Contemporary interpretations of the practice of a traditional Korean dance: 'Han Young-Sook's Salp'uri Ch'um'.

摘要

Study of dance notation has recently become a serious inquiry associated with the practice of advanced movement notation systems. Based on the assumption that dance consists of constitutive properties which can be captured, analyzed, codified, and translated into another medium, dance professionals, especially in the Western world, have limited the scope of dance notation to conceptualization of bodily movement in space and time. Current movement notation practice, however, has been challenged by epistemological questions, especially in regard to interpretative aspects of dance phenomena within different contextual dimensions. This research proposed an ethnographic case study to investigate this problem. Based on interview and observation of three Korean dancers, who are the leading practitioners of Han Young-Sook's Salp'uri Ch'um, a traditional Korean solo scarf dance, this study focused on exploration of the interpretation of Salp'uri Ch'um, relying on the major practitioners' points of view rather than solely on an alien movement notation system, which inescapably presupposes a particular cultural cognitive frame characteristic of a particular movement style. The findings of this study suggested the need for a broader view in the current practice of dance notation as the traditional Korean dance revealed such traditional phenomena as continuous interpretation and transformation of a dance through the dynamic force of sociocultural contexts. This study is significant in terms of questioning the status quo of movement notation through the effort to understand dance in the broader context of human life.