[News Culture] As artificial intelligence and immersive technology reshape both daily life and artistic practice, a new festival in Pyeongchang is asking a deceptively simple question: What can the human body still tell us that technology cannot?
Art Platform Re;Motion will launch the inaugural Pyeongchang Performing Arts Festival from Aug. 12 to 15 at the Alpensia Concert Hall and the Convention Center Auditorium in Pyeongchang, Gangwon Province. Dance anchors the program, but the festival stretches well beyond a conventional stage lineup, bringing together live performance, dance film, digital media and art-and-technology projects.
Its first theme, “Re;Manity,” combines “re-” with “humanity.” The accompanying slogan, “Art Reawakens Humanity,” captures the festival’s broader ambition: to use movement and physical presence as a way of restoring attention, empathy and connection in an increasingly automated world.
Technology is not treated as the enemy. Nor is it presented as spectacle for its own sake. The festival instead places the body at the center of the conversation, asking how physical sensation, memory and human presence might coexist with rapidly expanding digital systems.
The main-stage program spans contemporary dance, Korean traditional dance, ballet, jazz dance and hip-hop. The lineup includes Su-jung Kim’s Simcha, Jeong-yeon Lee’s Soom; Exhilaration, Jun-hyuk Kim’s The Sound of Rain Stepping on an Umbrella Vol. 2, Wise Ballet Theater’s Le Corsaire Grand Pas de Trois, Yun-seon Seong’s Gyobang Gutgeori Dance and Noraetgarak Janggo Dance, Mongsikmac’s Makes Me Forget, Maxxcut’s Unleash and Ga-won Yoo’s Piece of Wrong.
The range is deliberate. Rather than smoothing out the differences between genres, the festival places them in direct conversation, allowing audiences to see how each tradition trains, disciplines and releases the body in a different way.
Kim, a rehearsal director with Israel’s Kibbutz Contemporary Dance Company, will open the festival with Simcha. The Hebrew title means “joy,” but the work is less a celebration than an eruption. Twelve dancers move between collective force and individual fracture, with momentum repeatedly cut by sudden stillness. The choreography turns emotional release into something physical and immediate.
Seong’s Gyobang Gutgeori Dance draws from the dance lineage of the Jinju gisaeng schools. Its appeal lies in control rather than display: the angle of the hand holding the small drum, the length of time a heel remains grounded and the performer’s ability to ride the open spaces within the rhythm. The work demands restraint, allowing elegance and pleasure to surface from within the movement.
Yoo’s Piece of Wrong takes aim at the pressure to conform. Performed by a trio, the piece treats difference not as a defect but as its central choreographic material. The dancers absorb one another’s weight, pull away and push back, using imbalance and misalignment to question who gets to define a “correct” body.
Wise Ballet Theater’s Le Corsaire Grand Pas de Trois offers the evening’s most concentrated display of classical technique. Jumps, controlled landings, pointe work and formal line are compressed into a short, demanding sequence. Set alongside Korean dance, contemporary work and hip-hop, the piece makes the physical logic of ballet newly visible.
Lee’s Soom; Exhilaration closes the program by turning breath into movement. Inhalation and exhalation travel through the dancers’ torsos in visible waves, while the sound of breathing becomes part of the score. The work gives the audience access to the body not as an image, but as a living system under pressure.
The Aug. 15 program opens with Seong’s Noraetgarak Janggo Dance, a duet shaped by Gyeonggi folk melodies and traditional breath. The arc of the drumsticks, the shifting weight of the janggu at the waist and the pull between rhythm and balance give the work its layered texture.
Kim’s The Sound of Rain Stepping on an Umbrella Vol. 2 blends African-derived steps with contemporary dance pathways. Friction between the feet and the floor drives the piece, while the pelvis absorbs and redirects the beat. The result is both percussive and fluid.
Mongsikmac’s Makes Me Forget draws on jazz dance’s quick response to rhythm, turning everyday fatigue into momentum. Maxxcut closes the festival with Unleash, a hip-hop work built on sharp attack, group acceleration and the release of pent-up energy. Here, freedom is not simply a theme but the structure of the performance itself.
The festival’s dance-film program moves those questions beyond the theater.
Kim Media Move’s Space records buildings in communities facing decline or disappearance. The body becomes a measuring tool, registering the scale of a wall, the texture of a surface and the accumulated weight of time.
Ground Zero Project’s St. Ranger rejects conventional ideas of beauty through bodies that are deliberately awkward, resistant and difficult to categorize. The camera does not soften what it sees. Instead, it stays close, forcing viewers to confront forms that mainstream visual culture often excludes.
Lucid Dream in Metaverse, created with the Lee Jeong-yeon Dance Project, connects live performance and a virtual environment in real time. The dancers’ movements trigger digital imagery, while audience choices influence the direction of the work. The piece replaces the fixed relationship between performer and spectator with something more unstable and participatory.
Lee, a professor of dance at Yong In University and head of Art Platform Re;Motion, serves as the festival’s artistic director. Since 2016, her work has focused on the changing status of the body in virtual space, technology-driven performance and the age of artificial intelligence.
The Pyeongchang festival expands those questions into a regional project, using the area’s landscape and infrastructure as part of the artistic experience.
“Our aim is to make art a platform that connects a place, its people and the era they are living through,” Lee said. “Beginning with ‘Re;Manity,’ the festival will address a different contemporary issue each year and grow into an international performing arts brand associated with Pyeongchang.”
Art Platform Re;Motion was founded on the idea that movement can restore feeling, attention and human connection. Its work takes dance beyond the theater through film, technological collaboration and regional exchange, with a particular emphasis on experiences audiences can register through their own bodies.
Pyeongchang was chosen for its combination of natural surroundings, Olympic infrastructure and tourism facilities. The long-term plan is to create a festival where artists and audiences remain in the area for several days, allowing performance, travel and local engagement to become part of the same experience.
“Re;Manity” will be followed by “Re;Nature” in 2027 and “Re;Connect” in 2028. By repurposing Olympic-era venues as spaces for artistic creation and exchange, the organizers hope to establish Pyeongchang as a year-round cultural base rather than a temporary festival destination.
Reported by News Culture M.J._mj94070777@nc.press
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