Friday, December 21, 2007

Click Here, KoPAS

Streaming

The next in the Click Here series of art activities in the centre of Gosford produced by Brown’s Cows Art Projects and Gosford Art Flux Forum.


Streaming consists of three art performances “in homage to the Common Stream” by members of the Korean group KoPAS, also performing at this years Woodford Folk Festival in Queensland.

River by Baek Ki Kim
Facing against the Wind by Yong Gu Shin
Le Duex by Jae Seon Moon

KoPAS, led by Baek Ki Kim, is one of the leading groups in Seoul, with up to 40 participating artists from all disciplines and art forms. The artists coming to Gosford for Streaming have all performed in many cities around the world. Some Gosford people might remember Yong Gu Shin’s installation and performances in the Dawn Light Symposium in 2005.

See KoPAS at:
Kibble Park in the heart of Gosford

Saturday, January 5th 2008
1.00 pm.

Buried beneath Kibble Park in the heart of Gosford are the old town wells and the streams that once sustained the aboriginal people and early European arrivals.

On this site in January 2008, Baek Ki Kim, Yong Gu Shin and Jae Seon Moon will perform works whose symbolic and metaphoric meaning resonate with hidden currents in the land beneath the streets of Gosford, and take fleeting shape in the invisible streams in the air.

These are performances in poetic form that express through the metaphors of flow and change, and the symbolic meanings of water and air; of the river and wind, our common hopes, needs, emotions and strength.

On the Commons, in the public domain, around the town well, lives merge, as streams become a river. A river of streams survives. Like the common stream, buried but still alive, and the flow of the breathing air, still free.

This project regards water, the natural world and creative culture as a trust in common, and is not sponsored by any global water bottling and fizzy drink corporation. As taxpayers we sponsor them.

Click Here is supported in part by a Cultural Grant from Gosford City Council.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

The genre of performance art in relation to the KoPAS dancers, as Neil describes as a “symbolic and metaphoric meaning to resonate with hidden currents in the land beneath the streets of Gosford, and take fleeting shape in the invisible streams in the air”, sounds lovely. However, I would hope that Brown’s Cow Art Project’s, receive an indigenous blessing at the beginning of these performances. Without sounding irrational, it is problematic for dancers to perform these ritual expressions without first considering the cultural mythology embedded within the land, water and air of the hosts/ indigenous belief systems. Carl Jung expressed the notion that land or continents have absorbed the energy, or vibrations from the history of its occupants. What is culturally symbolic within Korean dance, as universal may not be translated that way for other indigenous culture’s.

As a naïve BFA undergraduate, I experienced and witnessed foreign performances from shamanic, spiritual and environmental perspectives. I have since learnt how these practices can be quite offensive without understanding the nature of the site and its cultural significance.