Reviews

Matters of Life and Death and What May Come of Them (The New York Times, November 27, 1996)
In a Cafe, a New Inspiration For Every Rainbow Color (The New York Times, October 27, 1997)
Wondrous Creatures Wander IN Small Enigmatic Worlds (The New York Times, December 7, 1998)
A Korean Choreographer Paints a Rainbow of Original Colors 1997 (ATTITUDE, Winter 1997/98)
The Yard Offers Its First Residency Premieres (The Martha's Vineyard Times)
Acquiring Grace, Beauty, and Wit by The Yard (Island Arts & Entertainment, May 26, 1994)
The Yard (Island Arts & Entertainment, June 1, 1995)
Dancing Is Like flying and Eun Me Ahn is a Very High Flyer (Island Arts and Entertainment, August 8, 1996)
From Baseball to Cataclysmic Century's End, It Is ....by The Yard (Island Arts & Entertainment, July 31, 1997)
Call Waiting (The Village Voice, December 12, 1995)
Elegant Tombs (The Village Voice, December 10, 1996)
Horn of Plenty, Sucked Up Into a Kiss (The Village Voice, November 11, 1997)
M Madness in May (The Village Voice, May 26, 1998)
Eun Me Ahn Dance (The Village Voice, November 9,1999)
The Best Dances of 1996 (Lesbian Gay New York, February 17, 1997)
Eun Me Ahn does let go (DANCE MAGAZINE, March, 1997)
Dictatorial eye (INDEPENDENT Weekly, November 17, 1999)
10 Stories Moon (RECESS November 5, 1999)
Subtle Motion (The Triangle's Arts & Entertainment Newsweekly, November 3, 1999)
Revolving Door (The Dance Insider, October 24, 1999)
Perpetual Motion (KOREAM Journal, March, 1999)

The New York Times, Wednesday, November 27, 1996
Matters of Life and Death and What May Come of Them
by Jack Anderson

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The New York Times, Monday, October 27, 1997
In a Cafe, a New Inspiration For Every Rainbow Color
by Jennifer Dunning

"Rainbow Cafe," a new piece by Eun Me Ahn, a young Korean-born avant-garde dancer and choreographer now based in New York City, started off promisingly on Saturday night at Dance Theater Workshop with some charming antics by a tiny, pregnant young Minnie Mouse look-alike dressed in re. She was followed by a woman with a shaved head and re rights and skirtlike fringe, her bare chest painted red, a hammer in each hand and a red plastic spoon in her mouth, who took over the stage with an impudent solo danced within a ring of red lights.
Could this be the answer of the Koreans, bless their hearts, to the sacrosanct Japanese art of Butoh? Sadly, Ms. Ahn lost steam about halfway through the long solo. and that flagging dance invention was a problem for the hourlong theatrical event.
Bold, lush visual images fill "Rainbow Cafe," whose seven sections are each bathed in a different rainbow color. A semi-comatose lounge singer warbles in a tangerine satin suit. There are cants of "Dog is dog," choruses of dancing amoebas, orange-juice quaffers and mysterious mermaids and mermen. Green balloon-balls get hurled, littering the stage like giant limes before they are raked up by Ms. Ahn and ;itched into the audience. Small birthday cakes arrive on shovels. A woman in a cage tosses, sleeps and moans throughout, holding a flashing red plush heart.
But the dance and connective material looked as if it had just bobbed up during improvisations. "Rainbow Cafe" at times looks like a love slide show. The cast included Nikki S. Lee, Ted Johnson, Michael Foley, Krista Miller, Tricia Brouk, Hye Jeung Chung, Soo Kyoung Jung and Hyoung Joo Lee, who also designed the set. The music way by Woody Pak and Woody's Groove Thang. The imaginative costumes were by Ms. Ahn.

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The New York Times, Monday, December 7, 1998
Wondrous Creatures Wander IN Small Enigmatic Worlds
by Jennifer Dunning

"starry night" Joyce SoHo

It is a given in New York avant-garde dance that work by Eun Me Ahn will spill over with brilliant visual imagination and wit. But one is never quite prepared for the magic wrought by Ms. Ahn, the South Korean modern-dance choreographer.
Take her new "starry night," which opened on Thursday night for a four-day run at the Joyce SoHo. With the aid of flashlights, plant caddies, flounced white underskirts and long-haired wigs and stretch and plastic fabrics, Ms. Ahn and her seven wryly deadpan dancers created small, sleek worlds inhabited by strange, often very funny creatures.
First came a tableau involving four space aliens in gleaming tangerine body stockings and tow men dressed only in impudently tasseled codpieces. Next came one and then another quizzical creature dressed in black, tow ambulatory apostrophes looking for mates and joined, eventually, in a tentative encounter with a huge gray ball.
Spiderlike figures skidded and spun on their stomachs, flashing green into the darkness from lights on their heads. Two tea-cozy women glided near and apart as if in some mute and melancholy conversation. Two shy brides, one a tender man and the other an impassive woman, engaged, in delicate courtship. Ms. Ahn was a white-painted, bare-breasted goddess, her unreadable face like a map of the world.
Ms. Ahn's dancers, all dft physical mimes, were Brian Brooks, Tricia Brouk, Eun Jung Choi, Mark Haim, Youn Hui Jeon, Ted Johnson and Krista Miller. Four musicians, three of them in white long johns, added considerably to the atmosphere and texture of "starry night" in a slyly witty score composed by Tom fm Chiu for violin (Mr. Chiu), accordion (Ted Reichman), cello (Jonas Tauber) and electric guitar (Brannon Hungness). The set and costume design was by Hyeong Joo Lee. The wondrous lighting - was by Chad MaArver.

