Creatives in Motion 2026
Presented by Korean Cultural Center New York & Korea National University of Arts
January 16-17, 2026
16:00 <Greta Oto> ㅣ Ohelen
16:00 <Access> ㅣ Bézier & <VERTEBRA> l Yeonju Ha
19:30 <La Plante Dansante de Désastres> l Seon-Ah Jo
19:30 <Boisterous Bodies> l Shin’s People & <Yeonhee Gyeong> l NOLPLUS
Korean Cultural Center New York
(122 E 32nd Street, New York, NY 10016)
Admission: FREE(Pre-registration is Required)
* RSVP and seating are on a first-come, first-served basis.
Creatives in Motion is a collaborative project between the Korean Cultural Center New York and the Korea National University of Arts. Designed to spotlight emerging Korean artists and foster meaningful connections with local audiences and producers in New York, the program returns for its second edition in 2026.
Taking place over two days on January 16 and 17, 2026, this year’s program will feature six artist teams working across multidisciplinary, contemporary dance, traditional Korean arts and innovative practices by the next generation of K-arts creators. Through live performances and networking sessions, Creatives in Motion highlights the creativity, experimentation, and artistic excellence nurtured at the Korea National University of Arts.
◆ PROGRAM (Scroll down to RSVP LINK)
January 16–17 at 4:00PM
◆ <Greta Oto> l Ohelen
Multidisciplinary (Music, Theater)
<Greta Oto> is both a singular character and a form of narrative itself, explored through solo performance. The performer moves continuously through fragments of memory, repeated phrases, and uncertain narrative structures, inviting audience projection rather than delivering a fixed message. Unresolved words, interrupted emotions, and moments that oscillate between stillness and movement appear vividly on stage. Audiences may experience the character as a “vanishing person” or see reflections of their own memories within her presence. Each performance introduces new episodes, allowing the work to expand continuously. The open structure encourages multiple interpretations, emphasizing the layered and ephemeral nature of the piece.
Ohelen is a vocalist and performance artist whose work moves fluidly across music, theatre, and visual composition. Her practice is rooted in improvisation and mobility, expanding performance into an event that unfolds uniquely in each encounter. By engaging audiences as active participants, her works transform music into a ritualistic and communal experience. Recently, she has been developing site-specific and interdisciplinary projects, from improvised choirs to performances in traditional and outdoor venues, broadening her scope to include international collaborations and tours.
January 16–17 at 7:30PM
◆ <La Plante Dansante de Désastres> l Seon-Ah Jo
Multidisciplinary (Choreographic Sound·Experimental Music)
<La Plante Dansante de Désastres> is a performative practice in which the performer perceives the instrument as the body—or the body as an instrument. The performer projects herself, an East Asian female body, onto the gayageum, a traditional Korean string instrument. The connectivity between instrument and body expands both inward and outward, resisting or reenacting the duties imposed upon the female body while attending to the unnamed strata of sound that reside beneath the surface.
Seon-ah Jo is an interdisciplinary artist and performer whose work moves fluidly across music, movement, and sound art. She treats the gestures and sounds generated by her Gayageum-playing body as equal artistic languages. Each movement becomes a spatial gesture through which the performer herself becomes the instrument, while the body functions as another site where sound both resides and passes through.
January 16–17 at 4:00PM
◆ <Access> l Bézier
Electronic Music Live Performance
<Access> is an electroacoustic music–based sound performance that explores the technical and ontological meanings of the act of “access.” Through tactile–auditory transference using conductive objects, the detection of invisible signals via radio and noise, and spatial experiences created with multichannel speakers and lights, its five parts sensorially reconstruct moments in which reality and the virtual intersect. Access uses sound not as a mere background but as a medium for shaping a nonlinear terrain of time and sensation, inviting the audience to experience “reconnecting with the world” through listening.
Bézier is a group of three sound artists who create listening-based works that explore the boundaries between technology and sensation, calculation and intuition, the artificial and the natural. Bézier reflects on the point where algorithmic structures and organic flows intersect and, through techniques such as sound synthesis, data sonification, conductive objects, and multichannel sound, translates movements of perception and transformations of being into sound within music. Rather than prioritizing technological outcomes, their work centers on auditory experiences that provoke reflection, proposing new modes of connection between reality and the virtual, and between humans and their environments through sound.
