Darkness Pumba

Darkness Poomba by Kim Jae Duk
Two male dancers ignite Darkness Poomba with a duet performed under severe top-light. A fast and furious exchange of angularly choreographed movement, hands mechanically grasping for each other’s faces, and bodies regimented in a forward facing stance. Creating the illusion of a robotic pair of Siamese twins, the two young men are a fashionable modern day fruition of an ancient cog-like machine. Five dancers clad in chic black clothing sharply enter from the peripheries to join the machine and expand upon the gothic energy that has been created .... Not one sense is privileged over the other in this haunting re-contextualization of the traditional South Korean melody of Poomba. A truly interdisciplinary and multi-layered work, audience members are taken on a strange and unexpected voyage through the realms of contemporary dance, traditional song, stadium rock, and festival reggae music. Although such a journey may sound schizophrenic and disjunctive in nature, this collage of contexts and performance genres is executed seamlessly. Darkness Poomba is a work that manages to constantly transform our environment before we have even noticed, each world almost functioning as a sinister critique of the one that has come before._Cat Ruka