Two Unique Performances for Summer
By Seo Dong-shin
Staff Reporter
This summer, two ambitious ballet-based productions are set to hit the stage. Both performances are sure to arouse the interests of even those who are not completely attune to classical music.
Carl Orff's masterpiece, ``Carmina Burana,'' is making a comeback 12 years after its last performance here in Seoul.
The German composer created the piece during the 1930s. The well-rounded production was inspired by a medieval manuscript collection and includes various dance and stage settings, strung together by a delightful musical score. Unlike the original, today's modernized version of ``Carmina Burana'' is staged as a cantata piece in a concert hall.
On Aug 3-4 at the Aram Nuri Arts Complex in Goyang, Gyeonggi Province, however, it will dazzle audiences in full-fledged glory, as roughly 230 people from the Korea National Ballet, the National Chorus of Korea, Goyang City Choir and Mostly Philharmonic Orchestra are geared to participate in the staging.
Until now, opera and ballet fans had to content themselves with snippets from the famous production, such as the grand choir song ``O Fortuna'' or the solo ballet act in ``The Song of the Roasted Swan'' at a select few special gala occasions. ``O Fortuna'' features the grandiose, bombastic choir melody, which almost everyone will surely remember hearing from a TV commercial, as it has been widely adapted into pop culture.
So this will be a rare opportunity to experience the production in full. For more exquisite rendering of the piece, which is centered on a grand wheel of fortune, always turning and symbolizing the fickleness of luck, a huge wheel from Les Grand Ballet in Canada will appear on stage.
Tickets range from 10,000 won to 100,000 won. For more information, visit www.artgy.or.kr.
``Shim Chung'' is also a unique production combining classical ballet and commercial musical. Ambitiously prepared by the Universal Ballet and CJ Entertainment, the production is based on the Universal Ballet's popular annual repertoire ``Shim Chung,'' originally a ballet piece based on a Korean folk tale.
Yang Jung-ung, director of the Yonhangza Theater Company whose Korean-cast production of Shakespeare's ``A Midsummer Night's Dream'' was invited to the Edinburgh Festival Fringe in 2005 and to the Barbican Center in London last year, took the director's job for the new fusion. In the ballet musical version, theatrical miming will be added to classical ballet movements of the dancers to intensify the story telling.
If ballet ``Shim Chung'' was a fusion of the East and the West using the Western expression of ballet to express sentiment in the Korean folk tale of a blind man's daughter, Shim Chung, then this ballet musical puts another spin on the story by mixing in the modern with the traditional.
Characters are infused with contemporariness. Here the piece begins with a father reading the story of Shim Chung to his blind daughter. It is a twist on the original tale of the girl sacrificing herself to open her blind father's eyes.
Costumes specially designed for ballet musical ``Shim Chung'' will fascinate the eyes as ballet tutus evolved here with a touch of hanbok, traditional Korean clothes, adapted in colors and small details.
It will hit the stage at the Universal Arts Center from Aug. 16-26. Tickets range from 30,000 won to 70,000 won. For more information, visit www.ubcballet.com.