Sin Cha Hong (; b. 1943) is a noted

modern dance Modern dance is a broad genre of western concert or theatrical dance which included dance styles such as ballet, folk, ethnic, religious, and social dancing; and primarily arose out of Europe and the United States in the late 19th and early 20th ...

choreographer Choreography is the art or practice of designing sequences of movements of physical bodies (or their depictions) in which motion or form or both are specified. ''Choreography'' may also refer to the design itself. A choreographer is one who cr ...

, vocalist, and writer from

South Korea South Korea, officially the Republic of Korea (ROK), is a country in East Asia, constituting the southern part of the Korea, Korean Peninsula and sharing a Korean Demilitarized Zone, land border with North Korea. Its western border is formed ...

. She is acknowledged as South Korea's first

avant-garde The avant-garde (; In 'advance guard' or ' vanguard', literally 'fore-guard') is a person or work that is experimental, radical, or unorthodox with respect to art, culture, or society.John Picchione, The New Avant-garde in Italy: Theoretical ...

dancer, and has been credited as that nation's premier

performance art Performance art is an artwork or art exhibition created through actions executed by the artist or other participants. It may be witnessed live or through documentation, spontaneously developed or written, and is traditionally presented to a pu ...

ist. She lived and worked in the United States from the late 1960s until 1990, founding the Laughing Stone Dance Company () in

New York City New York, often called New York City or NYC, is the List of United States cities by population, most populous city in the United States. With a 2020 population of 8,804,190 distributed over , New York City is also the L ...

in 1981. She returned to live in South Korea in 1990. She also spent some time in India, which affected her dance practice. She has collaborated with the ''

gayageum The ''gayageum'' or ''kayagum'' (in Korean 가야금, 伽倻琴 in Chinese characters) is a traditional Korean plucked zither with 12 strings, though some more recent variants have 18, 21 or 25 strings. It is probably the best known traditional K ...

'' player

Hwang Byungki Hwang Byungki (31 May 1936, in Seoul – 31 January 2018) was the foremost South Korean player of the gayageum, a 12-string zither with silk strings. He was also a composer and an authority on '' sanjo'', a form of traditional Korean instrumental ...

. She also studied

meditation Meditation is a practice in which an individual uses a technique – such as mindfulness, or focusing the mind on a particular object, thought, or activity – to train attention and awareness, and achieve a mentally clear and emotionally cal ...

for 30 years (which she first began doing in India), and is known as a meditation master. In a 2002 interview, she mentioned that modern dance is becoming more popular in Korea. She mentioned how she had not always been interested in traditional Korean music and dance, but had become so. She also explained how she got the concept of a "laughing stone," which is in the name of her dance company. While meditating, she realized that everything has a spirit, and even a stone can be laughing or crying.

References

External links

Sin Cha Hong page

Sin Cha Hong interview

Modern dancers South Korean female dancers South Korean choreographers 1943 births Living people {{dance-bio-stub