Min Yoon
(South Korea, United States)
With butoh dance and conflict studies, Min makes intimate, surreal, and psychosomatic dance performances and experimental moments to create moments of heightened relational emotions, permission for depths, and the emergent new. Min explores difficult truths that are beyond language through researching and dancing with a multiplicity of perspectives, unintentional movements within stillness and impulsive improvisation, and archetypes still with the intentions of a turning and new senses of beauty. Their dance collages intense imagery and physicality, stillness, and ritual.
Recent works switch between listening to their own body and the bodies of others. In dancing with violence, they researched the bodily memories of violence of another dancer to create an auditory theater piece that invites the listeners to move and embody the experiences poetically. In solo dance, they connect conflicts within the body to archetypes and collective experiences, such as the Joker archetype and feelings of remorse at the edge of revenge, and comfort women (forced prostitutes of the Japanese army) as an older archetype engaging with the #metoo movement. In their choreographic experiments, they question how bodies respond and move in groups, how we may find instinctual ways to move together beyond how our bodies were trained.