When the dancers extend their long limbs — legs poised on pointe shoes, arms drawn taut, fingers reaching outward — their bodies form impossibly long lines, like stalks of bamboo. They seem to lengthen with every breath, supple yet unbroken, bending without collapsing.
Then comes the sound of exhalation.
The dancers' deep breaths cut through the stillness like wind moving through a bamboo grove.
Backs arch sharply, legs sweep behind them like leaves caught in a current. Their movements radiate a tensile vitality.
There is something cool and vividly green in the air they create, a freshness that lingers. Their bodies sway only to return upright again.
The scene is from "In the Bamboo Forest," a new full-length ballet by the Seoul Metropolitan Ballet set to run Friday through Sunday at the Sejong Center for the Performing Arts' M Theater. It is the company's second original production, following its inaugural "A Midsummer Night's Dream" in 2024.
At the company's studio on Nodeul Island ahead of opening week, the work already carried the atmosphere of a living bamboo forest.
The ballet is choreographed by Kang Hyo-hyung, a soloist with the Korean National Ballet, in collaboration with composer and geomungo performer Park Da-wool.
The ballet transforms the flexibility and steadfast vitality of bamboo into contemporary movement set to music rooted in Korean tradition.
If the female dancers in the second act evoke slender bamboo stalks, the fourth act shifts into something more forceful. The explosive energy of the male ensemble embodies bamboo spreading unseen beneath the earth, taking root and ultimately growing into a dense forest.
Kang said the idea had stayed with her for years.
"I was inspired while walking through bamboo forests. There was always something compelling to me about bamboo's dual energy — firm yet flexible," Kang said during a group interview with reporters. "I had long wanted to choreograph a work around it. When the Seoul Metropolitan Ballet approached me, I knew this was the moment to bring that image out."
The ballet follows a figure lost in the disorientation of life who enters a bamboo forest and gradually learns to breathe in harmony with nature. By learning to let go and find a solid footing, we discover renewed strength.
"We live so busily now that sometimes it feels difficult even to breathe," Kang said. "I wanted the forest to become a place where one learns how to breathe again. That's why breath itself became central to the choreography, using breath to express delicate textures and emotions."
Since her choreographic debut in 2015, Kang has built a singular language by weaving Korean motifs and breathing techniques drawn from traditional Korean dance into ballet vocabulary.
Her debut work, "Into the Pulse," earned her a nomination for the Benois de la Danse in 2017. She created the full-length works "Heo Nan Seol Heon" in 2017 and "Hoi Rang" in 2019.
"In the Bamboo Forest" is Kang's first full-length production created outside the Korean National Ballet.
"It wasn't intentional, but the piece ended up becoming almost like a gift set of classical ballet, contemporary ballet and elements of Korean dance all intertwined. That has become my own style."
For Kang, breathing remains at the core of the work. Rather than the lifted, upward breath associated with classical Western ballet, she asks dancers to exhale downward, releasing and emptying the body.
"Ballet dancers are trained instinctively toward pull-up breathing," she said. "But in my choreography, they have to let go of that tension. The lower body remains powerful while the upper body softens and releases. What matters is achieving that delicate texture of breath."
She is equally adamant that the production remain unmistakably ballet.
"Contemporary ballet grounded in classical technique is different from modern dance. I wanted this company to clearly show that it is a ballet company," she said.
"I wanted to show ballet's greatest strength — that dancers can move this freely even on pointe shoes."
As in many of her earlier works, Kang turned to traditional Korean music.
"Music is the most important element in choreography. I kept pushing until I got exactly the music I wanted," said Kang.
Park created seven new pieces for the 60-minute ballet, built around the geomungo, a traditional Korean plucked zither.
"The geomungo is usually an instrument of short, pointlike sounds," he explained. "But for this production, we used bows and layered sound effects to evoke the wind through a bamboo forest and the vitality of living things."
The score combines traditional Korean instruments — geomungo, gayageum, daegeum, janggu and buk — with guitar, bass, piano and cello. Humming voices sung in the style of jeongga, a traditional Korean vocal genre, were added to evoke spirits drifting through the forest.
He noted the irony that much of the music had been composed underground.
"I spend most of my time working in a basement studio," Park said. "So I kept imagining clean air and forests. I wanted audiences to feel as if they were breathing in crisp air and awakening to the sound of bamboo trees."
When audiences leave the theater, Kang added, she hopes they will feel "as though something inside them has opened up — refreshed and cleared."
hwangdh@heraldcorp.com
