Dance and Music Reviews : ‘Gok-IV,’ Performance Art at Wallenboyd

Early in the Korean-American performance-art ceremony “Gok-IV” (Friday at the Wallenboyd Theater), Hye Sook Park mourned over the lifeless body of In Young Kim. Gradually, her visceral screams of anguish grew more songlike in rhythm and tone, absorbed into something greater than individual pain.

In this moment, personal experience became distilled in communal ritual--wailing as an ancient cultural heritage--just as later, when Park tore cloth into strips, tied them together and hurled the free ends across Kim’s body, her movements reinvented key elements of classic Korean sleeve-dances.

In these moments, traditional forms of Korean folk-performance gave a timeless, archetypal context to an extended lament for the death of the Earth following nuclear war.

Elsewhere, however, this one-act presentation by Theater 1981 suffered from soggy poeticizing (text by Ja Kyong Rhee) and the use of grisly slide projections (war victims, mostly) that seemed to impose a specific political agenda on what, until then, had seemed a universal anti-war statement.

Nor did Ik Tae Rhee’s direction camouflage the weaknesses of concept or casting. For all Min Jung Kang’s fine physical and vocal control, the role of Raven (symbol of destruction) proved unimaginative and tiresome: a shrieking, wing-flapping charade lacking the stature such figures attain in many types of Asian dance theater.

Park was indeed a wonder in her unsparing role as chief mourner, Mother Earth, but Gee Won Kim gave a listless, perfunctory performance as Daughter Moon: mostly a secondary voice in the formal wailing-songs and Park’s acolyte in the piece’s many quasi-shamanistic movement rites.

And why the glamour makeup for these agonized planetary deities? “Mother, the water is dried out,” they cried at one point. The water maybe, but obviously not the lipstick or mascara.