Rosemary Bai

I went to a free event held at the Korean Cultural Center in Hong Kong on a Friday evening. The program aimed at giving audiences a taste of Korean traditional dancing, including court dance and folk dance.

While many of Korea’s traditional dances have been lost over time, some pieces are reconstructed to preserve their beauty in modern times.

The jewel of the performance was the Confucian ritual dance reconstructed by Professor Lim Hak-sung from Sungkyunkwan University. Confucian ritual dance now performed in Korea was passed on to the Koryo Dynasty of Korea from China (the Song Dynasty, 960-1279) in the 12th century and has been performed by Sungkyunkwan (now called Sungkyunkwan University) since then. It has two categories: Jongmyo shrine dance and Sungkyunkwan dance. Jongmyo is the supreme state shrine where the royal ancestral tablets of deceased kings and queens are enshrined. Jongmyo shrine dance is performed when sacrificial rites are held at the royal shrine.

Sungkyunkwan is the name of a place where Korea’s highest state college and Confucius Temple, which is smaller in scale and lower in rank than the Confucius Temple in China, were located.

Sungkyunkwan dance is further divided into two types: martial and non-martial dances. Korea preserved the martial Sungkyunkwan Dance after its original Chinese version vanished after the Song Dynasty in China. Professor Lim Haksung and another dancer first performed part of the non-martial Sungkyunkwan dance and then the martial one. One could tell the two types apart from the items they carried. They were both dressed in identical red robes and black boots, but each of them carried a flute-shaped music instrument and a ritual item with beautiful feathers for the non-martial dance and a pair of shields and axes made of painted wood for the martial dance. The movements of the martial dance were swifter than the non-martial one and showed more strength, while the non-martial dance followed a more elegant and slow pace.

Sungkyunkwan dance is still performed every spring and autumn at Sungkyunkwan University. Although Confucian ritual dance is also performed at several Confucian temples in China nowadays, this was my first time seeing it really performed on stage.