• (The) Research of the performance art and culture
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• no.20
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• pp.63-94
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• 2010

Research on Gong Ok-jin's choreography and its artistic value is still insufficient in the academia of Korea. Her life cannot be said even or smooth - she was born into an artist family with abundant innate talent and sensitivity, feeling joy and sorrow as a gypsy artist begging for food, facing and overcoming the crisis of her trademark deformed dance during the period when she played the solo performance of Changmugeuk, making a transition to the animal dance and finally to the sick dance getting her health back from the long struggle against disease. Her life, however, has always been an artistic expression and we can know that art has been the consolation and driving force of her life. In the Korean artistic tradition that integrates music, singing and dancing, it is beyond doubt that the third has been rather secondary compared with the first two. In the Changmugeuk, however, Gong Ok-jin focuses on each movement of hers, commensurate with the humorous witticism and the traditional opera of pansori. What is her message in such painstaking movements? She puts gestures ahead of words and continues them, reminding her audience of the meaning of dance and driving it into them. Especially, her deformed dance, unprecedented in choreographic history, is hard to understand if you do not sympathize with Koreans' innermost emotions. If you are to understand it, you should first feel what emotions are in Koreans' mentality to be expressed in the form of choreographic elements and what artistic values they carry. This study, in this context, is to reflect upon the original choreographic form of her Changmugeuk solo and to overview Korean dance's unique emotional values with regard to the way Korean choreographic subject matters and traditions are passed down.