Form of Beauty

There is one essential ingredient to 33-year-old Korean dancer,Soo Hee Cho's method - spontaneity.

There is one essential ingredient to 33-year-old Korean dancer,Soo Hee Cho’s method – spontaneity. Even in her halting English,she emphasises that point repeatedly. She hardly ever rehearses before a performance,and once on stage,her focus is only on being herself. “Even I don’t know what’s going to happen,” she laughs. “Every performance of mine is different. It is about me dancing my own dance,sharing my reaction from moment to moment.” This ambiguity about her pursuit is part of understanding her dance,which sticks to no particular form or style.

For her most recent performance at Ishanya Mall,Cho combined fluid movements with spontaneous painting and live music. As her slender frame moved in undecided fashion to instrumental music and mantras,she swathed colours on cream-coloured sheets of cloth hung in the background. “For me,dance is as much therapy as meditation. I believe that true creation happens the moment the dancer allows himself to disappear into movement,” she says.

Born in Seoul and trained in traditional forms of dance,Cho’s approach changed when she came to India in 2004. She dabbled in yoga and vipasana and got associated with the Osho Ashram. But nothing really helped her cause until she discovered active meditation through dance. This is when she drew a distinction between the dance “for entertainment” that she had been doing so far,and dance as therapy. “Most dance forms,be it modern ballet,Korean dance or contemporary,are coming from ‘out’ to ‘in’. For me,dance is about using the qualities of the body. We forget about breathing,grace and beauty; my dance is about reminding ourselves that,” she says.

Cho has since then propagated the idea that anyone can dance,and that natural,uninhibited movements are therapeutic. She is currently in the process of completing a doctorate from Pune University on meditation and dance,and has developed a concept she calls Mind/Body Management Education (MBME). She also divides her time between Korea and India,conducting stress management classes. “I believe I’m more a dance therapist. I work with groups. I feel more energies are created when we dance together,” she says.

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