From the 1950s to the year of 1978 before Korean Dance Festival was born, most of the creative works of dance were irrelevant to the society that it is difficult to classify certain performing works with social or historical issues. Meditation on huma...
From the 1950s to the year of 1978 before Korean Dance Festival was born, most of the creative works of dance were irrelevant to the society that it is difficult to classify certain performing works with social or historical issues. Meditation on human nature was a mainstream without any meaning of the times' situations more than a mere background. Eastern way of thought which tends to find out causes of value violation, anomie, and disorder from man's self rather than from the society or outer world exerted certain influences upon even the artistic spirits, and thus goals of creation were rather viased to mental tranquility than to objectification of the relation between man and society. From the division of this country, anti-Communist ideology given priority to nationalism began to form an environment suppressing individual's freedom of thought, and accordingly prevalence of red complex and nihilistic thinking generalized people's indifference to society. Since then, works of art mostly were self-scornful or sorrowful in which poetic contents were partly mixed with national emotions. Because the generation which experienced indiscriminate inflow of American pop culture through U.S. troops stationed in Korea had a somewhat negative understanding about the multitude, dance as a performing art was partial to artistry and almost had no concern for development of popular dance or pop culture, and consequently this made creative performing dances could not narrow the distance between them and the general public even after confronting the age of the masses born from the economical growth. Under the social atmosphere emphasizing the very Korean upon every ideological principles to maintain the dictator hip of that time, dances borrowed their motives from old stories or fairy tales bega to be made with very Korean colors, and this phenomenon brought out disputes upon the concept of very Korean. And since introduction of American-style educational system resulted in the generalization of Korean people's view of America as the center of the world, influence of American thinking upon academic field not to speak or artistic realm was almost one-sided, thus set up ambiguous classifications about ballet, Modern dance and Korean dance from which some available technics or principles of movement began to be applied to every kinds of work.