Korea Night gives culture and style the spotlight

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On Saturday, more than 600 people waited in a line that stretched from the ballroom on the third floor of Smith Memorial Student Union to the basement-level bowling alley, winding down four flights of stairs.

What were they eagerly waiting for?

Korea Night.

The annual event is put on by Portland State’s Korean Student Association. “It’s our biggest event of the year,” said Jason Kim, a sophomore accounting major and KSA’s president-elect.

“Korea Night is our main chance to fulfill our mission, which is to spread all the good things Korean culture has to offer,” Kim said.

Attendee Roxanne Nussbaumer, a senior studying applied linguistics, said the event provided “a good snapshot” of Korean culture. “For people who don’t know anything about Korea, this does a good job of giving them an idea.”

The sold-out crowd started the night watching Korean pop music videos—including the latest video from “Gangam Style” singer Psy—while enjoying a dinner of steamed white rice with marinated beef or fried tofu, spicy fermented cabbage and fried potato and noodles mixed with zucchini and vegetables.

As the audience finished eating, a video of a street orchestra performing “Arirang,” a famous Korean folk song, played, signaling the beginning of the show.

The first half of the night focused on traditional Korean culture. Professional artists performed a complex drum number and dance.

In the past, Korea Night has featured the more well-known art of taekwondo, but this year organizers decided to feature the older but less famous soo bahk do style of martial arts. A group of martial artists displayed their prowess in a demonstration that included sparring and a series of spinning kicks that chopped through wooden boards.

Members of the KSA also performed a traditional mask dance. Historically, the dance was performed by lower-class people for the more privileged upper classes. Through the medium of dance, the lower class was able to protest their oppression and mock their oppressors without punishment. Saturday’s dance told the story of a woman torn between the affections of two men—one rich, one poor.

A fashion show midway through the night marked the transition from traditional to modern Korean culture. Korean hip-hop dance group Soul Trigger wowed the crowd with their dancing. The four-man crew switched seamlessly from quick, intricate steps to moves so slow they perfectly mimicked the slow-motion shots favored in K-pop music videos.

One of the highlights of the night was the comedy skit performed by KSA members that pointed out the sharp contrast between how events unfold in Korean television dramas and how they occur in real life. Two couples, one in reality and one in TV-land, ate dinner, had a run-in with gangsters and shared an emotional moment in the emergency room, with much less touching results for the reality couple than the TV-land one.

After the skit, around 30 KSA members participated in a K-pop dance number, where dancers replicated the moves of many popular Korean music videos. The show ended with KSA and audience members alike dancing to a performance by Korean rock band Rewind.

It wasn’t easy to put on such a diverse night of entertainment for such a large crowd, organizers said. The extensive planning and preparation for Korea Night began during winter break, Kim said.

To decide which acts to feature, “we asked the Korean community what they wanted to see, and whatever was best we put on stage,” Kim said. After that, the performers spent four months rehearsing.

The crowd’s reaction showed that the KSA’s hard work paid off.

“It was a good combination of entertainment and information,” said Leah Clifford, a social science senior. “I’ll definitely come back next year.”