DaEun Jung
(CA)
2024
- DaEun Jung is a Korean-born choreographer currently based in Los Angeles. She interlaces forms, principles, and methods of her ancestral and contemporary performance practices within her self-constructed system.
Jung’s work has been supported by New England Foundation for the Arts (NEFA), Jacob’s Pillow, Los Angeles Performance Practice (LAPP), Roy and Edna Disney CalArts Theater (REDCAT), Foundation for Contemporary Arts (FCA), Movement Research at Judson Church, Korea Foundation, and New Music USA. Her residencies include Headlands Center for the Arts, Maggie Allesee National Center for Choreography (MANCC), Loghaven Artist Residency, UCROSS, L.A. Dance Project (LADP), and Santa Monica Cultural Affairs at Camera Obscura. read more
In Korea, Jung toured Asia and Europe as a full-time dancer with the Gyeonggido Dance Company. Having six years of early conservatory training at the National Gugak School as a recipient of the National Theater of Korea Award, she completed a BA in dance and minor in Korean literature from Ewha Womans University. In the US, Jung holds her MFA in dance at UCLA where she was recognized as a Westfield Emerging Artist. She has taught at Santa Monica College, Loyola Marymount University, University of Nevada Reno, and Indiana University and currently is an assistant professor at UC Riverside.
NORRI (놀이)
Visiting Artist | January 9 – 20, 2024
Collaborators In Residence: Arletta Anderson, Tulsi Shah, Chantal Cherry, Jack Ironstone [Performers], Melody H. Shim, Daniel Corral [Musicians], Amanda Eno [Stage Manager], Ajani Brannum [Embedded Writer]
Visiting Artist DaEun Jung came to MANCC for the first time as a Lead Artist in a post-premiere residency to further develop her evening-length dance project, NORRI. Inspired by the principle, form and mode of Korean folk dance as a communal performance practice, NORRI, meaning “play” in Korean, creates an inclusive platform to experiment with collaborative pattern compositions while celebrating both collective accomplishments and individual grooves.
At MANCC, Jung, who performs in the piece along with her four other dancers, continued to refine NORRI, following its premiere in Los Angeles before they launch their tour at Kayenta (UT) in March 2024. While at MANCC, they continued their somatic practice rooted in the principle of classical Korean dance as a daily routine and hyper-structured improvisation on 16 gestural movements attuned to the individual dancers’ kinesthetic desires.
In addition to working with her dancers, Jung collaborated with Pansori singer Melody Shim and composer Daniel Corral. They experimented with an expanded range of spontaneous interplay between the dancers and musicians, which revives the mode of the ancient Korean folk performance scene, for different configurations of upcoming tour venues. They further explored the visual/scenic elements of NORRI, including Corral’s video counters that visualize dancers’ numeric sequence play while also working in the recording studio to record the dancers’ vocal parts and Melody’s Pansori singing. Ajani Brannum also joined the group as their Embedded Writer.
Jung and her dancers shared the practice and creation of NORRI to the FSU students, staff, MANCC and FSU community through an open showing towards the end of the residency. During her residency, Jung met with an Assistant Professor of Interdisciplinary Mathematics, Dr Malbor Asllani (PhD) at Florida State University. Their discussion focused on the synchronization and numeric systems that Jung built in the dance; Dr Malbor suggested improvisational ways to get the collective meeting points of the patterns and synchronizations for her further practice.
This residency marks the second time Jung and Pansori singer Melody Shim have been to MANCC. Previously, they were participant collaborators along with six other collaborative pairs in the 2019 MANCC Forward Dialogues, a 14-day immersive, early career artist laboratory designed to support and catalyse the ideas of emergent movement-based artists.
NORRI is being produced in partnership with Los Angeles Performance Practice (LAPP) and premiered as part of LAPP’s 2023 Live Arts Exchange (LAX) Festival. Its development has been made possible with support from the L.A. Dance Project LAUNCH: LA Artist Residency, New England Foundation for the Arts, Korea Foundation, and New Music USA.
MANCC commissioned NORRI: A Playbook, a 44-page color softbound book with photos from the residency and the Fall 2023 premiere as well as mathematical notations and Embedded Writer Ajani Brannum’s essay, Rules of the Game; Between Procedure and Play. NORRI: A Playbook was published in 2024.
Jung’s residency and the Embedded Writer Program was supported by the Mellon Foundation. Additional funds were provided by the Sustainable Arts Foundation, which allowed Jung to bring two collaborators who are parent artists.
