Dance
Beyond Dance with Dassy
A dancer slows down, reunites with her first artistic passion, and grows her creative process.
Lately, the world renowned dancer has been revisiting the drawing table and living a life of creativity by dancing, choreographing, teaching, drawing, and painting. Dassy, without a doubt, contains multitudes.
As August was coming to a close and just before Dance Your Style 2021 events kick off around the world, we got on the phone with Dassy to hear her tell her story in her own words.
Dassy and her art
© Jordan McLoughlin
Paper Origins
Growing up in South Korea, Dassy recalls constantly creating with her older sister by making cartoons, drawing, and coloring since she was three years old. “It’s more natural to me than dancing,” she says. An extremely shy girl, drawing was her main way of understanding the world. Dassy rarely spoke, her timidness rendering communication with others daunting. “I remember having a sketch book by my side all the time. Boys in my class would tease me and take it, bullying me. I was so shy that I couldn’t even get mad at them. At that time all I did was draw and cry,” she explains with a laugh. Drawing was so important to her, it was her whole world.
Until she found dance. Around nine or 10, Dassy started dancing and discovered her voice along with her footwork. She found a form of expression that let her translate the thoughts she used to only feel comfortable drawing into movements with her body, which gave her confidence. According to her, “as soon as I started dancing, my whole personality changed. I started talking about whatever I was feeling. I made friends easily. I completely stopped drawing and dancing became my passion.”
This passion led her to the United States, where she simultaneously learned English and launched a global, professional dancing career. Her life had little room for anything besides dance, especially drawing. Then March of 2020 arrived.
In progress
© Jordan McLoughlin
A Creative Pause
When the pandemic hit, Dassy’s life of constantly moving, dancing, teaching, and flying here to there came to a halt. She, like many people, found herself with one thing she hadn’t had for years: time. She filled it with revisiting her past skill of creating images. “I started teaching myself oil painting from YouTube videos or talking to my sister because she went to art school. It wasn’t as hard as I thought to get back into it because it had been such a big part of my life. It’s almost like drawing was my first language. I also felt very free doing it again, I didn’t judge myself,” she says.
COVID-19 also caused her creative process to change. She had been so used to creating with the intent of capturing people’s attention. Shocking people into watching her dances so mesmerizing they couldn’t look away. But when she was alone with her thoughts and no audience to speak of, her reason for creating shifted: “I’ve definitely listened to my inner self more during COVID. I’m asking what story I want to tell, who I want to focus on, what I want to share of myself.”
These inner thoughts are coming out in multiple ways for Dassy. She sifts through them using her visual thinking. Her choreography is becoming more narrative, translating her personal thoughts and ideas into fluid and striking movements. By reintroducing visual arts into her life, she is using images she creates both as complements to her dancing style and as mediums to explain what dance cannot.
Take her painting, Glitch “A,” of a delicate and powerful face that also seems as if it isn’t loaded properly on a web page. Dassy wanted to try painting the dance style she was practicing at the time: Animation, a genre known for creating the illusion of robotics or inhuman movement. Or, Glitch “Unexpressed,” which explores the presentation of her public persona versus the way she feels deep down. She says that even though her work has specific stories for her, she wants people to look and “just figure out how they feel” for themselves.
On display
© Jordan McLoughlin
Freedom in Visualization
Dassy visualizes a lot of things in her life. The movement and concept she wants to bring to life in her choreography, the ideas she wants to explore in her paintings. And even when dancing, when she wants to practice certains styles, she visualizes them first in her head. It makes sense that she would excel at both visual and performance art. She mentions that she’s thinking about trying her hand at film.
Dassy sees all creative outlets as ways to embrace yourself and your distinct way of thinking. She likes creating illusions with her dance and her art that make people lean a little closer, think a little deeper and embrace the weird. She wants people to question the rules and get out of whatever box people want to place them in. She finds freedom in painting, dancing and choreographing—using all mediums to tell her own story and explore her own mind. “Being who I am right now, I love myself like this. I will be forever creating, expressing, and feeling. I love this life.”
