Lee Jong-Ho, for the Love of Art

Before founding the Seoul International Dance Festival, Lee Jong-Ho began his career as a journalist. He joined the Korea Herald in 1977, and after contributing translations to the monthly arts magazine Chun in the early 1980s, he started writing dance criticism. He retired from journalism in 2009 after serving as a foreign correspondent in Belgium. In addition to serving as the artistic director of SID Festival, Lee established the CID-UNESCO Korea chapter.

Lee Jong-Ho, artistic director of Seoul International Dance Festival

Lee was in Busan for the Busan Performing Arts Market while I was in Seoul attending the festival, but we were able to meet via Zoom on October 9, where he was presenting work at UNAM in Mexico City before heading to Cairo. This conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity. Mr. Lee was joined in conversation by his colleague and translator Hye Jeung Chung.

Since you started the festival in 1998, what has been the biggest surprise in sustaining an international dance festival?

To make a festival and to continue it every year is really an adventure. In every aspect of the event.

The first and the biggest issue is money, money, money. And the second is how to make a better program. But to make a better program is not so simple, because I want to make a high-quality program for Korean audiences, but not just “high-quality.” I want there to be a specific topic, and curating for a specific topic is very difficult. This year the theme was “Into the Raging Vortex,” and in recent years it has been themes like “refugees” or “violence.” To discover works and pick the programming is challenging, but it’s a very big pleasure to imagine and prepare each year to make an exciting program. I feel like I have the curiosity of a teenager when planning the festival.

What types of contemporary dance do you find Korean audiences respond to?

The Korean audience is more and more receptive to contemporary dance compared to the past. It’s very encouraging. But the amount of audience is very small in comparison to classical ballet, or contemporary ballet as well. In the past only classical ballet was very popular. Nowadays, contemporary ballet is doing better in terms of selling tickets and securing audience. And Korea is very strong in traditional dance. Traditional and folkloric dancing has a strong tradition of good dancers and good repertoire. The Western style of contemporary dance is the least popular, but I am very hopeful that there are more and more fans, more contemporary dance lovers.

Lee Jong-Ho, artistic director of Seoul International Dance Festival

In the performances I attended, I was very pleased to see so many young people in the audience.

Yes, but in Korea the proportion of the young audience is far bigger than the older audience, and not only in contemporary dance, but especially in contemporary dance, it skews younger.

Your career began as a journalist. How has journalism influenced your work in dance curation?

I think, thanks to my journalistic career, I had many opportunities to look into society. In general, many people in Korea, many people in the field of dance, don't think about politics or society. They're only thinking about dancing: “Is the dancing good or bad?” They are not really interested in universal general issues of a human being, or his society or political background. But since I was a journalist I think I have had more opportunity to think about these subjects.

And this helped me to see into social issues, and as a programmer of the festival itself, to make a theme of each year.

For this year’s theme “Into the Raging Vortex,” how did you decide which works to curate?

I wanted to tell the audience that the art of dance can say something political to you. Dance is not only the dancing. So dances, like other art, like literature or theater, can alter something about our society, or engage with our epoch.

And secondly, I want to stimulate Korean choreographers. Please be interested in other issues than your own individualism. In comparison to the Western world, Korean choreographers are too much about the individual.

How do you balance showcasing Korean artists you want to bring to the international stage with international artists you want to bring to Korea?

I wanted to invite many more international artists, but it is not easy because of the budget. So, purely in terms of the participating numbers, individual artists or companies, Koreans are more represented. But in many cases, Korean participation is sometimes one big company. Or we have a platform for young, rising Korean choreographers. There may be more individual international productions, but there are more Korean artists than international artists in the festival.

“Toward One Another” by SOS (Sharing Our Stories) at the Seoul International Dance Festival. Photograph courtesy of SOS

How do you describe contemporary Korean dance?

We are passing the more modern dance period and getting into contemporary dance. However, until recently, Korean contemporary dancers just learned Western styles, especially European styles, and then those styles translated into our contemporary dance. Korean contemporary dance includes Korean traditional dance, too. The artists modernize it, and then it becomes Korean contemporary dance. Right now, it is dynamic and diverse. I cannot have one specific answer because the artists are very diverse based on the themes, and dance styles, and techniques.

However, I think that we still do not have any conceptual dance. The audience does not accept the conceptual dance, which is, like postmodern dance, performance art. We don't have that kind of genre at all. I think during the last about 10 years the concept of conceptual dance has come into Korea. And maybe it is popular among a group of choreographers, but there are not many performances of it.

In addition to being the artistic director of SID, you run the online media site The Preview. How would you describe the state of arts journalism in Korea?

Korea, in general, has cut all the papers. However, strangely enough, the dance field will still insist on print. Print magazines have an impact in dance, but overall, print is less influential than social media.

The younger generation of critics are very different compared to my generation. It feels like they are very light in their reviews. In my generation of critics, we could be debating with artists, or sometimes we would be writing against each other. The younger critics don’t want to be negative, and they just want to make a good relationship with the artists. They don’t want to hurt feelings. So, as president of the Korean Critics Association, I want to have three or four workshops among critics to ask, What is the main role of the critic? What is the responsibility of the critic. I want to have a forum.

What is a recent art experience—dance or otherwise—that you continue to think about?

The Spanish director, writer and actress Angélica Liddell’s play, “Liebestod.” I really loved that piece. It’s a drama about love, art and madness. I have seen many, many dance, theater, many kinds of performing arts, but I have an impression that in recent years, in our society, the art becomes more and more respectable. Nowadays artists don't like to be extremists. But Liddell showed us what is extremism in love and art.

Garth Grimball

Garth Grimball is a dance writer and artist based in Oakland, CA. He has danced with Asheville Ballet, Oakland Ballet, Dana Lawton Dances, and Brontez Purnell Dance Company. He received his MFA in Dance from Mills College. He is the co-director of Wax Poet(s) performance collective. He hosts the podcast Reference Desk and is the Executive Associate at ODC in San Francisco.

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