K-Cool: Choreographically exploring a K-pop social identity

Abstract

This research aims to choreographically explore coolness within K-pop, specifically how coolness may never be achieved and is always subject to failure. It aims to do this with the audience in my performance work The Release Launch. This is the overall name of the work but there are two versions of my work, The Making of Littlejohn and The Release Video. I aim to explore how choreography in a dance studio context can be created for specific purposes through exploring many aspects of coolness, such as categorisation, self-presentation, status, and persona. Furthermore, I aim to explore the norms and how Instagram contributes to our social identity. I have worked with five performers engaging with many approaches to choreographic testing within this solo performance. This research has been conducted through K-Cooling tests, a set of choreographic tests/experiments, and using testing through this framework (Ronell, 2005). I have understood choreography in this research through Pina Bausch’s (Tolman, 2014) use of choreographic repetition and Meg Stuart’s (Tomic, 2016) work with choreographic scores. Hence, I propose that my choreography invokes a sense of hybridised femininity (Young, 2017), through the lens of gender performativity (Butler, 1988), and having a girl crush concept (Almqvist-Ingersoll, 2019) for my performance. This K-Cooling also reflects on the norm of identity policing (Butler, 1999) for my performance to be structured into the work. This research reflects upon the idea of coolness as understood by Mark Harvey (2011) and Antje Budzanowski (2017). Other practitioners and performance thinkers such as Yvonne Rainer (Trio A, n.d.), Claire Bishop (Eschenburg, 2014), Helen Thomas (2003) and Alexa Wilson (2017) have all been sources of influence for this creative research.