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The audience of the Cultural Centre’s Studio Theatre will be put into a compromising position this fortnight, as Kisaeng Becomes You begins its two-night run. The multimedia dance performance – an edgy highlight of the New Vision Arts Festival – is a contemporary take on the poetry of Korean kisaeng, or courtesans, and during the show selected audience members will be invited onto stage to perform themselves.

This cutting edge performance has emerged from the Bessie-award winning American choreographer Dean Morris and his collaborator, Korean modern dance icon Kim Yoon-jin. Speaking over the phone from Seoul where Morris is readying himself for the world premiere of the show, he explains that the idea was born at the famed St Mark’s Bookstore in New York City.

“I was looking for inspiration,” he reveals. He stumbled across a copy of Hwang Jini & Other Courtesan Poets from the Last Korean Dynasty translated by Wolhee Choe, and was struck by how he related to their ancient poetic musings. “I started reading these poems and felt like oh, this is me. The translation was really good in a contemporary way, and it really attracted me to modern ideas of love, of people passing through your lives, how to reconcile the sense of pain.”

The kisaeng first emerged in Korea’s Joseon dynasty (1400-1900), when low-class female entertainers and dancers were employed by the state to entertain men – becoming highly trained artists and performers in the process. Morris says it wasn’t just the universal themes of love lost that attracted him; there were subtle similarities between his own 21^st century existence: “The idea of gaining in social stature, of having access to social immunities, because you have trained your life in the arts, I know that feeling being a black American of an age where I participated in the civil rights movement as a child. I had this background; I was looking at these poems from women who were basically enslaved to the state. And I had this feeling of love and desire for someone, and those people would leave, and you would have to reconcile that and be with the next guest… and the idea of training, which of course dancers go through.”

He pitched the idea of a contemporary work based on the poetry of the kisaeng to Kim Yoon-jin. “She was very sceptical at first,” he admits. “She wanted to make sure I wasn’t another Westerner involved in some kind of romantic orientalism.” However, Kisaeng Becomes You couldn’t be any further from that stereotype. Melding dance with video, poetry and the original experimental music of Okkyung Lee, the multimedia show features a cast of five, female Korean dancers. They are set in a ‘lab’ to replicate a kisaeng’s room, and the dancers control video art – including excerpts of interviews with men – while the people who play the role of the kisaeng are the audience members themselves.

“The piece really stresses sincerity within it, and it looks to involve the audience and share the audience in the emotional turmoil of the poems,” says Morris slowly… adding that there are more surprises, so he doesn’t want to reveal too much. He does explain, however, that the dancers invite audience members during the show to get on stage. “The dancers don’t become the kisaeng, it’s really the audience who becomes that role, and we get to share with the audience that precarious position.” Clare Morin