dream bargain, with projected English text, and then to contemporary dreams furnished by the public who had been invited to contribute through the project’s website. 

This airing of dreams, while consistent with the proposed aims of the project, weights the performance with an extensive use of narrative that is at odds with the condensed associative language and rarified psychic quality of both rituals and dreams. What begins as a ‘journey through the stages of sleep, and deep into the subconscious’, becomes engulfed in the prosaic intelligibility of dream-like stories and the digital virtuosity of the projected words and images. Dreams have the urgent reality of a symbolic message — which is why we attach such importance to them — and they impress themselves on our memory as photographic images. Dreams and rituals also have an incongruous, if not dark, quick-silver power; what Park has done is to portray this complexity too simplistically by overlapping floating letters, kaleidoscopic imagery and sound on Cha’s physical body. The effect dilutes the enhancement and elevation of dreams the creators had initially intended and thus weakens the relationship between audience and performance that is in itself a form of ritual transaction. 

As a visual artist, Park’s interest in ritual imagery extends beyond the performance into a photographic display and three video works. In the bar is a striking series of eight of her photographic prints with titles Ritual no. 1 through no. 8 whose mirrored forms of a manufactured dream aesthetic work better here as two-dimensional prints than as digital projections on stage. The video works — Lethe (2015), Internal Library (2017) and Cube (2011) — see Park experimenting with the layering of visual and choreographic art that foreshadows Dream Ritual but which suffer from a similar over-simplification of the unconscious by a reliance on the treatment of literal, narrative elements. 

Drawn in Colour, Degas from the Burrell

Drawn in Colour, Degas from the Burrell, National Gallery, September 18.

Edgar Degas, Preparation for the Class about 1877 Pastel on paper, The Burrell Collection

As a dancer I have for many years felt an affinity for the works of Edgar Degas who for the last 20 years of his life found an enduring subject in the dancers and dance culture of Paris at the end of the nineteenth century. The current exhibition at the National Gallery, Drawn in Colour, Degas from the Burrell, marks the centenary of Degas’ death on September 27, 1917, and is loaned for the most part from the Burrell Collection in Glasgow while its permanent home undergoes refurbishment. Drawn in Colour, curated by Julien Domercq, also includes works from the National Gallery’s own collection.

Degas’ drawings, paintings and pastels of dancers, some of which form part of the exhibition, are inured in the practice and performance of ballet at the Opéra Garnier in Paris. He was born too late (1834) to know the height of romantic ballet in the city but before he died, although his health was frail and his eyesight poor, he attended the first performances in Paris of Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes in 1909. (There are two pastels in the exhibition called simply Russian Dancers, dated 1899, which are, according to Alexandre Benois, figures from the Russian folk dance or Hopak, in Fokine’s ballet Le Festin at that 1909 performance).

Since Degas died during the First World War his estate was auctioned in Paris before the war ended. Maynard Keynes, then a humble Treasury adviser but also a keen art collector, used funds borrowed from the United States for the war effort to send himself and the then director of the National Gallery, Sir Charles Holmes, to Paris to bid on the Degas estate. The sound of the guns could be heard from the auction room but although Keynes and Holmes managed to bring home some works for the national collection, they did not return with any works by the artist himself. Sir William Burrell had already started collecting Degas around 1910, amassing 22 works by the time he gifted them, with his entire collection, to the city of Glasgow in 1944. All 22 are assembled in this exhibition, the first time they have been seen together outside Glasgow.

The exhibition is divided into three rooms organized around the themes of Modern Life, Dancers, and Private Worlds; Degas’ interest in the new middle class preoccupations with horse racing (Longchamp held its first race in 1857) and with ballet at the Opéra Garnier (opened in 1875) coincided with his interest in the passing gesture, in traces of movement, in the unique framing of subjects that sits somewhere between the Japanese print and the photographic snapshot and, it is evident, in his love of the intimacy and sensuality of the female form. Degas might have been a photographer — he became proficient in the use of a camera that he purchased in 1895 — but drawing and painting in colour was his particular medium. He sometimes merged the two techniques as in an oil painting, After the Bath, from 1896, which he painted from one of his own photographs. Perhaps I am imagining it, but while its sensuality of form is as equally present as in the bathers drawn from life on the same wall, its flatness of plane belongs more to the nature of the photograph than to the directness of the artist’s own eye.

It is in his use of pastels that Degas found a medium that most successfully united his emotions, his eye and his subject, an effervescence of cross-hatched lines and colour that extend beyond the subjects themselves to express both a sense of movement and his feelings towards them. Red is a tone that is particularly evident in this collection of works, from the red hair of many of his dancers and their tulle skirts to the orgy of red that is the National Gallery’s own Combing the Hair (1896). All the paintings in the exhibition focus on the female form, either at work (Laundresses, 1882-4), at leisure (At the Jewellers, about 1887), dancers rehearsing (Dancers on a Bench, 1898) or preparing their toilette (Woman in a Tub, 1896-1901). If one is prepared to allow this sensuality to arise from the canvas, then Degas, Drawn in Colour allows us behind the eyes and into the life of a famously protective artist; if not, the ‘shocking voyeurism’ of which he is accused by reviewers like Rachel Spence in the Financial Times (writing about the parallel Degas: A Passion for Perfection at the Fitzwilliam Museum) becomes an excuse to use his work as a keyhole through which to observe the private life of the artist.

Drawn in Colour, Degas from the Burrell is at The National Gallery until May 7, 2018. Admission free, donations welcome.