Jee-Ae Lim´s initial point of this project was to engage with both of her educational backgrounds, the traditional Korean and the contemporary European, deploying them at the same time on the same body. The aim was to have them appearing within and through one another, the body being source, tool, and matrix at the same time. One basic concept of this outline is that the body is always a conditioned one, shaped by education and everything the body has gone through, carrying the acquired codes and modes like an invisible backpack. Unlikely a backpack though, the content – positions, movements, characteristics inscribed in the body – will always diffuse into the current practice, it will always show, no matter what the overall concept would be. The body is a matrix not only for what is willingly performed but also an independent archive of what it absorbed through time.
It is an inevitable function, which is even more determining when the body has been conditioned by – at first site – such contradictory concepts of movement and of shaping the body as traditional Korean and contemporary European. Starting point for 10 Years in 1 Minute was that this is not just accidently happening as a byproduct, but it can be a tool for creation, it can be an explicit content, the central issue of creation and performance. Therefore Jee-Ae Lim´s work is more than just combining the better of two worlds: It is about making active use of an implicit situation and a fundamental mechanism.
10 Years in 1 Minute is a project about the body in time. Jee-Ae Lim shows a hybrid of past and present. But we are not just looking at a museum of an old culture, enhanced by a present form. We are shown a mutation, an evolutionary sidekick, a crack within the time-space-continuum.
In some languages – as in German – there is a future form, called “future II”. It allows us to project an elapsed past into the future, saying that something will have happened, or we will have experienced something, that is then over (past). In 10 years in 1 minute Jee-Ae Lim is doing a reversed version of this: She projects a possible future into a fictional past, to display our present. It turns out to be a scenario for a future dance without a clear determination, which future it shall be. It is not about any specific past 10 years in the one minute we are sitting here. It is simultaneously about many 10 years in any 1 minute.
In traditional Japanese theatre, the stage is considered a place where ghosts appear in front of our eyes – a place other than present, past, or elsewhere. The stage is a multiply folded place of manifold layers, variable times, and shifting references – a place where we can see and experience things that don´t have space for appearance elsewhere. If we think the stage to be a place for scenarios, not in the sense of stage design but in the sense of systems, schemes, sketches we project from a past or into a future, then there is not one space, in which we share the here and now, witnessing the performance. There are many spaces: one for the audience, one for the performance, and probably each dancer has an individual specific sphere as well. Then the performance is something like a wormhole, which allows us a glimpse into a possible future or past, or a fusion of both, creating a present or future form as one of a million possibilities rather than a prediction. This is what Jee-Ae Lim is making use of to show us an example for the infinite possibilities of a past, present, and future dance.
Concept and Choreography: Jee-Ae Lim. Creation and Performance: Neji Pijin, Sergiu Matis, Jee-Ae Lim. Sound: Kyan Bayani. Light: Shingyu Kang. Costume: Jee-Ae Lim. Dramaturgy: Matthias Quabbe, Seunghyo Lee.
This project is a Korea-Japan-Germany Co-production Trilogy. It starts in Germany and continues on to Busan and Tokyo. It is the 2nd project of the Korea-Germany-Japan collaboration trilogy. Festival Bom organizes the series, and LIG Arts Foundation produces it. Produced by LIG Arts Foundation and Organised by Festival Bo:m Trilogy Coproduction: K3|Tanzplan Hamburg, Festival/Tokyo, LIG Arts Foundation.
Premiere: 13.11.2014, Tokyo Festival