Since the 1990s, Korea has developed into a full-fledged multicultural society with an increase of foreign workers, marriage immigrants, and defectors. Today, as multicultural education is emerging as a critical task for Korea in the 21st century, it is a crucial moment to examine what role Korea’s dance education plays in such a multicultural society. The purpose of this study is to search for an appropriate type of dance education, given Korea’s transition to a multicultural society. Thus, this study conducted comparative studies between the United States’ form of multicultural education and France’s intercultural education to identify the current status and problems of dance education in Korea. Based on this analysis, four ways in which intercultural education has been applied as an alternative to appropriate dance education in Korean multicultural society are presented. This study attempts to identify the similarities rather than the differences in intercultural dance education. Furthermore, children coming from immigrant families and students from ordinary households want to communicate with each other through various traditional dances. Therefore, intercultural dance education needs to be extended to immigrants as well as native citizens. Additionally, a community dance program that implements intercultural education for a large number of inhabitants and a small number of immigrants should be established. If dance education that emphasizes communication and mutual integration is formulated to meet the needs of the present age, it is expected that it will also be a great help toward creating a safe and healthy multicultural society. Through this study, the importance and value of dance in Korean multicultural society will be re-acknowledged, and the value of dance education for leading the way toward a 21st century multicultural society will be illustrated.

Shusterman developed somaesthetics, which emphasizes somatic consciousness and practice based on pragmatic aesthetics. Somaesthetics is closely related to the somatic approach to dance, which focuses on the dancer’s inner experience as the cognitive subject. This study purposes to analyze the relationship between performative somaesthetics and dance in order to determine how somaesthetics contributes to dance as an art form as well as provides the theoretical framework for the dancer’s movement exploration. For aesthetic communication between dancer and audience to occur through dance expression, it is necessary to develop the dancer’s expressive power. The dancer can enhance his/her expressive power through the development of abilities to form motor programs in dance, process proprioceptive information, and perceive dance space. These are closely connected with the development of the dance body, that is, the body schema in dance. The development of the body schema in dance is the outcome of conscious efforts to transform the everyday body into a dance body. From the perspective of somaesthetics, this implies the transformation of the dancer’s body into the aesthetic medium through practicing performative somaesthetics. The development of the dance body makes a dancer able to perform dance movements in a refined and natural way, in which the dance schemata functions preconsciously. As a result, aesthetic communication with the audience is enhanced. Therefore, through somaesthetics, particularly performative practices, the dancer develops a dance body to contribute to the expressive power of dance. As the audience reaches deeper understanding and experience of the movement possibilities of the dance responding to the dance environment, its appreciation may be heightened. This implies that it is important for students to have performing experience in the dance curriculum through experiential and performative practices in order to enhance the abilities of evaluation and appreciation in the dance performance.

This study traced Choi Seung-hee’s dancing career in Europe and the Americas between 1937 and 1940. Choi is recognized as a pioneer who built the foundation of modern Korean dance. Called “the dancer of the peninsular” and very popular in Korea and Japan, the celebrated dancer extended her career to Europe with the ambitious mission to introduce Joseon dance to an international audience in the late 1930s. As the Japanese novelist Yasunari Kawabata put it, her dance was powerful and based on her ethnic roots, which became representative of her as a dancer. Meanwhile, most Korean intellectuals criticized her dance for failing to fully express their nation’s identity; this was because it was a mix of Western-style and traditional Korean techniques. Despite this criticism, her dance proved itself to be fascinating enough to attract an international audience, presenting the uniqueness of an ethnic culture in a dignified and fresh way. It also suggested that the legendary dancer’s work carries significance in that it created a new value system with a blend of globalization, locality, and democratic elements.

When I first looked through the records of Korean immigrants on the foreigner register in Mexico in 1989, a photo attracted my attention of a flapper-haired, smiling, beautiful woman who stood out among the others. She was Sai Shoki, a famed dancer who performed in Mexico City in October, 1940. When I met Judy Van Zile, professor of University of Hawaii in Puerto España in the summer of 2000, the professor told me that her study on Korean dance was nearly completed. Her study looked into the performance tour in America by Choi Seung-hee(Shoki’s Korean name)and included articles on her Bogota performance. That led me to the presentation of this study in which I was to give details about Shoki’s dance career, records on her Mexico performance, and her political position on her nation’s independence movement, which drove her to move to North Korea and continue her career there. The appendix contains related photos.

Rooted in British sociologist Anthony Giddens’s description of modernity as a historical and cultural space that is “in various key respects discontinuous with the gamut of pre-modern cultures and ways of life”, this study seeks to contextualize Ch’oe Sŭng-hŭi’s life and legacy in relation to evolving ideas of modernity. Here I continue my concern with Ch’oe’s actual dancing. I first lay a foundation for moving forward by summarizing related previous findings. I then look at Ch’oe’s emerging aesthetic philosophy and artistic development in relation to modernity as it was becoming defined in dance in Japan, Korea, and elsewhere. I conclude that it was the diverse philosophies underlying the kids of dance with which Ch’oe became engaged that in effect gave her permission to develop artistically in the way she did, and that allowed for her changing embodiment of Korean modernity during the 1920s and 1930s.

