Phantom Limbs of Comfort Women: Exploring the Complexity of Pain through Dance

This research aims to articulate the complexity of pain and suggest movement as a potentially useful tool for communication of pain by focusing on Korean comfort women as a case study. Comfort women were victims of sexual slavery, abused by the Japanese military during World War II and the Japanese colonization of Korea. The pain of comfort women has many dimensions including physical, psychological, and social. Two original works of choreography, Fever Dreams (2014) and Nondisjunction (2015) were created in order to communicate the pain of comfort women to the dancers and the audience. Dance as a practice has the potential to promote higher self-awareness and facilitate the embodiment of unfamiliar pain. This study recommends further research in using movement as a clinical tool for pain assessment.