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ATTITUDE Winter 1997/98 Vo. 13, No. 1
A Korean Choreographer Paints a Rainbow of Original Colors 1997
bY G. Lipton

October 24, 1997- Eun Me Ahn's Rainbow Cafe, which showed this weekend (October 23-26) at Dance Theater Workshop, is structured on the colors of the rainbow. The seven color sections of the evening's length piece succeed one another just as colors of a conventional rainbow do: red, then orange, then yellow and so on. However, interlaced in this predictable structure are surreal images of perverted childhood symbols, adulterated in vogue fashion styles and hybridized dance forms - all are variations on familiar themes. Yet, Eun Me Ahn manages to contort these images with dream-like inflections and though often visually magical, they are sometimes only confusing.
A carrousel horse on either side of the stage, a coin operated pony ride and a large bird cage inhabited by a dancer with a bandaged arm and a large flickering electric heart are the permanent set design making up the cafe's interior. Rainbow Cafe is a night club of sorts where the stage is grounds for exploring basic human traits. The first act at the cafe was a solo for Eun Me Ahn who gyrated to the abrasive heavy metal sound of an electric guitar, with a hammer in each hand, a red heart painted on her bare chest, and garbed in a hula skirt made from shiny red plastic ware. Eun Me Ahn's gestures oscillated between a pantomime of an ape-like beating of her chest with hammers and a sensual twirling of them. At moments she was angry and explosive and at others tender and vulnerable.
The yellow act at the Rainbow Cafe was the most upbeat and comical. Dancers in brilliant yellow unitards, that extended from head to toes, mumbled to one another 'dog is dog". A motto perhaps suggesting that human beings too are just animals. Eun Me Ahn employs clever evolving anomalistic images to exaggerate, ad absurdum, the agitation that stems from frustrated sensual needs. Dancers who sniffed each other like dogs became runners panting from thirst and were stupidly giddy once satiated. Suddenly, they ravenously exchanged kissed with one another grunting as though relishing a succulent meal.
Next green balls, which appeared like weightless watermelons flooded the stage floor, transforming it into a children's romper room. Ahn appeared and began tossing the balls out to the audience. But as this playful toss accelerated, Ahn hurled the balls almost violently. A casual game of catch turned competitive and vicious.
By the last section, the tempo of the dance slowed to a dream-like pace almost like that of a carousel. Dancers in purple fringed bikinis, fish net stockings and turquoise wigs of mod hair styles sauntered on stage swaying their hips to funky sounds of the bass guitar. Once seated, they slowly lit birthday cakes. Ahn entered in a fuchsia party dress only to have the other dancers batter her with cake. On her completely shaven head, a dancer placed a snow ball of frosting in which she poked a lit candle. Covered in cake, Ahn is surrounded by dancers configured now like the horses on the circumference of a carousel. The circle of dancers with Eun Me Ahn at the center, slowly rotated, almost nostalgically and seemed that it would never shop.
While Eun Me Ahn's Rainbow Cafe is entertaining in its satiric, tender and magical bend it lacks the connective tissue that would give it necessary clarity. It seemed that Eun Me Ahn, and therefore her audience, got lost in the complex layering of floating images.

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The Martha's Vineyard Times
The Yard Offers Its First Residency Premieres
by Wendy Arnell Brophy

Ms. Ahn, who moves her body in ways most of us cannot even conceive of, cheerfully weaved and bobbed, rolled and jumped through the telling of her family life; until she got to the balloon marked "Clara." No smily face existed on the balloon, no happy depiction of a father working or a mother cradling a child; caution, gentleness, awe, and distance came when Ms. Ahn drew near Clara.

Much laughter greeted Eun Me Ahn's choreographic endeavors, "Moon." Russell Aubrey, decked out with a housecoat, white wig, and a groom, and Ian Butler with black wig, red sleazy dress, and pocketbook, set a mood of light-heartedness which was soon to disappear into the sounds of violence, sirens, and a flashing red light.

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Island Arts & Entertainment May 26 - June 1, 1994
Acquiring Grace, Beauty, and Wit by The Yard
The two dancers seemed to be undergoing a process of self-discovery....
by Annette Sandrock

The third dance, "White Tomb," choreographed and performed by Eun Me Ahn, was extraordinarily original. The dancer began completely concealed under a full skirt. A series of movements slowly gives birth to a woman, who emerges through alternating wild disjointed gestures and frightened screams. Wild gyrations and cries eventually gave way to loose, more flowing movements as the dance developed. Punctuations of strains of "Unchained Melody," silence, and live vocal sounds by the dancer herself underscored the action, as did the appearance of her shaved head and painted white breasts. Her unabashed movements further enhanced this surprising experience.

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Island Arts & Entertainment June 1 - June 7, 1995
The Yard
by Wendy Arnell Brophy

The Yard opened its 1995 season this past weekend with works by artists in residence Eun Me Ahn, Russel Aubrey, Laurie Fields, Heather Harrington, Leajato Robinson, Robin Shevitz, and Sandra Stone.

Eun Me Ahn has been at The Yard on several occasions; each time is a new and exciting experience. She comes to the stage with a long history of accomplishments, including an MFA in dance from NYU, but in "White Moon." choreographed and performed by Ms. Ahn. her skill as a performance artist is all pervasive.
So powerful is her ability to sit motionless that not a sound could be heard anywhere in the house, except for the chanting of Elijah's Mantle and Tamla., the musical accompaniment for the piece.
Seated on her haunches, center stage, in a voluminous white skirt puffed up around her, she cradles an infant in her arms. Moving her head ever so slightly, Ms. Ahn begins to rock the child and to gradually move her torso from side to side, never leaving the kneeling position at center stage.
As the motions of body, head, and arms grow, the "infant" begins to seep from the folds of her skirt. spilling flour in an arc onto the floor in front of her. She dives into the pile of flour, dispersing it, extending her arts out to the sides and gathering in the soft whiteness; she creates symmetrical Rorschach designs on the black floor by drawing her hands in toward her body.
Ms. Ahn pulls you in, holds you enraptured, and releases you with the exultation of a single breath. Her performance was minimalist in movement, spiritual, and a superb piece of art.

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Island Arts and Entertainment, August 8, 1996
Dancing Is Like flying and Eun Me Ahn is a Very High Flyer
by Wnedy Arnell Brophy

