What was the starting point of 1 Degree Celsius?
The idea for 1 Degree Celsius grew from a quiet but persistent question that has accompanied me for years: how aware are we, truly, of the environmental crisis, and how do we choose to respond to it? I noticed that conversations often stop at the surface. In Korea, for instance, people speak about the weather, yet rarely about what it reveals about climate change. There is a form of collective avoidance at work.
The turning point came through a conversation with my 10 years old son. He told me they speak about the state of planet at school and thinking about the future made him feel so sad and helpless. I was struck by the idea that we are handing down not only a damaged world, but also a burden of despair. When I asked him what we could do, he answered with disarming simplicity: we could walk more. Meaning use cars less, consume less energy. Walk, because it is good for the health, and better for the Earth. That word stayed with me: walk. The most ordinary yet, the most universal and natural gesture. Before language, technologies, we walked... In its humility lies its power. Walking became the thread of the project, a minimal action that contains a rhythm and its own way of inhabiting the world.
1 Degree Celsius was born from this realization: no gesture is too small. Just as a one-degree shift in temperature has major consequences, small collective gestures can transform our future. On stage, the walk evolves from organic flow to mechanical repetition, from nature to the industrial city; mirroring how human desire has reshaped the planet. Yet within this transformation remains a fragile hope: that the same humanity capable of harm is also capable of care. I want to offer something for people to feel and reflect upon. How far have we driven? What are we doing to this Earth and to ourselves?
Why do you believe that dance is like a powerful medium for raising environmental awareness?
For me, dance is one of the most powerful tools of awareness precisely because it exists beyond language. Words are essential but the body reaches places that language cannot. Movement is an abstract grammar, and in that abstraction lies its strength: it allows each spectator to connect through their own memories, sensations, and lived experiences. A single gesture can resonate in a hundred different ways, yet still be shared.
This is where dance can open a space of perception. It does not deliver solutions, nor does it pretend to resolve the crises we face. What it can do is bring the problem close enough to be felt, to be touched emotionally, physically, so that it re-enters public consciousness and debate. We often believe we can discard what troubles us, as if throwing something away removes it from our lives. But everything returns, amplified. Our actions inevitably come back to us. Art allows us to confront this cycle.
In 1 Degree Celsius, I began with the simplest action: walking. On stage, dancers collide, align, and merge until they create a shared collective identity. Through repetition and transformation, the walk let appear natural landscapes, then gradually shifts into a calculating one: counting steps, synchronizing, adapting to the rhythms of the city, merging into industrial patterns. Within this evolution lies a central question: we have driven the crisis through desire, yet we are also the ones capable of imagining another way forward. Humanity remains at the core; movement as embodiments of our struggle to respond to the Earth’s changing state.
This dialectic between the individual and the collective extends into the score and scenography. The music is not a literal translation of climate data, but it is inspired by rising temperatures — pulses that accelerate, rhythms that harden into urban drives, textures that feel at once cold and tense. In one movement, the sound evokes organic horizons; in another, it becomes an industrial machinery with an insistent beat. The musicians hold the rhythmic structure while the dancers fracture it, breaking and reconfiguring time. They must listen to one another, read one another, and negotiate space together.
At its centre, the work returns the triptych of body, music, and light.
Your style is often described like a hypnotic minimalism. How do you balance this signature with complex societal issues?
For me, limitation is not a restriction; it is the very condition that sparks creativity. When dealing with complex societal issues, the temptation is to add: more images, more symbols and more spectacle. During the early stages of 1 Degree Celsius, we experimented with many elements: plastic materials, flags, projections, even ideas of artificial rain. They were visually striking, but they led the audience toward illustration rather than experience. I realized I needed to move in the opposite direction — to reduce.
So we began removing one by one the excess layers. What remained were the bodies and a strong, sculptural use of light. Within this limitation, I wanted to test whether the essential story could exist without these intermediaries. By wiping the stage almost clean, we return to the point: the body as harmony, the body as community, the body as manifesto. The dancers’ bodies became the primary site of meaning — bodies that endure, collide, support, and reorganize themselves. In that stripping away, the work revealed its true subject: humanity as a collective organism, capable of resilience even when everything else is gone.
This reduction is not aesthetic minimalism for its own sake; it is an ethical gesture. Using fewer resources, less energy, it asks whether we can confront the crisis with our bare hands — without technological illusions, without distancing devices — through presence, responsibility, and mutual reliance.
How do your rehearsal sessions work?
For this project, rehearsals took place across continents: I was in the UK while all the dancers were in Korea. We had to rely on Zoom. It was challenging, because the choreography is entirely counted and extremely precise. I could not physically guide them, and they could only observe me through the small screen. Yet we made it work!
The conditions required rigorous planning. Korean dancers rarely have fixed schedules; many juggle several jobs to survive, teaching, rehearsing, and performing multiple shows a day. I often had only four hours with them. Although the material ultimately comes from the dancers, I had to arrive with a clear structure. To help them navigate the space, I drew a detailed map in my notebook, inspired by the lines of an imaginary city. Counting steps became their only way to orient themselves. It demanded intense concentration — a real challenge to make this world exist.
So I remembered the first thing I asked the dancers was simple: show me your best walk, and then this question: can you count? (laugh).
Interview conducted by Julie Ruocco in January 2026.