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?