Sin Cha Hong: Laughing Stone – A Master in Tandem with Legacy
Friday, October 2, 2015 at 12PM
Buttenwieser Hall
(Lexington Avenue at 92nd Street, NYC)
Tickets : $10 online / $15 at door
Korean national treasure Sin Cha Hong is a noted avant-garde performance artist whose bold and striking vision has influenced generations of Korean choreographers including the powerful and nuanced Jin Han and Eun Mi, who appear with Ms. Hong on this program.
Mirror
Choreography and performed by Sin Cha Hong with Young Aha Choi
Music by John Cage and others
Costume by Oma
Mirror is a piece about looking at your self in the mirror and contemplating, “Who Am I…?”
Young Aha Choi has been working with Sin Cha Hong for the last 20 years. She also plays the waterphone. She now teaches mathematics in a public high school in Hawai‘i.
Sin Cha Hong, choreographer, dancer, vocalist and writer, is one of the most influential artists of 20th century Korea. Ou Jianping, vice-director for research on foreign dance of the Chinese National Dance Academy, has rated Sin Cha Hong as the “flower of Western avant-garde dance with East Asian roots” on par with Isadora Duncan, Vaslav Nijinksy and Martha Graham. When she toured Germany in 1998 the Weimar newspaper Ostthüringer Zeitung wrote “Sin Cha Hong is a famous Korean and American dancer equaling Pina Bausch.” The most respected dance and music writer in Korea, Yong Koo Park, identified Hong as the source of the third major period in Korean dance history, after Korean Court Dance and Seoung Hee Choi. Sin Cha Hong won many awards during the 1970s and 1980s in New York City. She was the recipient of the NEA, NYSCA, NYFA, Asian Cultural Service and Japan Foundation grants. She also won many awards in Korea. After winning praise by the art critics for her debut performance of “Morning” in New York in 1973 she founded the Laughing Stone Dance Theater and collaborated with artists like John Cage, Yuji Takahashi, Margaret Leng Tan and Nam June Paik. She also taught at the Beijing Dance Academy as guest professor and in various universities in Korea as a Fulbright scholar. She returned to Korea after a long stay abroad in 1993 and founded the Laughing Stone Dance, Inc. there, leading public performances and meditation workshops. She also lectured on dance at the Korea National University of Arts. In 1994 she organized the Juksan International Arts Festival, which became famous as an international festival for avant-garde art. Her autobiography, “Excuse for Freedom,” became a bestseller and has been translated into Japanese and Chinese.
For more information, please visit www.92y.org/Event/FAN-Sin-Cha-Hong.aspx.