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Twirling, twirling towards Prospering Virtue!

Three cheers for dance-offs and mortality

B R

31 May 2023 — 3 min read

30 April, 2023 | Seoul, South Korea

After a long evening with a more than average quantity of drinking, I found a place that spoke to me to start the day.

The Palace of Prospering Virtue, or Changdeokgung, was conveniently located less than a ten minute walk from both my hotel and the palace I saw yesterday. As I walked up to it, I saw Louis on his way out. Paraphrasing our conversation:

Louis: “It was awesome. You have to see the show”

“What are you talking about?” I asked.

“They are doing some kind of thing with dancing,” he continues, “they only do it once a year here. I think they repeat the show one more time today”

I had already planned on doing the Secret Garden tour of Changdeokgung, and the show he described lined up nicely with it ending and that tour starting.

I was glad I took his advice and hoofed it over there, because this was a ton of fun to watch. A wild blend of traditional and new dance. It was a total of four acts.

The first was some youths doing their best Daft Punk video impression.

The next bit was beautiful, flowing fan dance called Buchaechum; a dancer named Kim Baek-bong, inspired by traditional music and dance in shamanistic rituals and imperial court entertainment, invented it in 1954.

Which is why it can easily incorporate more recent musical genres seemingly effortlessly:

The Republic of Korea has universal, compulsory male conscription.1 It’s unclear to me if these folks were active, but if you have the seventh largest standing army in the world you are going to have some good dancers and you should not let that talent go to waste. They do not:

The last part of the show was Pungmul, a type of dance/drum/singing performance with roots in collective farming culture (dure). In the video below, you can see the members of the troupe employing their entire bodies - legs and arms being used for dance and percussion, throats for singing, and their head/necks causing the sangmo ribbon-hats to swirl with the beat.

To be honest, after all that the Secret Garden tour was kinda just okay. I did not become less rude after befriending a maid/gardener/robin redbreast nor did I aid in the recovery of a crippled child and the redemption of their father. But there were some standout areas:

Apparently the ruler would fish from here, and jokingly banish people to the island for mock offenses. It’s all fun and games until the hereditary ruler inevitably pops out a inbred mutant son that does this for real.

Walking through this door is supposed to give you youth and/or extend your life. Honestly three cheers for human mortality - we have shitty enough leaders now, imagine having to live under some deformed Hapsburg monster or one of the dipshit purge-happy Joseon kings that ran Korea one minute longer than average.

I hit up the market from yesterday again, hoping it was better during the evenings (as suggested by some number of sources), but no - it was still kinda touristy and compared to some other places I have been, not as great?