Most professional dancers believe they have a gift for dance, otherwise it would be many years of extraordinarily strenuous hard work for naught and their dreams would go unrequited.
After watching Eun Me Ahn perform at The Yard over the past two summers and again this year, I have found a woman who has the gift; a gift which is so great that to see her on stage is to be riveted to her every movement no matter how minimalist or how bold.
"I get a feeling that his interesting job comes from my God. It is no just from my personal life."
" I remember when I was five I saw people walking on the street in traditional Korean costume, dance costume, and I knew, 'yes, that's what I really want.'"
" I went home and said, 'mommy, mommy I saw something which I really want to do,' And she said to me 'what is that:' she was washing dishes so she put down the dishes, stopped everything and changed her costume and she just followed me. We went to a second floor studio, but I didn't know what it was called then, where they were practicing and we were watching dancing. Ah, it was so beautiful."
"So, after the big accident (seeing the dancers) boom. I just keep in y mind that's really what I want. that would be my life."
Eun Me also likes to act" her choreography is story based and most of all she loves an audience. There are those who cringe at getting out on the stage, but not Eun Me. " When I was a little girl I would gather the village people, not just my father, and I would sing and dance like a princess, like Cinderella-I really liked that. That was my fate, life's fate. I was an entertainer; it was like a crown. it was especially good when I stand up in front of many people, not just two or three. Many, many people makes me very happy."
Eun me, number three in a family of four children, was born in Seoul, Korea, after the war and studied traditional dance from age 12. Her family was poor, as most people were after the war and it was her older sister, who was then part of the workforce, who gave her the money for dance lessons. "The other brother and sisters were normal' no artist, only me cousin is painting."
She remembers not being particularly interested in regular school, but main-training a good enough grade point average to ultimately continue her education at the university. "The whole day I was just sitting on the chair in class waiting for the time to go by so I could go to my dance. I cleaned up the whole room by my self - you know the students at my school were very lazy and talking, and I would say, 'stop talking, clean up quickly because I have to go dance'," Eun me know what she wants, and from age five has been almost single minded in her approach - a dancer was what she was going to be, no matter what she had to take on to accomplish her goal.
When Eun me wanted to go on to secondary school, what we call hight school and no something you are automatically accepted to, she had to take an exam. Through a friend, she found out about a school which had a good modern dance program, and that was where she wanted to go.
Her family had just moved into the area for her to attend the Kum Lan secondary school, but in Korea you are put into a lottery after you pass your exam, given a number - hers was eight - and then you have to wait to hear over the radio to find out with which school that number corresponds. "I Promised the God, if you give me the chance, I will dance forever; if you do not give me the chance I stop my dance life here. So, it's your choice, not my choice. If you love me you will give me something - and it happened! I know he loves me."
Number eight was the Kum Lan School.
After three years in secondary school Eun Me applied to the university, not really having the grades but wanting to continue her studies in dance and expand her learning to yet another level. Her advisers said she would never make it to the university, but Eun Me knew she would continue on because her God would not fail her. If it was meant to be, she would be accepted' if not, she would go on to something else.
Since her belief in a God is so strong, I asked what religion or faith she followed.
"I have very shamanistic belief. I don't have any religion. I have someone living in me, it's kind of an Eun Me-God. It's not like a big huge giant God. More tiny, so cute, he looks like me, a baby, so young' he comes from my imagination. I just made him my God. I make him male because I am female and I love men," she laughed. "i just want to be a good person, not a star - good to everyone."
After graduating from the university and becoming one of Korea's brightest young choreographers and dancers, she decided to come to the United States - New York City - to continue studying dance at NYU.
When she arrived three years ago, she spoke no English, had no friends, and was out of her movement dance wise. Everything was new, but Eun Me likes a challenge, she plans her life in stages, one to read more books on philosophy, one to study a certain technique, one to perform more, and so on. Most recently she has become a member of the Martha Clarke Dance Company and wil be performing with them in England later in the year.
After she finishes at The Yard she will be returning to Korea to perform at the Young Dancers Festival, a great honor in her own country.
Always there is something new in her perception, in how she presents a dance, and in how she hopes the audience will receive her works.
As I watched a rehearsal last Friday, I saw her in action with others, Tricia Brouk, Krista Miller, and Eric Handman, who will be performing a piece she choreographed. There is never a hesitation in what she asks her dancers to do; never a well, let's try it this way, and if that doesn't work we'll try it another way. No, she knows exactly what she wants - all she asks her dancers is if it is physically going to hurt them; if the answer is "yes" then the movement is altered. Her choreography is avant-garde, introspective with universal themes, and always with a sense of humor; but her creativity doesn't stop there, she creates her own music from traditional Korean recordings, plus uses ever day sounds such a s sirens, people talking, a radio playing, and American music too. she also designs the costumes used in her performance pieces.
Eun Me Ahn will be performing with The Yard beginning August 15-18, in the Choreographers/dancers Session Premieres. The program will offer new choreographic works by Aleta Hayes, Nicholas Leichter, and Regina Neyman.
Those performing in these next works include Clare Byrne, Rachel Zack, Hooly Handman, Stacey Spence, and Matthew Stromberg.
All performances begin at 8:30 pm, and reservations are recommended, 645-9662

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Island Arts & Entertainment, July 31, 1997
From Baseball to Cataclysmic Century's End, It Is ....by The Yard
By Wendy Arnell Brophy

A collection of works were presented at The yard this past weekend by new artists in residence at the dance colony.
These young dancers and choreographers, Charlotte Boye-Christensen, Brian Brooks, Tricia Brouk, Marie Citron, Pamela Cohen, Li Chiao-Ping, karen Love, and Luis Tentindo, offered works choreographed elsewhere. Over the next several weeks they will work together to build a new group of offerings, to be viewed mid-August.
Although Eun Me Ahn was not physically present at The Yard this year, her presence, in the form of choreography, was firmly stamped upon the Friday evening program.
Tricia Brouk was the soloist in "Boxing Queen," displaying all of the counterpoint trappings of Ahn. On the floor was a rectangle created by a rope of flowers; upstage sat four chairs, all in a row, occupied by Clare Byrne, Lisa Bonomini, Brian Brooks, and Walter Dundervill. Never once did they flinch as Brouk weaved, bobbed, and threw punches at them with her re-Boxing-gloved hands.
Tricia, dressed in a cross between a 1940s sun suit and Uncle Sam's stars and stripes, danced her way around the ring, did a head stand, and learned the art of timing - the long pause- a trademark of Eun Me Ahn's staging.
Ahn brings dance into another world with her conceptualization of story, costuming, music, and props. The music was by Woody Pak and Abba. Brouk's costume was designed by Russell Aubrey, who designed the costumed for patricia Nannon's lastest work.

