Ochre wall, plum table, turquoise vase, a spray of pink, red and white flowers – all of it fades into the background in the presence of Korean choreographer Eun-Me Ahn. It is just past breakfast time at a modern hotel in Amsterdam, where her company is performing, and she easily outshines our tasteful decor as she gives me a twirl to show off today’s outfit: white dress printed with giant daisies, fluorescent lime net skirt, scarlet trousers, pink flip-flops – and a smile that beams like the sun. The woman before me may be 60 years old but I can readily see her as the endlessly energetic little girl who, she tells me, never stopped, never slept, and would make up little dance dramas every day.
It was colour, in fact, that first brought Ahn to dance, at the age of five. “Usually in our society we wear black, grey, dark …” – she elongates the words into yawns of tedium – “but one day on the street I saw a group moving together wearing red. I went over and asked them: what is this? And they said: dance.”
