people who couldn’t afford enough food to keep themselves
well fed. We didn’t have the fancy church buildings that
other churches had, but we ate barley when others ate rice and saved our
money a little at a time. We then shared that money with people who were
poorer than we. Our missionaries slept in unheated rooms by laying their
sleeping quilts on the bare cement floors. When meal time came, it was
common for them to stave off their hunger by eating a few cooked potatoes.
In every case, we did our best not to spend money on ourselves.
In 1963, we used the money we had saved this way to select seventeen
children and form a Seonghwa children’s dance troupe called the Little
Angels. Korea in those days had very little in the way of cultural performances.
We had nothing to show people from other countries, let alone
performances that we ourselves could watch and enjoy. Everyone was too
busy trying to survive to remember what Korean dance was like or even the
fact that we had a cultural heritage extending back five thousand years.
My plan was to have these seventeen children learn how to dance and
then send them out into the world. Many foreigners knew about Korea
only as a poor country that had fought a terrible war. I wanted to show
them the beautiful dances of Korea so that they would realize that the
Korean people are a people of culture. We could insist all we wanted that
we were a people of culture with a five-thousand-year tradition, but no one
would believe us if we had nothing to show them.
Our dances—with dancers dressed in beautiful, full-length hanboks,
gently twirling around—are a wonderful cultural heritage that can give a
new experience to Westerners who are accustomed to watching dancers
jump around with bare legs. Our dances are imbued with the sorrowful
history of the Korean people. The movements of Korean dance—in which
dancers keep their heads slightly bowed as if by force and move carefully so
as not be draw attention to themselves—were created by the Korean people,
whose five-thousand-year history has been filled with grief.
As the dancer raises one foot wrapped in white beoseon, the traditional
Korean leggings, and puts it forward to take a single step, she
turns her head gently and raises her hand. As I watch, the gentle subtlety
of her movements seems to melt away all the worries and frustrations in
my heart. There is no attempt to move the audience with a lot of words
spoken in a booming voice. Instead, each dance move, performed with
great gentleness and subtlety, moves the heart of the audience. This is
the power of art. It allows people who don’t understand each other’s
language to communicate. It lets people who don’t know about each
other’s history understand each other’s heart.
In particular, the innocent facial expressions and bright smiles of the
children would be certain to completely wipe away the dark image of a
country that had only recently been at war. I created this dance troupe
to introduce the dances from our country’s five-thousand-year history
to people in the United States, which was the most advanced country in
the world at that time. The society around us, however, heaped criticism on
us. Before even seeing the the Little Angels dance, they began to criticize.
“The women of the Unification Church dance day and night,” went
their outrageous criticism, “and now it looks like they’ve given birth
to children who also dance.” No such rumors could shake my resolve,
however. I was confident of showing the world what Korean dance was
like. I wanted to let the people who accused us of having danced naked
see the beautiful, gentle movements of dancers stepping lightly in their
beoseon leggings. These were not wild dances with twisting and turning
without rhythm. They were gentle dances by dancers clothed in the
traditional dress of our country.
