A half-hour's drive east from the center of Seoul through bumper-to-bumper early-evening traffic on the elevated Ch'onggyegogaro Freeway brings you to the sudden calm of the Children's Garden Park. Just outside its walls stands a handsome marble complex of modern buildings: the Sun Hwa School--the School of the Little Angels.
Teenage girls and boys, friends, and family laugh, chat, and jostle one another as they enter the large white, gold, and scarlet concert hall of the Little Angels Performing Arts Center. With their light summer dresses, freshly pressed jeans, and shining hair, the youngsters seem very like their counterparts in the States.
Tonight the concert--a kind of graduation recital--is presented by the senior class' seventy-member symphony orchestra. The program emphasizes Mozart, opening with the overture from The Marriage of Figaro, and continuing with the Concerto for Two Violins and Orchestra in C major, K. 190. The solo violinists are two serious and concentrated young women wearing full-length gowns of yellow and peach, who play before the black- and white-clad orchestra.
The final number on the program is an original piano concerto by seventeen-year-old Cho Sang-Ook, fittingly enough known to his fellow students as Wolfgang Cho. His professor plays the concerto. The audience gives the youthful composer, his teacher, and the orchestra an explosive standing ovation.
Long after the concert, the students stand about in small groups discussing the performances, as friends bring bouquets of flowers to the performers. A few days later, the Korea Herald carries a story about a young woman violinist, a graduate of the Little Angels School, who has won a first prize in a music competition over students from a number of other distinguished art and music schools in Seoul.
Classic Korean Dance
A private day school emphasizing art and music instruction for children in the equivalent of the first through twelfth grades, the Little Angels School grew out of an effort to minister to the educational needs of a troupe of youthful dancers. The company, which was formed in 1965, is known as the Little Angels, and specializes in stylized renditions of classic Korean folk dances performed by girls aged seven to fifteen. In the years since its formation, the Little Angels troupe has given more than two thousand performances in forty countries during sixteen world tours, and has appeared in two hundred television specials worldwide. It has performed for the queen of England and a number of U.S. presidents, and has been termed "phenomenal" by Anna Kisselgoff of the New York Times.
Private music and art schools are not unknown in Korea, but the Sun Hwa School (as the school is known in Korea, and which translates roughly as "making harmony") is the only one to have its own world-touring, professional-caliber dance troupe. It is also the only school to have generated a ballet company--the Universal Ballet Company--which has toured the world to very high notices from major dance critics.
The Universal Ballet Company, which came into being in 1984, developed from the classical dance department of the Little Angels School. The ballet's
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