Martha and the Swans: BTS, “Black Swan,” and Cold War Dance History Available to Purchase

In “Martha and the Swans: BTS, ‘Black Swan,’ and Cold War Dance History,” Yutian Wong situates stage performances of BTS’s “Black Swan” as the end result of the culture wars that took place in theaters across East and Southeast Asia in the 1950s. With Martha Graham’s abstract expressionism and the Bolshoi’s classicism representing aesthetic extremes on a shared bill, stage performances of “Black Swan” embodies this history. In her close reading of three different stagings of “Black Swan,” Wong argues that taken as a whole, the multiple versions of the stage performance utilize performance conventions, choreographic structures, movement motifs, and costume choices that reference the two most common tropes of Cold War dance history (Graham vs. the Swan) and mirrors back the end result—a reflection on the condition of a K-Pop idol as a product of Cold War culture wars.