The purpose of this study is to examine Western works of art through a historical and archival point of view related to arts psychotherapy. The method of approaching visual works of art is based on essential attributes of art therapy history. The theoretical background is founded in publications and research papers relating to art history, arts philosophy, and expressive arts therapy. To examine contemporary Western works of art and artists, Pablo Picasso, Jackson Pollock, and Henri Matisse were selected for analysis and exploration of the origin of arts psychotherapy. For the purpose of discussing the conceptual foundation of dance therapy, the characteristics of Western works of art and artists were examined, resulting in the following findings. First, the characteristics of Pablo Picasso’s “Three Dancers” include free-form expression, destruction of form, and bodily expression of subjective emotions arising from an inner world. In particular, “Three Dancers” exhibits Symbolism, which is one of the main elements of dance/movement therapy. Second, the characteristics of Jackson Pollock’s “Mural” and “Rhythmical Dance” represent Shamanism and strong Body Action, both from the artifacts and the process of creating them. Lastly, Henri Matisse’s “Dance the Second” and “Two Dancers” show a simple and strong color composition which emphasizes the harmony of nature, humans, and the power of Rhythmic group activity, also a main concept of dance therapy. As a result of the analysis, these three important Western artists and works of art are seen to demonstrate meaningful perspectives and theoretical foundations of dance therapy. Indeed, their works of art could be considered valuable documents of dance therapy history. This study is limited by its focus on only a few selected artists and works of art. A larger, follow-up study is needed to rule out over-generalization. Second, interpretation may be limited by the subjectivity of the author. For this reason, the author included a number of references to support the study’s point of view.

This study begins with the question of what dances were performed in the Sa-ak during the Joseon Dynasty. The Sa-ak (賜樂) consisted of a director, musicians, female entertainers, boy dancers, and a Cheoyong masked dance group. The research objective is Jeongsanggonhoenangilok, which was written to celebrate Hoebang (回榜)’s 60th anniversary of passing the state examination by Jeong Won-yong(1783- 1873). The Joseon wangjo sillok (朝鮮王朝實錄) and Akhakgwebeom (樂學軌範) were also sources of background material, consisting of official records and literary works, that were subject to review. In terms of the rites of the Hoebang, on January 1, 1862, the king gave orders. In addition to feasting by the royal family, the government allowed citizens to also participate in festivals, many of which were held over the course of two months. Relative to the Sa-ak, the king established the first degree of Sa-ak, which consisted of a total of 52 people: 1 director, 36 musicians, 10 boy dancers, and 5 Cheoyong masked dancers. They performed for two months. In terms of the performances, the repertoires of the boy dancers were not recorded and remain unknown. While it was performed leisurely, it gave a feeling of flourishing and colorful. The female entertainers performed seven kinds of dances along with the Jangagwon orchestra: Cheoyong masked dance, sword dance, drum dance, pogulak (dancing ball into hole), seonyulak (dancing to play on the ship), and hyangbal heonseondo (dancing to give a long life peach). These repertoires were the most popular forms of jeongjae (呈才) in the late Joseon court. The Sa-ak was performed as part of a private feast. “Sa-ak” is an important keyword for understanding the culture of Korean dancing, because it spreads as “Sa-ak” in private space, and has the character of cultural circulation in which the enjoyment of royal court dance extends to individuals.

Byung-Choen Park’s Jindo Drum Dance is a masterpiece that strikes a balance between traditional Korean music and dance. As one of the most representative traditional dances, this dance has been loved and performed by many people for a long time. This study focuses on discovering the unique qualities of Byung-Choen Park’s Jindo Drum Dance by examining its movements through Laban Movement Analysis. Along with this analysis, this study also explores the special concepts and philosophical meanings embodied in the movements of the dance. As a Certified Laban Movement Analyst, the author analyzed the movements based on the dance film shown at Jin-do on November 7, 2008. The movement qualities of the Jindo Drum Dance are as follows. First, the dance employs both regular beats and irregular up-beats that cause disorder within order. Second, the limited torso movement while holding a drum enhances simultaneous and, consequently, harmonized arm and leg movements. Third, diverse arm and leg gestures draw curved and straight spatial designs by using peripheral and transverse spatial pathways. Fourth, in most performances, the dancer faces the front and right and left forward side directions based on the proscenium stage. Also, the diverse spatial directions of all body parts within a personal kinesphere create three-dimensional volumes with mixed diagonal lines within a cube. Fifth, the inner impulse of the movements demonstrates an Effort phrase, such as Action Drive, then Bound and Free Flow and Passion Drive, versus Remote or Mobile State. These Effort phrases reveal a unique Korean dance aesthetic, which consists of a harmonizing of Jeong Jung Dong-stability and mobility, as well as calm and active. Sixth, these five special qualities rely on a structure that includes principles of repetition. Repetitive movement qualities help audiences appreciate and evoke the unique Korean sentiment, Shin-myung. All of these movement qualities are well orchestrated in between two opposing poles, such as harmony and chaos, regular and irregular, soft and stiff, strong and weak, curved and straight, and feminine and masculine, which eventually imply the special Korean cultural concept of Jeong Jung Dong and Dong Jung Jeong, which is based on Yin-Yang philosophy.

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.

Han Sung Jun has been recognized as an extraordinary figure who collected traditional Korean dances and laid a foundation for systematic transmission during the late Chosun Dynasty and Japanese colonial period. Due to his significance, there have been ample researches in the past. However, there seemed to be some rooms for re-examination within the cultural contexts. The purpose of this study was to re-examine Han Sung Jun’s dance works, more specifically his social awareness as well as his dance perspective. Archives of his direct interviews were utilized for this task. Han Sung Jun, as an artist who experienced both feudal and colonial times, considered his life as a ‘shame.’ Based on this notion, he maintained his cultural identity during the abrupt changing times from the West dignity and accepted his fateful mission on traditional dance. Han Sung Jun focused on the principles of dance with open mindedness and holistic thoughts. Han Sung Jun’s three major dance works, ‘Seung Mu’, ‘Tae Pyung Mu’, and ‘Salpuri Chum’, were analyzed for better understanding using historical sources and Han Sung Jun’s thought. ‘Seung Mu’ was not just a form of religious dance but the crux of traditional dance cementing several cultures and ideologies. ‘Tae Pyung Mu’ could be viewed not only a dance for peaceful time and strong reign, but a dance for just society where all people were treated equal and lived an harmonious community. Lastly, ‘Salpuri Chum’ had the most liberal form and reflected the dancer’s emotion and could be regarded as the dance form with open possibilities.