the company
“The street style in dress and movement disguises finely honed skill in balancing bodies at extraordinary angles and in extraordinary configurations. […] It proved a winning selection.”
–Critical Dance
Founded in 2011 by choreographer Soon-ho Park, Bereishit is a Seoul-based dance company that approaches the Korean traditional culture from a contemporary view–keeping the fundamental value of things, as opposed to simply borrowing or transforming them. The work also explores the issues of identity and transformation and delves into multimedia, street dance, community dance work and real time interactive demonstration. It displays an amazing sensitivity towards space and rhythms and its performances are always delivered with kinesthetic clarity and power. Bereishit has toured internationally including to a sold out house at the Arts Center of NYU Abu Dhabi, and in the US at the Jacob’s Pillow Dance Festival, Pittsburgh Dance Council, ArtPower at UC San Diego, Dance Salad Festival, Strathmore, Celebrity Series of Boston, NYU Skirball, The Ringling, and FUNDarte. The company has also set a work on the dance students of Rutgers University and George Mason University.
the director
Soon-ho Park majored in contemporary dance at Hansung University in Seoul, Korea, and actively worked as a professional dancer from 1992 to 2001. He then completed a choreography course at the Arnhem European Dance Development Center in The Netherlands where he developed his work, trying diverse experiments through his solo or trio pieces. He participated in many projects as a dancer in The Netherlands, Germany and other European countries and was selected as the New Choreographer by the German institution PACT Zollverein in 2003.
Soon-ho has done various works and projects with installation and media artists, and musicians, including a collaboration with Giga Hizume, who is the director of Sal Vanilla, a multimedia and live performance group in Japan. He has received major funding from Arts Council Korea, and awards including The Choreography Award of the Year by the Performing Arts and Film Review, The New Choreographer’s Award by the International Modern Dance Festival, and the Best Choreography Award both from the Korean Dance Researchers and Critics Association and the ChangMu Arts Center. His work opened the Festival Asia in Barcelona, Spain, in 2007. Since then, Soon-ho’s works have been presented at venues and festivals in many countries such as Poland, the United Kingdom, Brazil, Uruguay, India, Switzerland, and Mexico, amongst others.
BALANCE & IMBALANCE
Balance & Imbalance (2011) explores the dialectical nature of human relationships to reveal their inherent elements of coexistence and conflict : appearance and disappearance, gravitation and repulsion, freedom and oppression, love and hatred, good and evil. Accents taken from martial art combine to form movements that coexist and harmonize and, when combined, create something unique and alive and new. With dancers seamlessly partnering and then hurtling through space, Balance & Imbalance uses the laws of nature to illustrate the constantly turning wheel of opposition and harmony at the heart of all relationships. Balance & Imbalance includes live music by an ensemble of Korean traditional drummers.
BOW
Park’s tenacious interest in tradition and sports is now expanded into an investigation into their meditative dimensions. In his work Bow (2014), he focuses on why traditional archery is considered an art form, building his performance out of rigorous research and thinking on the meaning of shooting a bow. Two male dancers recreate the act of making and firing a bow, turning these actions into an austere confrontation with oneself, and at times developing into a waltz spiraling forward through repetition. This performance showcases Park’s skilled choreography that crosses the boundaries of sports and dance, training and meditation, action and thought.
JUDO
In Judo (2014), Soon-ho Park views sports as a way to control, mediate, traverse and indeed transcend the violent, churning urges within us. Using this idea, Judo deploys the symbolic meaning of sports as a counterpoint and frame of reference and presents, through the medium of dance, the harmonious play between rhythm, movement and space. Judo is a developed version of an earlier work entitled Pattern and Variable, which was originally created for the Asia-Africa Dance Exchange Program of the Cultural Partnership Initiative co-produced by SIDance under the Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism.
GYEONG-IN
The title, ‘Gyeong-In’ means ‘Seoulites’, a symbol for contemporary people who are firmly entrenched in modern culture, information, and trends. This work, choreographed in 2017, explores the city’s duality, woven with body language: push and pull. Body weight is placed on scales, stretching. The trio of dancers constantly shifts with body weight and movement, illustrating the desire for material wealth juxtaposed with emotional emptiness. How our craving to have more can leave us feeling empty and meaningless. The contradictory nature of urban life via Soon-ho’s brilliant capacity to re-imagine the expansive nature of the human body.
COMMUNITY WORKSHOPS
For Soon-ho Park, the significance of dance is freedom. Dancing with the members of a community restores dance as the body of the ordinary working classes. Community dance workshops will enable participants to express their existential needs and their desire to live through their body.
TECHNIQUE CLASSES
Body movements contain texture, space, rhythms and other various elements. The Bereishit technique classes will allow participants to experiment a relationship with external elements through movement and feel an inner relationship between the chi and themselves, which is the fundamental principle of oriental martial arts such as aikido and tai chi.
CHOREOGRAPHIC WORKSHOPS FOR DANCE MAJORS
These workshops focus on various elements of the choreography including the movement, space design and semantic of the action. These components change along with the relationship and have numerous meanings.
CHOREOGRAPHIC WORKSHOPS FOR DANCE PROFESSIONALS
These workshops focus on Soon-ho Park’s creation process. He considers his choreography as abstract as its role is to simplify and filter reality. Through observation and experience he is able to reveal the philosophic or core essence of the work.
