hankyoreh

Although their debut album has not been released yet, the Dallae Music Band is already upbeat, hoping to hit it big. The five-woman band, all North Korean defectors, has made a string of media appearances at home and abroad and signed with Seoul's leading entertainment firm.

While anything related to North Korea sounds off-key to the highly commercialized South Korean entertainment world, the young women believe they have their own specialty to show -- North Korea-style music and dance.

"Some say, 'What can North Korean defectors do?'," Kang Yu-eun, 19, who plays accordion for the band, said.

"When we hear that label, defectors, about us, our hearts get heavy," she said, "We want to show we are from the North and that we have dance and music to show."

Kang and the four other members, aged 19 through 28, are trying to succeed in the local entertainment industry with their artistic talent developed in the North. Working from 6 a.m. to midnight and sometimes sleeping at their training home in southern Seoul, they dream of becoming famous - minus the label of a "defector band."

The band's debut album is to be released next month with the title song "Dandy," a sweet love song that combines the South Korean trendy fox-trot genre with North Korean high-pitched singing style and is presented with cute choreography borrowed from North Korea. The song sounds like a North Korean song, not with propaganda lyrics but phrases like "100 years is not enough for your love for me" or "Sharalala, my love, you're my dandy."

Having defected from the North over the past several years, they are reluctant to say where they came from or why they left because of fear of persecution of their relatives. Some have changed their names.

Han Ok-jeong, the oldest member and lead vocalist, who sang for the propaganda band of the North's Workers' Party until she defected in 1998, says the members want to leave their past behind and rebuild their lives here. Even the sight of a movie set built to look like Panmunjom, where they recently went to shoot a music video, was painful, she said Panmunjom is the truce village inside the demilitarized zone separating the two Koreas.

"We are laughing and making jokes here in Panmunjom, but if we were really there, we just can't. It's a place of pain," she said during a rehearsal for the filming of the band's music video at Seoul Studio Complex in Namyangju, northeast of Seoul, where there are recreations of the Joint Security Area of Panmunjom and traditional Korean houses.

One of the biggest differences they face in the South is language. Although language does not seem to be a problem for defectors in the South, they are often embarrassed to hear lots of English words used in the entertainment world. Words like "ready," "action" and "go" are still new to them.

Unlike most South Korean bands that use English names, their band name "Dallae" is a pure Korean word -- a wild berry that ripens in the spring -- something warm and sweet that they hope will help thaw relations between the peoples of the South and the North.

Kim Yong-cheol, their manager from Orange Entertainment, said Dallae may be the first of its kind in the South, where North Korean defectors mostly live outside the mainstream, but not the last.

"Someday we will see South Korean singers perform with North Korean orchestras, and vice versa. Just we are seeing that a little earlier. A band like this won't be uncommon," he said.

Seoul, July 22 (Yonhap News)