Review: GRAVITY, The Place

GRAVITY opens with a striking image: bodies in a ring arch and peel away, like a blooming lotus, under the glare of slowly blinking, piercing white light. This motif appears throughout, reminding GRAVITY’s eleven dancers of its enduring gaze. It is also, perhaps, a metaphor – the scrutiny of critical observation on a work created in one context and performed in another.

Experimental choreographer Jang-hyun Ryu’s dance piece is among the curated works making up The Place’s Festival of Korean Dance. Ryu’s surrealist dreamscape is populated by shape-shifting bodies and eerie mutations –‘a universe in motion where energy mutates, transforms and sets alight’ over an ‘extra-terrestrial’, ‘otherworldly’ plane. Images accumulate and intensify, the alien tipping toward the ominous. Weight-sharing escalates into rough wrestling. Within the chaos of eleven thrashing bodies, hidden vignettes emerge. Some are threatening (a hand grabbing the back of someone’s head); others quietly heroic (a figure standing triumphantly on another’s shoulders). A lone performer scrabbles desperately against the back wall, trying to climb out. Someone collapses, and their limp body is carried offstage like a corpse. A bowl of fire, held aloft as an offering in one section, returns later as an entire head engulfed in flames. When dancers revisit the opening circle under the same blinking light, their clasped formation now resembles the gaping maw of an anglerfish.

Ryu’s movement vocabulary is distinctive. Bodies fall off-axis; limbs swing across the body’s midline before performers swiftly recover and shift positions on a dime. These fluid falls are punctuated by sharp stamps and rippling, isolated articulations. Ryu makes relentless use of all eleven performers, sustaining an energetic pace that rarely lets up. GRAVITY shines brightest in its second section, where the choreography functions like a conveyor belt of frenetic vignettes: small ensembles rip across the stage in unison, then clear and wipe space for the next image. 

Central to the work are large, torso-length black balloons that fuel the most intense metamorphoses. Held between the splayed legs of a performer crawling onstage in a handstand, it then becomes someone’s disembodied head. Later, the balloons reappear as grotesquely swollen bellies on dancers sliding slowly across the stage. The final section revolves entirely around holding a single balloon aloft. What first appears as levitation – dancers pliéing beneath it, all hands gently supporting – transforms into a delicate relay. In a line, performers take turns keeping the orb suspended in space, carefully wrapping arms around the person in front, who snakes away as the next dancer steps in. The balloon remains fixed in position as bodies shift around it: balanced like Atlas’ burden on shoulders, held between legs, suspended in stasis between two dancers’ opposing pull. GRAVITY’s final image – the balloon, floating on its own – is darkly unsettling once untethered from the performers’ painstaking care.

Maintaining the illusion, Ryu seems to tell us, is a collective effort.

Directed, Choreography & Sound by Jang-hyun Ryu
Lightning Design by Ji-hye Kan
Costume Design by Kyung-sool Bae
Produced by Jung-eun Lee, Jung-hyun Park

GRAVITY was performed on May 15 at the Place as part of A Festival of Korean Dance 2026, which runs until 30 May.