Dreams of Dance

All reviews of live performance are an exercise in hindsight. No matter how diligent a notetaker I will forever be rearticulating my in-the-moment responses into something that is ideally a cogent and cohesive response to a work. This review is a magnifying glass on that exercise.

Performance

“Toward One Another” by SOS (Sharing Our Stories)

Place

Seoul International Dance Festival: Sogang University, Seoul, Korea September 25, 2025

Words

Garth Grimball

“Toward One Another” by SOS (Sharing Our Stories). Photograph courtesy of SOS

I saw “Toward One Another” by SOS (Sharing Our Stories) on September 25 at Sogang University as part of the Seoul International Dance festival. Ten minutes into the performance it was clear that “Toward One Another” featured extensive spoken text in Korean. I do not speak Korean. And while there was much to behold in the work for all non-Korean speakers, to review it without including the text would not be to review it at all. Fortunately, one of the festival producers was able to share a translation of the text with me, albeit 11 days after the performance. So, this review follows the process of melding intellectual-emotional responses and brass tacks notes, with added time and translation.

Kim Won founded SOS in 2023 as a movement research group exploring improvisation and bodily expression. “Toward One Another’s” improvisation score employs five dancers, one speaker-performer and one musician to explore the precarity of life as an artist. Or, as Kim wrote in the program: “Art that doesn’t pay. Artists struggling to survive. A tearful saga of their fight. The lives of artists with broken careers are more precarious than most. Their works are the fervent embodiment of performativity, where life and art become one.”

Four dancers sat in the four corners of the Maryhall Theater stage. Each focused on a massive bundle of paper debris in front of them. The quartet engaged with the debris in variations: ripping individual pieces, flattening out the folds to read what remained, crumpling it into balls then tossed over the shoulder, or rolling the paper into cylinders to survey the surroundings or build a tower. Are these the options available to artists in pursuit of creativity, to creatively reimagine the scraps, the margins?

“Toward One Another” by SOS (Sharing Our Stories). Image courtesy of SOS

A fifth dancer held the center, yielding into the floor from seated to prostrate to fetal positions. The quartet stood and rearranged into a tableau as musician Tamura Ryo played a medicine bowl from off-stage right. The dancers collected their bundles and wiped the floor of their trash-cum-creations.

Kim Hyun-ah’s voice was heard before she entered the stage.

“Hello? Hello?

Yes! I want to learn how to dance!

I'm planning to transfer to the dance department!

I danced with passion—with all my heart.”

Hyun-ah spoke directly to the audience as the dancers would flank her in support of her words or retire to their own activities behind her. At one point she grabbed a bundle and step-touched her way across the stage singing, “Ddan-dan-da-dan~ ddan-dan-da-dan.” A choreography and a rhythm perhaps universally recognized as a wedding march.

The narration continued in biographical and metaphorical details. “After putting my kids to bed, I’d dance in my small room. Flowers bloomed along my spine.” Ryo took the stage with a guitar and mirrored the intensity of Hyun-ah’s delivery. As her narration delved into its most existential (“When did I grow so old? What have I been doing all this time? What do I want to do?”) The quartet’s improvisation reached its energetic apex as the dancers dove across the floor, swept their limbs through the air and reached towards empty space, but not each other.

In the end the dancers settled down with their bundles. Instead of dissecting the leftovers available, they cradled the material. Necessity may be the mother of invention, but “Toward One Another” situated compassion as invention’s bedfellow.

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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