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The Village Voice, December 12, 1995
Call Waiting
by Deborah Jowitt

Fresh Tracks
Dance Theater Workshop
November 21,28, December 5

Funding for the arts is drying up. Rumor has it that the public is losing interest in dance. Yet every time Dance Theater Workshop announces it Fresh Tracks series, eager choreographers get five or six friends to telephone DTW on their behalf at the appointed hour. It's that hard just getting and appointment to audition. Think of it - hundreds of people show to be a non-career. God bless America.
Getting produced Is so difficult and the DTW showcase so prestigious that experienced choreographers vie for Fresh Tracks slots too. On the recent program, Theresa Reeves of the fringy but established Reeves/Jones Performing Group, and Eun Me Ahn, winner of many prizes in her native Korea, share the bill with, among others, Karinne Keithley, a senior at hampshire College, and Daniela Pinto, who's presenting her very first piece.
Ahn(also a former student) is a riveting performer, executing even her more outrageous acts (like staggering on the pointes of her Reeboks, wearing a big re skirt with a painted flower covering her bare breasts, emitting a single scream) with fervently focused simplicity. Her puzzling but engrossing White Tomb comes as a series of theatrical jolts: Ahn poking her fingers out the top of the mountainous skirt she's concealed under (antennae to test the wind before her shaven head pops out); Ahn smiling like a sweet geisha and vamping us to "Unchained Melody." Her structure and performing are so meticulous that you "get it" even when you maybe don't.

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The Village Voice, December 10, 1996
Elegant Tombs
by Deborah Jowitt

You wouldn't have imagined that four dances with "tomb" in their titles could form one of the most gripping and beautifully constructed small dance events of the season. With the collaboration of lighting designer Chad McArver and set designer Chung Shik Ee, Korean choreographer Eun Me Ahn (whom I first knew as a graduate student) turned an architecturally challenged downtown space (four white pillars flank the narrow performing area) and a traditional "evening of dances" into a sparkling, black-and-white environment, with a single theme presented in deepening variations.
Panels of unbleached muslin force us bend our heads on entering the theater, as if tunneling into a tomb. Sheets of clear plastic cover the floor and form a watery wall between us and Fish Tomb. The fish are endearing and preposterous four men in fluffy white cotton wigs, white mitts, and iridescent white bloomers, their cheers blue with makeup. Ahn skillfully conflates the aquarium and the drag show" Chankoo Paik, Trey Gillen, Nicholas Leichter, and Jaemon Joo blow out their cheeks and make round fish-mouths; they turn their backs on us and shiver their little ruffled butts. After a burst of fierce dancing, one wilts and, to his delight, is hoisted in a split by his friends. Each performer has a distinct personality, but they all yearn bravely, touchingly upward to the electronically altered strains of the Bach_Gounod Ave Maria. The piece could stand editing, but the only labored or obvious part of it - indeed of the whole evening- is the ending, in which the "fist writhe to the sounds of machine-gun fire.
In contrast to these giddy athletes, the tree women in Snow Tomb (Tricia Brouk, Krista Meller, and Rachel Zack) move with extreme and minimal slowness-sleeping beauties half-buried in blankets of "snow" on immense white lily pads (these turn out to be skirts made of cotton batting). From time to time, an apparition glows behind a scrim" a suspended make angel (Jaemon Joo), clad mostly in wings, slowly unloosing sparkling flakes from his hands. At one point the women converge, appearing completely buried in a single moud of white, only their arching breasts and an occasional had surfacing.
Between these two dances comes a strange, inaffably sad solo, Baby Tomb. Ahn, wrapped in white tissue paper, is attached to a slender rope stretching from the ceiling, the other end of this umbilical cord taped to her shaven head. She's almost somnolent, swaying there to the sound of heavy breathing. Slow as a butoh dancer, she inches forward through suddenly appearing geometries of light-walking tremulously in a squat, crawling even though the cord snaps loose. Is birth time running out? She thrashes, tearing the paper. In sudden silence she retreats, catching the end of the cord in her mouth and standing on tiptoes as it slowly rises.
The most remarkable dancing happens in the final solo, Empty Tomb. The tomb is reduced to a tiny white tent that whirs around via a hidden mechanism. The spirit has already awakened to new life. Ahn wears only long ruffled white pants (by Hyung Ju Lee), her torso glittering and a red rose taped to her head - part shaman, part flamenco dancer. Sometimes she's weak or stiff, as if relearning coordination' at other times, she undulates intensely, her eyes fixed on a single spot. To the deep tones of Park Byung Chon's taped chant, she dances with the soft yet emphatic lilt of a Korean Shaman. She suggests an apparently unpremeditated array of changes; perhaps a new environment challenges her muscles, incites her skin. At the end, a large photograph of her face is projected on the rear scrim, each succeeding picture in greate close-up. finally with the living dancer poised inside.

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The Village Voice, November 11, 1997
Horn of Plenty (Sucked Up Into a Kiss)
by Deborah Jowitt

On any 10autumn days in New York, you can see dance work of such diversity that you wonder what characteristics historians will attribute to the '90s beyond anything goes." Visit the Downtown houses and get your sensibilities jerked around.
Attending Eun Me Ahn's Rainbow Cafe at Dance Theater Workshop and Vicky Shick's a little space of intermediate time at ".S. 122 takes you from diverse acts offered in a bizarre club to a quiet, austere place where repetitions pull you deeper into a single subject. Ahn concocts a neon rainbow spectacle with merry-go-round horses, a child-woman (set designer Hyoung Joo Lee) in a cage, many costume changes, brilliant lighting (by Chad McArver), and a field of large green balls. --------
Ahn's kinky revue is not a finely made as the somberly beautiful Tomb she showed last year, nor does it have a strong dance continuity. It does, however, confirm that this Korean-born choreographer has a wild imagination. At the re end of the spectrum, Ahn enters a circle of flashing red lights with a lizard in her mouth, a re design painted on her are breasts. She's twirling two hammers as if they were batons, howling silently, and jabbing re plastic forks into her mouth while the band (Woody's Groove Thang) plays on. Ahn's bad gyrations go on too long, but she makes a wonderful exit, dragging the circle of lights by her ankles, like a kid ignoring the fact that her pants have fallen down.
The productions is gorgeous. There are moments of beauty (bare-breasted women undulating dreamily in floor-trailing pale blue sarongs) and funny antics: Michele Kim, Trisha Brouk, Krista Miller, Ted Johnson, Hey Jeung Chung, and Michael Foley carry on like lemon yellow primates. In a nutty-sad finale involving a human pinwheel bearing birthday cakes, Ahn is daubed with a candle-topped hat of icing and, while she stares mournfully at us, smeared with more white goo.

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The Village Voice, May 26, 1998
M Madness in May
by Deborah Jowitt

For instance, Eun Me Ahn's "Red Solo" from her Rainbow Cafe harmonizes nicely with Mother's little red stage - if harmonize is a word you can use in connection with a woman sporting re-painted breasts and a skirt of red plastic spoons who gyrates frenziedly with a rubber lizard hanging out of her mouth.

