by Afnan.
It is the 7th year of BTS as artists. Amidst the anticipations surrounding their comeback album, Map of the Soul: 7, BTS drops the orchestral version of Black Swan (2020). The music video is an art film performed by MN Dance Company. This collaboration is part of CONNECT, BTS the global art project of experiments with multimedia art, and in effect, blurring boundaries to connect with different genres of art.
The title of the song points to Darren Aronofsky’s movie Black Swan (2010) which derives ‘inspiration’ from Satoshi Kon’s anime Perfect Blue (1997). Both of these movies are reflections on artistic identity and the process of artistic creation. As the protagonists, Nina and Mima immerse themselves into their respective arts, in the pursuit of perfection, they navigate through the world with reality unearthed from beneath their feet. These intertextual references set the tone for BTS to talk about the engagement with their art.
The music video begins with a quote by Martha Graham, American modern dancer, “a dancer dies twice – once when they stop dancing, and this death is the more painful.” This functions as an epigraph to the meaning art holds for BTS. Artists build their lives and identity on their art. In a profit and production oriented social framework, artists gamble with fate to live for their art. To create means to be. By extension, ceasing to create means ceasing to be. Artistic anxieties like losing passion or a creative burnout equate to a painful death of the self. Breaking the promise of lifelong commitment to art would imply the betrayal of the artist’s own self. Black Swan is an introspective meditation on the fears of the artist if their heart no longer races or resonates when music is played. The remnant self of the first death is an ungrounded wanderer as they have lost the passion that anchored them. This self cries out a ‘silent cry’, struggling, sinking. The artist is stranded in a bewildering spatial dimension of the vast ocean floor and a temporal realm of time suspended into eternity.
The artist delves deeper into themselves as an aimless seeker. The artist’s encounter with their shadows is illustrated in the choreography where the main dancer is controlled, restrained and dragged away by the shadows in a prison of light. “Let my own feet carry me, I’ll go in myself.” In Carl Jung’s map of the soul, the shadow archetype describes the repressed or denied facets of the self. This is similar to the theme of temptation BTS discussed in their WINGS album, a coming of age text. Conventional didactic narratives seek to moralize and purge temptation from the self. BTS talks about temptation as the soul’s voice that one must listen to rather than try to suppress, for temptation is the door to self-realisation. The same can be said of shadows. According to Jung, shadow integration refers to the process of assimilating the hidden aspects of the self into consciousness. This suggests that one must make peace with one’s darker sides rather than enter into conflict with them. In the movie Black Swan, this is depicted in Nina’s inner conflict between her persona (white swan) and shadow (black swan), and her eventual perfection of the role of the black swan, the inner journey into accepting her shadows.
BTS undertakes a similar inner journey and encounters their artistic selves. As they open their eyes, they find themselves in their workroom, the studio. Their inner journey of shadow integration indicates the rebirth of their artistic selves. A determination to create and to exist, guide them. “Film it now” becomes a soulful entreaty to record them in their elements, as a testimony to their art. Towards the conclusion of the music video, the shadows no longer inhibit the main dancer, rather they facilitate the main dancer’s movements. The shadows hold up the dancer who arms are outstretched in graceful flight. The shadows are in harmony with the self.
Kim Namjoon, the leader of BTS, talks about the pain embedded in the image of an unread book, thereby suggesting the significance of the audience who engages with their art. In the subtext of Black Swan, there is a silent request to not be dissected for a message or deeper meanings. The soul of the songs flaps its wings defiantly in the critic’s hands, a struggle against being analyzed, a refusal to be put down into standardized binary boxes of meanings. Instead Black Swan asks you to feel. Feel your own self in relation to the art. Feel it deeply with the artist. Art becomes a space of active interaction. Connect yourself to the art and ask, what feelings does it evoke in me?
Raw Whispers Magazine, edition 3.
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