Choreographic Residency 2025 - Soo-hyun Hwang

Footnote are honoured to welcome Korean choreographer Soo-hyun Hwang to New Zealand to work with the company this April.

Photo: KNCDC

Soo-hyun Hwang is a choreographer based in Seoul, South Korea. She transitioned from a career as a professional dancer to a choreographer and has explored the realm of choreography by re-examining the norms inherent in dance performance. From the beginning of her work, she has been questioning, ‘Why and how should dance performances exist as contemporary art? And what can a dance performance do?’ Focusing on these questions, she has presented critical and political possibilities for the creation and appreciation of dance performances through the trained body of a dancer. She focuses on the ‘imbalance of sensations’ that resist becoming dulled or absorbed by the relationship dynamics, drawing attention to those perceptions and leading them into unfamiliar sensory territories in her work. Specifically, she questions the way in which the sensory experience of the dancing body often remains confined to a singular visual perception. To counter this, she creates choreography that restricts or dismantles habitual ways of seeing, inviting the audience to imagine and sense what lies beyond the visible.

Her work uses the dancer’s voice, vibration, and fine muscles as the main materials, and creates kinesthetic effects through sensory transfer where subtle changes in the body are transmitted to the audience. Through this, dance performance goes beyond its artistic role and reveals its function as a social practice in that it is not simply an art to be seen, but can create a sensory community that arises when bodies meet. She believes in the potential to understand and speculate the world in various perspectives through the unfamiliar sensory experience from a dance performance, and has continued working with an experimental and exploratory manner.

Her major works include Cavea and Zzz (2023), Ummmm (2020), I Sense of What They Feel, and Sense of Darkness (2019). Sense of Darkness received the Best Work Award from the Korean Dance Critics Association in 2019 and garnered significant attention, along with a commendation from the Minister of Culture, Sports, and Tourism in the same year. Ummmm, presented in 2020, earned her the 27th Dance Arts Award for Choreography and was highly acclaimed both critically and artistically within the Korean dance scene.

Her work with Footnote

This workshop is based on the artistic methodologies developed by choreographer Soo-hyun Hwang, and centres around the theme of sensing and revealing the invisibles. Soo-Hyun questions the vision-centred audience experience of the dance performance.

Through her work, she brings attention to unseen sensory elements — such as vocal vibrations, micro movements of the muscles, and the energetic exchanges between bodies — as material for performance. This workshop shares her choreographic approaches and enables one to directly experience how these methods operate through the body.

Participants will engage in a range of physical and sensory explorations that increase perceptual resolution and open up new channels beyond familiar sensory circuits. Through precise muscular engagement activated by breath, vocal vibration work, and exercises that cultivate awareness of energy flow between individuals, participants will investigate how their own bodies connect to and resonate with others.

This is not simply movement training; it is an invitation to expand one’s sensory boundaries and discover new forms of somatic responsiveness. By tuning into unfamiliar sensations and attending to subtle, invisible flows, the workshop becomes a space of inquiry for anyone interested in embodied thinking and sensory-based creation.