In most mythological stories of Kumiho, the narration focuses on the man’s perspective – how he met a beautiful woman, how she seemed elegant yet slightly animalistic in nature, and how she ended up taking his heart (literally, in most cases). To me, the legend of Kumiho is a mistreated and misunderstood woman. Throughout history, women are constantly told they are “teases” if they don’t give sex or slut shamed if they do. Women are constantly told we are no more than our appearances, our bodies. Yet women are accused of being man-eaters, gold-diggers, and heartless if they use their bodies to their advantages in life.
Inspired by writing exercises I’ve used before, I asked my dancers to create “blackout” poems from the short story of Kumiho. This method involves a simple process of circling words that stand out and creating your own poetry out of a piece of writing that already existed before. Since the only written iterations of the Kumiho myth I could find focused only on the man’s perspective, I figured creating our own poetry from the story was the beginning of taking the narrative back. Kate Baer, a poet who creates thought provoking, powerful poems out of hate messages from men uses this method to change horrible comments targeted at her (mostly about her appearance, or how she’s not a “good woman”) into her own artwork.
Rules for creating a blackout poem:
- circle/underline words that stand out to you (cannot be more than three consecutive words)
- find different ways to put the liked words together without rearranging the order
- blackout the rest of the unused words
The enamor of a woman: her hair wrapped around her lost voice, her bewitching spine bubbling past her eyes. Silence held its breath. Remember to run.
After we created our own blackout poems, we each made movement phrases to go along with the words. Using each solo phrase material, we created a group phrase together.
Here is the same material in its finalized form on stage: