Editor’s Note
This review highlights two performances from the Seoul debut of the ‘Dance Reflections by Van Cleef & Arpels Festival,’ part of the jewelry maison’s global initiative to support contemporary dance. The festival ran in the South Korean capital from October 16 to November 8, 2025.
The French high jewelry maison Van Cleef & Arpels’ patronage program for modern/contemporary dance, ‘Dance Reflections,’ has been fostering the art form globally. As part of this initiative, the ‘Dance Reflections by Van Cleef & Arpels Festival,’ previously held in London, Hong Kong, New York, and Kyoto/Saitama, made its debut in Seoul, South Korea, from October 16 to November 8, 2025. Dance critic Sae Okami reviews two works from this festival.
As the festival enters its fifth year, Serge Laurent, the maison’s Dance & Culture Program Director, reflected on its mission ahead of its first Korean edition.
‘1 Degree Celsius’ is a work by Korea-based choreographer Ho Sung-im. While responses to global issues are active in contemporary dance—with French choreographer Rachid Ouramdane’s ‘Sfumato’ (2012) using footage of climate refugees, and Akram Khan’s ‘Jungle Book’ (staged in Japan in 2025) belonging to this lineage—Ho’s approach is more suggestive.
Ho states that an awareness of climate change underlies ‘1 Degree Celsius,’ but her narrative is more implicit. Using neither sets nor video, the theme is connected only through abstract sound and lighting created from processed temperature data. The choreography also does not explicitly convey emotion or story. This very quality highlights the dancers’ physicality, amplifying the poignant impression of the physical movements.
At the beginning, Ho crawls onto the dark stage, twisting her torso and moving the joints of her protruding limbs awkwardly, meticulously presenting an eerie body reminiscent of a Francis Bacon painting. As the stage brightness increases, six male and female dancers appear, repeating a mechanical march from stage left to right and back, but the formation gradually disintegrates. Some collapse like shocked trees, others tremble like beasts, or bounce their bodies vigorously. Multiple dances emerge and resonate in different spaces. The six dancers capture minute counts, use one-legged pirouettes as cues to adjust timing, and dance orderly chaos. The contrast with Ho’s monstrous solo, which reappears mid-piece, is striking. Diverse dances intersect within the closed stage space, shaking the audience’s own bodily senses. Effectively using stimulating movements reminiscent of the Belgian style of the 2000s where Ho built her career (she was a dancer in Jan Fabre’s ‘When the Man in the Lead is a Woman’) and street dance vocabulary, the dance conjured a sense of crisis here and now.