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The Village Voice, November 9,1999
Eun Me Ahn Dance
by Deborah Jowitt

Eun Me Ahn Dance
Miler Theater, Columbia University

Like Alwin Nikolais before her, Eun Me Ahn often presents the human body metamorphosed. But her visions are darker and more surreal. Dancers enter Revolving Door in vivid bags ( she designs her own costumes), glowing like jewels in Wendy Luedtke's lighting. Walking on hands and feet, butts in the air, masks on the sides and backs of their heads, they're a garish but placid herd. The bags, pulled into stylish drapes, can permit a decorous court dance by Krista Miller and Ted Johnson, while curious sounds from the backstage music ensemble led by David Chiu blat around them, or turn Johnson into a an undulating diva.
Tow revolvable walls press together at an acute angle. The clear material joining their open ends can be a mirror, or a window through which two naked figures are suddenly glimpsed. Stranger, one of the walls is apparently soft, because the dancers dig their heads into it and start shrieking-just before Brian Brooks emerges from the structure like a giant lizard.
This striking visual display is bolstered by clever movement conceits and strong performing (by Ahn, Brooks, Johnson, Miller, Brian Flynn, Jung Sun Kim, and Linda Sastradipradja). If the meaning is elusive, this may be partly because of a hole at the works' center: One dancer, Elizabeth Pape, committed suicide four days before the opening; another, her partner Eric Butler, could not perform. Sastradipradja danced some sections on short notice. And the dance's "revolving door" tragically evoked for all that other door, between life and death.

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Lesbian Gay New York, February 17, 1997
The Best Dances of 1996
by Brain McCormick

Eun Me Ahn - Baby Tomb
Ronald K. Brown - Ebony: To A Village
Trisha Brown - Opal Loop (revival)
Merce Cunningham - Ocean
Lance Gries - Half Life

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DANCE MAGAZINE, March 1997 Vol. LXXI NO. 3
Eun Me Ahn does let go

Eun Me Ahn does let go. And in her free fall through four interconnected and highly charged dances presented a the Ohio Theater, the most affecting moments were her solos, Baby Tomb and Empty Tomb. In the former she is wrapped in a cocoon of white paper, while a rope , and umbilicus, extends from the top of her shaved head. Moving slowly, she shakes the swaddling from her body and crawls toward the audience with a curious and menacing expression on her face. To the amplified sounds of a human heartbeat, the piece suggests a lonely sadness in being a baby. Empty Tomb, on the other hands, is vigorous and playful. in white flowing trousers with a rose attached to her head, Ahn dances with a tiny, whirring mechanical doll-a bride or a ballerina. As it flits across the floor, she moves from mock flamenco to urgent ritual gestures, conjuring an angry energy that makes the space feel anything but empty.

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INDEPENDENT Weekly, November 17-23, 1999
Dictatorial eye
by Whitney Vaughan

Korean-born choreographer Une Me Ahn distances herself form the B-word. She says she wouldn't make a career out of performing butoh-wrangling naked, bald, eyes rolled back a la Linda Blair. The prominence of that art form, with its expressions of the grotesque, in post-World War II Japanese culture is formidable. Yet its cache, its market value in American dance circles is at an all-time high, so why not try on some of its trapping for size?
Ahn's disclaimers about her influences emphasize her allegiance to "no one thing," and her evening of solos Nov. 5 at Duke University's Reynolds Theater showed that she-like any pop-culture hip and grant-savvy artist-can serve up tradition on a stick if need be.
Butoh's minimalism and solemnity appeared next to traditional Korean hand gestures, but these elements were mixed with Edith Piaf's laments, finger-puppetry, The little Price (on acid, apparently) and shamanistic love duets. Ahn admits that her influences include "everything" - television, movies, animation, fashion and life experience. With a palette as crowded as this, even butoh's traditional angst is just a channel to flip through.
Throughout the evening of dances - each a part of her "Tomb" or "Moon" series - there were certainly moments where "everything" crowded into the frame. But the night's most arresting moments were those in which one image or idea was played out so insistently or thoroughly that a familiar image became strange, or a strange one became familiar.
In the first solo, "White Moon," Ahn trained the eye on one such image by appearing kneeling in a white pool of light. Her dress was made, seemingly, of white sheets, tied so tightly at the chest as to evoke a bodice. The lower half - not visible till she stood much late in the piece - was a stark variation on a petticoat. Ahn's use of silence, her languid movement and distracted gaze were all superficial markers of an Eiko and Komaesque sensibility. But Ahn's images were layered and suggested several possible meanings, if not outright visual puns.
Here, perched close to the floor, Ahn cradled the excess material of her dress to suggest a baby. The images and associations related to pregnancy - supported by the "moon" of the title, the sphere of light, Ahn's bald head, the silence - only multiplied when the "baby" she held spilled out of her arms and onto the floor as flour. This one surprise was full of resonance. It conjured flour rising, creating form from its tabula rasa on the floor, the slow gestation of baking bread, or a more sideways link to a womb's flowering. Though Ahn's movements were aparse and contained, the piece was breathtaking as it followed a slow, steady trajectory toward its destination. In its moment of arrival, the dance ended with Ahn upended, head planted in the pile of flour before her. The postscript to the piece was Ahn's bow, her forehead now anointed with a moon-shaped white imprint.
This very strong start to the evening was followed by "Black Tomb" - a piece Ahn used to explore the erosion of memory. Yet, without that foreknowledge of the work's intentions, the viewers was again visually lured into images that wavered between familiar and strange, recognizable and not. In "Black Tomb," ahn appeared in vampy garb - black mini, hose, pumps - with black circles painted like grim targets on her bare breasts. She stood, preened, and walked the parameters of a small box of stage light to the strains of "La Vie en Rose."
With her Betty Boop cartoonishness, Ahn was a caricature of feminine wiles. Structurally, this illusion of "woman" - a thing in drag - was pulled slowly apart. For each cat-walk around the stage, a shoe came off, a stocking showed its run, a sexy gait became a hobble then a crawl. Almost unnoticeably, the Piaf tune warped with each successive playing until the voice resembled a man's. We could see where this was going, but Ahn took it further than expected. Her movements regressed to near-infancy by the end, her eyes dumb and blank, her black pumps finally foisted on her head like Mickey Mouse ears or party hats.
"White Tomb" finished the series as a piece detailing a marriage ceremony practiced in Korean Shamanism. As with "Black Tomb," this information about the piece is, on one level, unnecessary. There were images explored that were wholly satisfying and stood outside of such an elaborate context. There were also places where theme became top-heavy for the works visual delicacy. Strongest was the opening, in which we saw a hovering umbrella of ruffled cloth. There was little way to make sense of this object, then it suddenly rose to reveal gartered legs. As a pipe methodically banged away, the skirt descended until only two fingers protruded from its too opening to enact a bizarre puppet show. This single exploration elicited that curious thrill provided by those two-headed dolls from childhood, one identity erased with the swish of a skirt. But the piece became a costume show after that, with Ahn enacting a bride and groom's dance to the sounds of "Unchained Melody" - a song now hopelessly tainted by its association with the film Ghost.
In some real sense, Ahn is all about show. Her eye is the dictator, and it can be brazenly superficial in the way that it will create costumes first, dances later (her modus operandi), or in the way that it will appropriate butoh's shoved head because "it's beautiful." That tendency can be a little unsettling, and it can, on occasion, veer into lunacy. But it also has a likable energy and candor. As is evident from her evening of solos, it's the moments in which Ahn reins in her eyes obsessions, when she gives the floor over to them entirely, that she is able to stumble - almost blind - into the most symbolically rich of images.

