Unworking Movement / Migrating Bodies, 2025 (Choreography)
Choreography by Yon Natalie Mik
Conceptualized as part of a larger same-titled collaborative project with Choi Taeyoon
Commissioned by the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Seoul (MMCA)
Performed by Esl Kim, Sooyoung Park, Hyeontaek Oh, Daelan Yoon, Kwonkeum Ko, Yon Natalie Mik
Music Composer by Gregory Lenczycki and Christopher Davidson
Audio-Description by Yon Natalie Mik, Ko Kwonkeum
Photo documentation by MMCA
Unworking Movement / Migrating Bodies was a collaborative project with artist Choi Taeyoon, consisting of multiple works including a group live performance, a durational solo performance, notation drawings, and a video piece. The project explored the relationship between migration, labor, and movement. It examined the embodied knowledge of four individuals with different migration experiences, engaging with their memories and aspirations through the lens of eight key movements. These movements were used as a shared practice to cultivate empathy and care for lives different from our own.
During the choreographic process, I conducted kinetic interviews with each participant, learning and collecting their resting movements. These movements were treated as forms of lived information, a kind of embodied data that could be transmitted, reinterpreted, and transformed through another dancer’s body instead of a machine learning system. By placing these gestures in motion within a new corporeal context, the work allowed them to pass through differences in physique, rhythm, memory, and cultural background, emerging altered yet still resonant with their original histories. This method foregrounded the body as a site of relational processing, where information is not extracted or standardized but continuously reshaped through empathy, encounter, and the friction of translation.