This study is an analysis of dance critics' way of writing to make the general public appropriate images. Thus, this study aims to identify the images in writings inferred by readers; this study investigates the factors of aesthetic works by critics who compose images in their writings. In this study, the inference process of images for the interpretation and analysis of works was described by investigating the factors appearing in dance critics' writings on their impression of the works. By describing a critic's way of writing, which is shown in the critique on the Korean National Contemporary Dance Company's , the components and meaning of image inference in the work were examined. The study found that the trends in the form of the aesthetic work from critics' appreciation could be summarized as generalization and the universalization. It could be seen that the generalization acted as the basis of a basic judgement for the quality of the work, which appeared through understanding the subject and themes of the work. The universalization presented image refinement of inference for the analysis with technical requirements for aesthetic characteristics, form, social and philosophical structure, thoughts and ideas, and artistry. The critics writing on works has an open attitude to possess a convergent direction of interpretation as a progressive form against the abstractness appearing in the art of human society. However, it could be seen that the functional descriptions of artworks were presented to readers as as an association process of image inference in a censored form (which is generalization and universalization) in order to identify human society as cultural, social, and historical forms.

This study aims to examine the contemporaneity of performance archive and reconsider the historicality of dance, focusing on practice and theory in contemporary dance. For this, I explored theories and discourses that arose in contemporary arts, and I have analyzed the cases of archive practice. Over past two decades, choreographers in contemporary dance have experimented contemporaneity and history through archive practice. This study focuses on historical concepts of archive in order to find the meaning of the choreographer’s re-enactment. In this study, I refer to Walter Benjamin and Michel Foucault’s proposal on history and archive to construct the theoretical frame of this study. “Actuality” in Walter Benjamin’s philosophy is heterogeneous time modes of the past and the present in singular moments, and it presents reality. Foucault suggests archive as a system of transformation and severance. He exceeds common perception of linear history with an archeological approach. To examine how choreographers apply archive to their work in a level of choreography and body as medium of dance, I have chosen the works of two choreographer: Yvonne Rainer and Boris Charmatz. Rainer uses the methods of “repetition” and “representation”, which transmit from one body to others in her . She suggests performative archiving to produce new creations in the process of returning to the original. Charmatz writes new history, which is established between dance history and a dancer’s memories in the present time. They both emphasized that a body is the subject of both dance and real life because every segment of history inhabits the body. Therefore, there are no distinctions between archive and body in dance. In this study, I discuss performance archive being toward embodied actualization with the choreographic approach. Performance archive is not only a form or style of dance but also questions, engagement, relationships, and enactment of the objectivity and subjectivity of dance. In this light, the choreographic is the way to create both dance and history.

This study aims to understand how the terms ‘muyong (dance)’ and ‘shinmuyong (new dance)’ were initiated, used, and established in Korea through newspapers in the Japanese colonial era such as the Maeil Shinbo, the Dong-A Daily news, and the Chosun Ilbo. The term muyong was first used in Japan, as suggesting a new formal characteristic of being not only Western and but also Japanese. It was simultaneously born with shinmuyong, a term indicating a type of dance newer than the existing one. Shinmuyong indicated an achievement of creation of new Japanese dance that was regarded as being compatible with that of the Western powers. It was an article on the Maeil Shinbo dealing with Yeki, a Japenese dance, on October 7, 1913 that introduced the term muyong to Korea for the first time under Japanese imperialism. In the Dong-A Daily news, muyong represented the term ‘Western dance’ when European tanz theater in 1920s was introduced; it was used to indicate a type of Western dance with philosophy and artistry. The Chosun Ilbo first used the term muyong in its article titled “Western Dance Nowadays” on October 7, 1927. Since then, both mudo and muyong had been used to refer to dance until early 1928, but since late 1928, the use of muyong had increased rapidly in the newspapers and then became generalized. The first article describing classical dance such as geom-mu (a sword dance), a Korean traditional dance, as muyong was the one written by Kim Dong Hwan dated May 12, 1927. The term shinmuyong was perceived as a creative dance that produced something new in 1930s in Korea. It was, in other words, used as a term similar to new-work dance, creative dance, or creative artistic dance with artistry and creativity on the basis of European modern dance.

The research on "the data status and data use case of Simso Kim cheon-heung" started from the importance that the Kim Cheon-Heung Collection can be seen not only as an individual archive, but also as a manual of an extended artistic record and utilization method of performing arts. This study has a second purpose of sharing information to be a mediator of researches on Kim Cheonheung by grasping the current status of the materials and the cases that have been utilized. As a research method, I focus on the activities of the Korea Dance Resource Center, which I have participated in the past, and analyze event materials (event plan, programs, materials, books, etc.) Related site search. In addition, I analyze the case of reconstruction of Cheoyongrang. I expect that this study could be seen as a reference in the creation or reproduction of archiving.

This study compared Jeongjaemudo Holgi (musical scripts) with video materials of “Mugo” (group dance from the Goryeo period) and “JangsaengboyeonJimu” (court music from the Joseon period) performed in the 1980s at ‘Traditional Dance Presentation’ of National Gugak Center following Simso Kim Cheon-heung’s restoration of them. By doing so, the study sought to learn how he had restored the court dances. As a result, the study found following characteristics of “Mugo” and “JangsaengboyeonJimu”. First, the greetings were added both in the beginning and the end of the performance. Second, the songs of the dancers were simplified. Third, there was no big change in dance formation. Fourth, there were omissions or additions in the procedure of the dance. When he restored court dance in the 1980s, the restoration was built on what he learned from Music Academy of the Joseon Dynasty and a number of materials including Akji (music book) of Goryeosa, that is lustrated Text on Traditional Music and Holgi. His restoration of the court dances in the 1980s was affected by periodical circumstances and creative experiences during the 1950s. This study concluded that the court dances he restored was the extension of tradition and literature interpretation. This study identified his spirit from his restoration which was completed based on experience and aesthetic attitude. Rather than sticking to the original literature, he showed the essence of the court dances as a new form of art by putting it on stage. He desired to turn the court dance into a contemporary proscenium stage art and to elevate it to the modern art form. As such, his restoration of the court dances in the 1980s was a process which he embraced the change of the period. Thus, Kim Cheon-heung can be considered as an artist who demonstrated artistic capability encompassing tradition.