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RECESS November 5, 1999
10 Stories Moon
With shoes on her head, paint on her breasts and not much else on her body,
Eun Me Ahn brings her unique brand of performance art to Duke.
by Carely Petesch

Reynolds Theater isn't normally thought of by the masses as a hub of topless dancing. But Friday night, dancer Eun Me an will bare her breasts in a jolting performance guaranteed to redefine your ideas of what is beautiful and what is punk.
Combining body paint, topless nudity, an shaved head, bright colors and odd costuming, Eun Me Ahn creates intriguing images of life, death, and womanhood. Her favorite piece explores the universal experience of being a woman - using the image of blood. Red paint drips from the ceiling onto their body, forming beads of color on her skin as she dances.
Color is an integral part of most of her pieces. One of the pieces she will be performing at Duke is entitled "Black Tomb," where she is dressed completely in black. This color helps set the mood for the piece - sad and soft - rather than wild and vigorous like much of her other work.
Tombs are one of her central images, symbolizing life from beginning to end. She also has a series of pieces entitled Moon Stories, using the moon as a symbol for the female.
it's tempting to look deeper into the meanings behind these titles, but Eun Me Ahn claims, "i don't care about the title, I care about the subject."
Most performers pick the costume to enhance the subject of their piece, but Eun me Ahn first envisions the costume, which then produces her subject matter. "I decide what I am going to were, and that becomes the subject," she says.
Clothing is only part of her performance - literally. She performs, topless and with a shaved head, but this is not a deliberate attempt to shock the audience. She dances this way "because it's beautiful."
"Your skin can breathe the energy from outside." she explains, '"and if I feel good, my audience feels good."
This goal is important to her because some of her dancing is improvised and feeds off the energy of the audience, while the rest of it its carefully choreographed to invoke lush images. this Korea post-modern punk artist claims that her work fits no specific style; Eun Me Ah simply does what she wants to do, rather than conforming to a y particular expectations.
So each dance is different, forming unforgettable images that are glamorous and strange. The lighting and costumes are bright, loud and enticing: When the res of her dancers are with her , they've been known to dress in large fluffy skirts and off-the-wall fish costumes.
Despite the "weird" appearance, her themes and motives contain universal ideas, and she strives to relate to the people she performs for. She sees her role as a Shamanist, explaining, "i am between God and people....I have to do what I do."
Her intent is to bring people closer to themselves and their spirituality; she is out to celebrate the joy, sadness, humor and common sense in life. Certainly her performances use wildly imaginative means of conveying her intentions, but in the end - after the feast for the eyes - she hope to bring the audience beyond their known, comfortable horizons.

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The Triangle's Arts & Entertainment Newsweekly November 3, 1999
Subtle Motion
Korean choreographer Eun Me Ahn strives to tell a story
by Lissa Brennan

The reaction of most Western audiences upon viewing an Asian performer progressing slowly across a stage is to cry our "Butoh!" and sit back pleased at their ability to identify and pigeonhole.
Though Korean choreographer and dancer Eun Me Ahn shares the shaved head and bone structure which have become hallmarks of that genre and at times has brought languorous motion to the stage, the similarities end there. Ahn holds a reverence for the discipline, but is adamant that what she submits as a choreographer exists independent of the Japanese form that evolved in response to World War II, is populated by hosts, and is traditionally presented exclusively by men.
"The New York Times once asked 'Is this the Korean answer to butoh?' in a review of my work," Ahn says. "Americans always compare [dance] to butoh, especially if it's Asian - they want to put that word in there. I'm very separate form that."
Gestures affected by butoh, though, my very well find their way into her worlds - Ahn cites "everything" as her primary inspiration. As a child studying Korea dance and ballet, she was entranced by any representation of creative physicality set before her, and developed a particular fondness for Gigi; Cancan and 1960s and '70s Hollywood musicals. Encouraged by a myriad of influences, she sees herself as a confluence of not only divergent methods, but of contrary cultures as well.
"Our country [Korea] is very conservative artistically," she says. "I'm very open. It's the difference between the generations, the parents say 'do not, do, not, do, not,' the younger generation says 'we do.'"
This variety led her to experiment with several different kinds of movement and ignited a desire to unite as many orders as she can into her work.
"It's the American style brought together with a Korean emotional and cultural education," she says. "It mixes very well."
The most recent evidence of this was the debut of Revolving Door, a one-hour and 10-minute long piece which premiered last weekend at Columbia University's Miller Theater and utilized her company of dancers.
In addition to the epic ensemble pieces, Ahn has crafted several collections of compact solo and group works which stand free of each other while centering around a common theme. The "Moon" series explores the intricacies of the female body, the "Tomb" succession focuses on birth and death, the "Cafe" works take elements of everyday life and elevates the to circus-like spectacle.
Solo selections from the "Moon" and "tomb" repertoires are performed his Friday, Nov. 5, as part of Duke University's "New Directions in Performance" program. "White Tomb" interprets a practice in Korean shamanism of conducting marriage ceremonies for the spirits of dead virgins who can't move on to the afterlife unwed, as they'll suffer an eternity of loneliness. Ahn portrays both bride and groom to the strains of "Unchained Melody," the former tentatively reaching for love, the latter full of swaggering machismo. Remembrances of the dead are dissected in 'Black Tomb" with Ahn demonstrating through minimalism who time's erosion of memory can reduce the complexity of a person to a single facet of their being.
"White Moon," danced by Ahn without music, investigates the universe of possibility held within women, beginning in the womb and the space that surrounds it and continuing the bond between mother and child, revealing the world inside the body is slow, quiet and powerful. "Blue Moon," performed by Youn Hui Jeon, a company member and student at Tisch School of the Arts at New York University, premieres here. Ahn is currently assembling the piece, which, through avant-garde modernism, will examine the beauty of the body through stamina and adaptability.
In all of her work, Ahn is careful to encompass a full rage of motion and emotion, finding the humor contained in tragedy and the sadness that can dwell within joy. "We jump in both ways," she says. "We have both at the same time." Though a tale can be found in each of her inventions, her conveyance of it is broad and visceral, and she disregards facts and details (which she praises as being appropriate for theater, but ignores in her own work as too specific for dance) in favor of feelings and suggestions.
"I have a little story to tell," she says. "and I care about what I want to teel people, and how. An I do it through dance. All my life is dancing. I never think about anything not in relations to that.

