★★★★
If 1 Degree Celsius is probably a masterpiece by South Korean choreographer Sung Im Her, it’s because, like all masterpieces, it operates on several layers of meaning—or, without forcing the metaphor, several degrees of interpretation.
The first and most explicit layer is the one the choreographer herself announces: the climate crisis. It’s written in the title, and the stage elements confirm it. The set is bare, a signature of Her’s minimalist aesthetic, yet this time, thirty-two spotlights hang on the back wall, as if the ceiling grid had been lowered and fixed vertically. The effect is disorienting. It feels as though the audience has been displaced; as if we were lying on the stage, looking upward. These lights, searing and relentless, stand in for the sun. We are made to face them directly, to feel their intensity on our skin as it is set to raise like the temperature of the earth. Her doesn’t simply invite us to think about the climate; she makes our bodies experience it.
Her dancers wear simple urban clothing adorned with tiny silvery fragments that might be leaves in winter, fish scales, or feathers. It immediately recalls the work of South Korean Nobel Prize–winning writer Han Kang, especially The Vegetarian, in which a woman transforms into a tree. Her seems to draw on that same impulse toward human-to-vegetal metamorphosis, a thread that runs through the choreography.
The movement language oscillates between extremes: moments of rigid, mathematical precision, angular, almost binary, as if coded by an algorithm, alternate with passages of breathtaking organic fluidity. These are the most luminous moments of the piece, where the movement seems not choreographed by human intention but animated by the elements themselves. The dancers ripple like seaweed in invisible currents, then snap abruptly into stillness, as if caught in a sudden drought. A constant pendulum swing: on one side, exquisite softness, gestures moved by air and water; on the other, contraction, density, the human pull back toward gravity and structure.
As 1 Degree Celsius progresses, the bodies grow increasingly fractured, contorted, and brutalised. By the finale, the wall of lights blazes with violent intensity, the heat tangible on our faces. Her extends the experience of climate anxiety into the spectators’ own bodies; the discomfort is not symbolic but physical.
Yet there is another layer—perhaps unintentional, but unmistakable: the choreographer’s reaffirmation of her heritage as well as her own signature. The alternation between Her’s solos and group sequences evokes a dialogue between the personal and the collective.
Trained at P.A.R.T.S., Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker’s renowned Brussels school, Her carries traces of that legacy throughout 1 Degree Celsius. Certain patterns and gestures unmistakably quote De Keersmaeker’s vocabulary: the walking, the running, the straight lines, the geometric repetition directly recalling Fase. It remains uncertain whether these references are gestures of reverence or acts of resistance—or perhaps both. Her sometimes inserts De Keersmaeker’s mechanical precision within scenes of pain and rigidity, as if to test or fracture the structure she inherited. The piece seems to narrate a slow detachment from that lineage, a counterproposition. Even the costumes speak this dual language: plain, everyday clothes—a nod to De Keersmaeker’s minimalist aesthetic—are overlaid with silvery leaves, a delicate touch of magical realism that marks Her’s distinctive signature.
Where De Keersmaeker’s choreography is grounded, earthbound, oriented toward the floor, Sung Im Her’s gaze turns upward—toward the light, the sun, perhaps even transcendence. Within the imagery of climate change, she constructs not only an environmental allegory but also a personal dialogue—a tension between the organic and the mechanical, the magical and the logical, the human and the elemental. And, quietly but powerfully, between the choreographer and her own inheritance.
Words by Léa Lightowlers
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