Dancing the Spirits:
Korean Shamanism from Ritual to Stage to Screen

What if Korean shamanic dance isn’t just ritual, but a way for spirits to become visible, and a movement language that now reaches the global stage?

Korean religious life has never been organized around a single tradition. Buddhism, Confucian ritual, Christianity, and musok, usually translated as Korean shamanism, occupy the same neighborhoods and often the same households.

This lecture introduces that religious landscape before turning to musok‘s practitioners, the mansin, who are predominantly women and who conduct kut, rituals performed through music, costume, and dance.

Movement is my central concern. In a kut, dance is one way a spirit becomes present and recognizable. That vocabulary has since traveled to the concert stage, to the state’s heritage registries, and to global film culture, where K-Pop Demon Hunters borrows the shaman’s costumes and gestures for its idol heroines.

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