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The Dance Insider
Revolving Door
Flash Review 3: Devoted Weirdness
October 24th, 1999 by Albert Lee
Copyright 1999 Albert Lee

There's something heartening about Eun Me Ahn's devotion to weirdness. It brings into the theater a certain measure of mutual trust - of belief in her hallucinations - that invigorates in out era of skepticism and irony. She believes in the subterranean, in cryptic unknowables. Who knows" She may even believe in Freud.
Ahn's "Revolving Door," which premiered in New York at Columbia University's Miller Theatre on Friday night, is a willfully weird 90minutes, spiked with some truly haunting moments. The piece was created during Ahn's residency at The Yard in Martha's Vineyard this past summer, and is filled with some of the oddest characters this side of "The Satyricon."
In a nod to the Greeks, the seven performers (a hodgepodge of shapes hired locally) in this archetypal drama hide their faces for much of the dance in white masks stitched to black pantyhose, often worn on the sides of backs of their heads. Their primary-color costumes look essentially like two bedsheets sewn together, with a hole between the legs. At first the effect is playful; they roll across the stage; bend over, shuffle and bleat like sheep; crouch and hobble like old women' or flap their arms awkwardly like penguins.
But then Ahn herself comes on, introducing an ominous air. Her body painted in glittery gold, she divines a spotlight, crawls into it, and stars cutting space with serpentine movements that recall both breakdancing and nritta, classical Indian dance. As she builds momentum, so does a masked dancer in orange, further upstage in the dark, who rotates faster and faster, exposing light and dark sides of his mask. Then as quickly as she entered, Ahn exits, reverting to a slow, spidery crawl.
A giant wall moves slowly across the stage - the revolving door of the title - and exposes masked, motionless figures in G-strings. For the rest of the dance, we watch a procession of menacing tableaux emerging from behind the wall, as it rotates to reveal a white surface and, on its third side, a mirror. In one tableau, a masked nightclub revelers watch an unmasked couple dance. In another, a figure sprawled on the floor touches a mirror, and it becomes transparent to reveal a naked couple embracing. By the end, the dancers are all unmasked and nearly naked, their costumes on the floor. The black curtains upstage part to reveal white walls, and the house lights have come up halfway. The mood - no longer playful - is now frantic, erotic, flamboyant, and nearly explosive. The undercurrent of sexual violence can be at times overpowering, though the choreography is never overwrought.
The fantastic John Cage - like music, played live by Michael Grigsby, Ron Kozak, Skip LaPlante, and David Simons, heightens the tension; it is created as much by plucking, twanging, and banging the instruments as by actually playing them,
Ahn's very capable company of dnacers included Brian Brooks, Brian Flynn, Ted Johnson, Jung Sun Kim, Krisa Miller, and Linda Sastradipradja.

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KOREAM Journal March 1999 / volume 10, number 3
Perpetual Motion
Choreographer Eun Me Ahn Dances Into the Future
by Grace Elaine Suh

