ABSTRACT
Park Il-kyu trained extensively in the United States with the aid of fellowships from the Korean Cultural Foundation and the Asian Cultural Council. He received his M. FA. in Dance from New York University, and studied ballet with Larry Rhodes, modern dance with Don Redlich and Ruby Shang, and choreography with Linda Tarney. He enrolled at the Joffrey School, but soon tired of that because it was all classical ballet. He was a soloist with the Korea National Ballet at that time, doing only classical ballet. Then an Austrian dancer came here park actually forget his name. That dancer picked him out for a major role his piece, which was "modern ballet". The Korean dancers went there to study, and brought the idea back to Korea. So at that time people had Korean traditional dance and creative dance co-existing, but eventually creative dance became more popular, especially after the Korean War in the 1950s.