◆ <VERTEBRA> l Yeonju Ha
Contemporary Dance
<Vertebra> offers not a grand or dramatic form of consolation, but a quiet assurance: “It is okay to tremble like this.”
The work focuses not on a perfected shape but on the fragile and persistent process of holding, collapsing, and rebuilding the body. Through these continual shifts, the piece reveals how instability itself can be a place of truth and resilience.
The objects that appear onstage are closely connected to the dancer’s own body. They evoke fragments of structure, weight, and balance, functioning as extensions of the physical self. Rather than directly explaining their meaning, the piece invites the audience to imagine what part of the body each object might mirror and to find pleasure in tracing those subtle correspondences. These objects create an additional layer of sensation, guiding viewers toward a deeper awareness of how the body remembers, adapts, and reassembles itself.
Vertebra hopes that, upon leaving, the audience will look at their own bodies with greater gentleness—recognizing that every curve, bend, and trembling line carries its own accumulated time. By witnessing a body that continues to reshape itself, viewers are quietly reminded that uncertainty is not a failure but a way of being.
“Your body knows more than you say.”
Yeonju Ha is a contemporary dancer and choreographer whose work investigates movement through the body, sensory awareness, and inquiry. Rather than pursuing fixed forms, she observes how the body supports, collapses, and reorganizes itself, developing these real-time processes into a functional movement language.
Guided by the question, “When am I most fully myself?”, she studies subtle shifts in weight, balance, intention, and response that reveal movement as it emerges. Her analytical approach focuses on how the body organizes and adjusts under changing conditions, shaping a practice grounded in clarity, presence, and structural awareness.
Through this work, Ha aims to create an environment where audiences can relate what they see onstage to their own physical experiences, understanding movement through direct sensation rather than symbolic interpretation.
January 16–17 at 7:30PM
◆ <Boisterous Bodies> l Shin’s People
Dance
The gestures of the marketplace unfold onstage. <Boisterous Bodies> reinterprets the vibrant atmosphere and sensory character of Korean traditional markets through a contemporary movement language. From ajummas squatting beside large basins, to hands swiftly sorting goods on narrow stands, to the rhythmic call of “Golla-golla!” and the lively motions of the yeot seller, familiar market actions are transformed into new choreographic textures. The performers shape the market’s bustling warmth and collective energy into movement, exploring how the everyday bodies of today might become the embodied traditions of tomorrow. Through this process, familiar gestures become dance, and the breath of daily life is reborn onstage.
Shin's People explores the physicality of contemporary Korean dance through traditional movement vocabularies and everyday gestures deeply rooted in Korean life. Their work begins with observing the rhythms, textures, and sensory nuances embedded in daily actions, then translating these patterns into contemporary choreographic structures. They reimagines habitual postures, repeated gestures, and the pace of ordinary life, expanding the meeting point between lived experience and the formal language of the stage. Through this process, she continues to reconstruct the distinctive bodily sensibilities shaped by Korean social and cultural life.
◆ <Yeonhee Gyeong> l NOLPLUS
Yeonhee (Korean Traditional Performance)
“In a world where five seasons breathe and live,
we journey together through the beauty and utopia of Yeonhee."
<Yeonhee Gyeong> visualizes the very process of imagination and creation, exploring the point where the temporality of tradition meets contemporary artistic vision.
Drawing on the cyclical sense of time within traditional yeonhee (Korean folk performance) and its structure of ritual and play, the piece expresses the flow of time through rhythm and movement. The stage is built upon the archetypal structure of traditional performance, presenting a yeonhee world that traverses the four seasons and culminates in a transcendent fifth season.”
NOLPLUS is a creative performance group that views “sound” as a form of encounter, crafting new Yeonhe
e through diverse meetings. Drawing inspiration from ancient legends, myths, and folktales, we reinterpret them within contemporary contexts. While preserving the essence of tradition, we experiment with forms free from convention, shaping performances that embody the sensibilities of today.