A very pregnant girl wearing coke-bottle glasses wanders into the audience and sells Tootsie Pops. A woman dressed in skirt made from plastic spoons and forks holds a rubber salamander in her mouth and swings a hammer in each hand as she gyrates in a circle of red Christmas lights. A large red heart is painted across her bare breasts. later gabbed in nothing but a pom-pom-trimmed apron and high heels, she rakes dozens of bouncing, green balls toward audience members who throw them back. The woman rakes the balls into a pile and having gathered the last one, dives in.
These are some of the striking images offered by Eun Me Ahn, 37, a choreographer who regularly garners rave reviews from The New York Times, The Village Voice, and Dance Magazine, among others. Her work has been described as "striking," "highly charged," and "somberly beautiful." Ahn has been called "a riveting performer," a choreographer with a "wondrous imagination," and "a priestess casting a spell."
Ahn's recent show, "Starry Night," played to standing-room-only crowds at new York City's prestigious Joyce SoHo Theater. The hour-long show presents an idiosyncratic, vaguely sci-fi future filled with breathtaking beauty and deadpan humor.
First several plump shiny peach female forms slide along the brilliant white floor and walls. Their headpieces resemble inflamed lilies or vulvae in advanced stages of excitement. The impression they give - of a species whose evolution has come to externalize and glorify their reproductive features - Is doubled when the naked, muscular male form at their feet suddenly rolls toward the audience, revealing his extravagantly padded codpiece, also shiny peach. The women group and regroup in flower formations, their synchronized legs making gorgeous blooming patterns. At the segment's stunning close, they lift the man high above their heads. Sudden darkness - then in the pulsing light of a strobe the man crops into their waiting arms.
The evening proceeds with the illogic of dreams each surreal comical scene sliding into the next. Two men in shiny, black unitards with beekeeper-type hoods negotiate hostilities by bouncing on a huge, black rubber ball. As they edge toward a detente, the ball becomes less weapon and more plaything. Soon, they are taking turns flying across the room stop it, arms busily working in powerful butterfly strokes.
Identical-twin dwarf Sicilian widows with tiny, ruffled petticoat bodies stare at each other with the mournful faces of Madonnas or department store mannequins. ON the caster wheels they have for legs, they whiz past each other and into opposite corners, then stare blankly at the audience who screeches in laughter.
A solo by Ahn, in which the sinuous motions of her deep-green head, arms and torso give the impression of an expressive sea creature or extraterrestrial nymph, adds a human dimension to the parade of otherwise biologically exotic species.
The fantastic impact of "Starry Night" gains much from playful, ingenious costuming and gorgeous lighting design (Ah collaborates on both) and its talented accompanying band of violin, cello, guitar and accordion. Wearing only white long johns and led by composer and violinist Tom fm Chiu (in a white Andy Warhol wig) the band produces evocative and often hilariously contrapuntal moods by way of polka, heavy metal, folk tunes, and Cronos quartet-type dissonance-singing, chanting.
In the house-rocking finale, the full company enters single file. Buddihist top knots on their nodding heads, proudly sporting what appear to be huge, pointy breasts. The dancers weeble and bobble the weight of their armless bodies, flop their long, empty sleeves, and gesture insouciantly with those curiously mobile breasts. Facing the cheering audience, their faces rapt, joyous and smiling, the dancers pop their arms into the overly long sleeves (thereby deflating the ludicrous "breasts:) and gesture madly in an eloquent communication of the unsinkable spirit.
"Starry Night" is a picture of the futre that reflects the anonymity of technology, computers and the Internet (thus the many masks used in Ahn's work.) It is a future that is strange and somewhat ominous, yet also colorful, droll and fanciful. As Ahn says of the new millennium, "Don't be afraid of change...[everything] comes back around to happiness."
When Eun Me Ahn was a little girl growing up in Seoul, her family didn't have a TV until she was 9. she attributes her lively imagination and her love of performance to those early years without passive entertainment. She spent most of her time outdoors playing alone or with her brothers. All of her favorite games were dramas: gun fights with the boys, sagas with her dolls, fashion pageants with her friends. She loved nothing more than acting tragic comedies of her own invention and mimicking her favorite actors and singers for whomever would watch, or just as happily for herself.
When she was 5 she experienced a life-changing moment. Playing outside one day, Ahn saw a dazzling procession of hight -school girls were on their way to dance practice and Ahn covertly followed them down the street and up a flight of stairs to class. There she was enchanted by the mirrors, the drums, the movement. She ran home and told her mother she wanted to become a dancer. Ahn says that as a child she was "outgoing, smart, beautiful, talented, the class clown" - and clearly never overly shy or modest. She has always possessed a highly developed sense of the theatrical. In the sixth grade, she was Juliet in a class play and raised money on her own for a curtain. For Eun Me it just wouldn't have been a real show without a curtain to raise and lower.
She studied ballet (which she found formal and boring) and traditional Korean dance (too slow). When her family finally got a TV it was the dancers behind the singers that she was enraptured by along with the elaborate floor routines on the variety show. She practiced the disco and go-go moves she saw, in addition to the moves of Michael Jackson, Korean pop stars, and anyone else's she saw.
In high school and at Ewha Women's University, she studied modern dance and learned the Martha Graham technique, the only modern system taught in Korea at the time. Again, Ahn found its formality stifling, but was able to tap into the energy of the technique which she found "so exciting." All of these influences and traditions are found in Ahn's highly eclectic and exuberant choreography - extrapolated, rearranged and reinvented into wholly original worlds, moods and languages.
She quickly became a star in Korea, winning top awards as a dancer and choreographer. Just out of school, she led rehearsals for the Opening Ceremonies at the 1988 Seoul Olympics and was soon putting on her own show for enthusiastic audiences in Seoul's most prestigious venues.
In 1992 Ahn came to the United Sates to "see what the others were doing" from a perch in the master's degree program in dance at New York University's Tisch School of the Arts. It was a dramatic move. She was leaving behind her many friends, colleagues, a loyal public following and an established career in exchange for student status. Furthermore, she spoke little English and knew few people in America. Four years late, she had taken her new country by storm, winning awards and funding, assembling a dance company and mounting show that quickly became must-sees for critics and audiences alike.
"Seven years ago, Eun Me was OK, but since [coming to the U.S.], she has changed a lot." she says. In Korea where she was nationally recognized, she might have been satisfied with things as they were. In her new surroundings, Ahn found herself ever-searching and seeking. And with the freedom of her newfound anonymity and in the absence of the disapproval she regularly received from the Korean press for her shaved head, nudity, and "craziness." Ahn was able to experiment with increased boldness. Her work became darker with new attention to theme and movement; she became more sure of her power.
Her recent works reflect this new confidence. As Ahn says about "Rainbow Cafe," he r1997 program: "For the first time I stopped trying to make art and allowed myself to get funky...to make whatever images came into my head."
Her ambition is to choreograph a "great piece that endures." a powerful and truly original work that will find a place in the repertory and go on to be performed and reinterpreted by others.
Given her free-handed use of props (one show in Korea included a 15 minute section in which 2000 balls cropped from the ceiling), lighting ("Starry Night" features washed of red, green, yellow, and black light as well as strobe), her often outrageous and always imaginative costume design (plastic hanboks, whipped cream, orange-stuffed briefs and bikinis with enormous flowers highlighting breasts and crotch), and music (such as a medley of "old grandma picnic music" interspliced with Wagner and panson"). Ahn's choreography itself is surprisingly minimalist.
In fact, as one critic wrote, it is characterized by "fervently focused simplicity. "Striving to create what she calls "pure images," she keeps her physical vocabulary clean and spare. This infuses more meaning to each movement and allows the piece as a whole to be stronger and more focused. It is also another reason why her costumes often include hoods and masks, and sometimes sleeves and legs that extend over hands and feet: "It makes a clear picture for the movements and removes [the distraction of] hair and feature."
In her view, European-derived dance (especially ballet, which she mockingly calls "air dance") is driven by its need to defy its oppressive monotheistic culture to fly (literally) in the face of its punishing God. Thus it strives for the ethereal to give in its leaps and twirls the impression of gravity and physicality overcome. Asian dance tradition, however, secure in its harmonious polytheism, focuses on breathing, eyes, attitude and internal energy. It grounds itself in the elements and works strongly and sensually from the center of the body with arms moving around the heart and through the air.
For Ahn, the body is the most beautiful thing in the world. She doesn't want the body to convey ideas because for her the body is the idea.
In person, Ahn is as colorful as she is onstage. Fearless and energetic, overflowing with new ideas, she is poised to take on the world and dresses for it, too. One day she wears a plasticine lemon-yellow dress with a pink and orange scarf with enormous turquoise sequin earrings. Another day she is all shades of rose: carnation-pink vintage coat, crimson sweater, carmine backpack, crayon red tennis shoes, and on her shaved head, a pink, striped, pom-pomed ski cap that ties under her chin.
This woman, who creates wonderful visions of a fanciful. humorous, shiny, beautiful world, claims never to "dream in my sleep...it is all in my work."

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