The Cheonan World Dance Festival

First off, I want to explain why this post is going to be a little different than my normal ones. In an effort to promote their event, the Cheonan World Dance Festival paid several foreign bloggers to attend the event and then write about their experience. That's why this post is going to be a little bit longer and a little bit heavier on the details than my normal ones. I want everyone to know, however, that the dance festival made no demand that my post portray the event in a positive light. I'm not selling out, this is not an advertisement for the event, and I'm going to be honest about everything. Alright, now that that's out of the way, let's do this.

Cheonan World Dance Festival

As my taxi pulls up to Samgeori Park, the location of the Cheonan World Dance Festival 2013, the driver, who somehow still didn't quite understand that I don't speak Korean even after I dropped 5 hanguko motaeyos ("I don't speak Korean") on him, says something that I assume is along the lines of "enjoy the festival!" Or maybe it was, "thanks for letting me rip you off by driving 10 blocks out of the way before I finally went to the park." I prefer to believe it was the former though.

I walk into the park and my first impression is how beautiful the setting is. Samgeori Park also appears to be a botanical garden with thousands of flowers, sculpted bushes, and a couple of little ponds. As I walk through an area of pink and yellow flowers, I can hear rock music blaring in the distance and am struck by the contrast. But the good kind of contrast, like finding out that that cute girl in the sundress likes to put Led Zeppelin on while she does her makeup. As the sun beams down on me, I walk over a hill and see the main stage. I'm so relieved to see that it's covered, as it's going to be my home for the next 6 hours and I forgot to bring sunblock. No sunburned gringo, er, waygook today!

Flower sculpture!

The main stage

I have about 40 minutes until the Traditional Folk Dance Competition begins so I decide to get a lay of the land. There's a football-field-sized tent located near the main stage so I decide to go inside and check it out. Holy cow, jack pot. The first thing I see are two enormous screens showing a soccer game with about 100 people seated below them watching. "Oh cool," I think, "people can come check up on their team." But wait a second, those soccer players aren't real... It's a video game! All of these people are watching two people battle it out on FIFA 2013. And there are even announcers commentating too! I look to my right and see a computer pit with about 50 teenagers and 20-somethings sitting in front of computers, all playing FIFA. There's another pit with people playing League of Legends. And 2 other pits with people playing other games. It turns out that Cheonan Dance Festival doubles as a qualifier for the National Electronic Games. An interesting coupling of the physical and the furthest-from-physical-as-possible. I was fascinated, to say the least, about the whole thing and was only able to pull myself away when I realized that the Folk Dance Competition was about to begin.

Koreans take their electronic gaming seriously

Complete with commentators

I go back to the main stage and take my seat just in time for the competition to begin. The Folk Dance Competition took place over 4 days and featured 24 teams from 20 different countries, including powerhouses like France, India, Mexico, Turkey and Indonesia, regional-hometown favorites like Korea, Japan, China, and Taiwan, and even a couple from completely unknown-to-me places like Bashkortostan and Buryatia (turns out they're both republics within Russia, however that works). On Saturday, the day that I attended, the 8 teams performing were: Poland, Korea, Malaysia, India, Buryatia, Japan, Taiwan, and Turkey. I'll save you a lengthy description of each performance, but suffice it to say that the whole thing was really cool. The dancers were great and it was interesting to see how the aspects of each culture came through in their style of dance. Korea and Japan were very disciplined with every dancer performing every movement perfectly in unison. Poland was pretty bland and boring. India was weird yet mesmerizing. Buryatia (in Russia, near Mongolia) appeared pissed off at their own existence. And Taiwan, I thought was China until I looked back at the program.

The Korean group moving in perfect unison

My personal favorite - The group from India

Buryatia, looking like they're about to invade and enslave the audience

Next on the program was the Talent Competition, but it didn't come on for another hour so I decided to meander around some more. In my meandering, I found what might have been my favorite part of the whole thing: a world culture section. It had museum-like exhibits from different regions of the world (which, by the way, featured Costa Rica reppin Latin America) as well as a food court with food and beverage from Russia, Turkey, Mexico, Kenya, India, France, and Ecuador. I was thrilled. I got myself a gyro from the Turkey stand and a bratwurst and a beer from the Germany stand and wandered around chowing down on my delicious multicultural meal.

When the lady working the exhibit saw me taking this picture she 

asked me, "Would you like to know a little about Costa Rica?"

In the US, 'talent show' usually means some singers, some dancers, a couple of magicians, and maybe a guy who can make his stomach look like Danny DeVito. In Korea, 'talent show' apparently means "let's all go up there and sing nothing but ballads like the love of our lives are in the audience and we have this one song to convince them to come back to us." This might have been enjoyable were I a 15 year old on a date with his 14 year old girlfriend, but, alas, I am not and I was not. The only real noteworthy part of the talent competition was the rapper who I got to watch warm-up, but, unfortunately, didn't get to see perform because I had to catch my train. During warm-up, he performed an English song but felt that it was sufficient to just spit random English words instead of actually learning the lyrics. One of his sequences went as follows: "now pick up the bush man, putting sugar on the leg, take it to the dog, and close the bus down." Now that I'm looking at the lyrics, maybe he's just really poetic, like a Korean Bob Dylan. Another thing I found interesting about the rapper was that, when he performed his Korean song, he used the honorific verb tense, used when speaking to an elder or superior. I didn't actually understand the lyrics but picked up on the 'nida', 'sida' 'nim' and 'seyo' of the honorific tense. In my mind, I imagined his lyrics went something like, "yo respectable girl, come over here and back that honorable booty up on this humble playa."

Looking past the terrible talent show that ended the night, the Cheonan World Dance Festival was, all in all, a really enjoyable event. By far the best thing it has going for it is its embrace of multiculturalism. In a country that has traditionally prided itself on being one of the most ethnically homogeneous countries in the world and has a reputation of hostility towards diversity, it's really cool to see a multicultural event thriving. As an RPCV, it's probably no surprise to you that I believe cultural exchange is important. In an increasingly globalized world, it's important that we understand cultural differences while also recognizing that behind the different clothes, food, and dancing styles, we're all still humans who have the same basic needs and desires. The Cheonan World Dance Festival is doing its part to facilitate that understanding and, for that, it should be given a standing ovation.