hankyoreh

Bernd Chrischilles, owner and operator of the website kpopdance.de and several K-pop dance studios in major cities throughout Germany, during his video chat with the Hankyoreh in late April.

“Our studios are probably the only ones in Germany that train K-pop dance instructors.”

Privately operated K-pop dance studios have become a booming business in Germany. Type “K-pop dance” into a German-language search engine, and you’ll find quite a few studios advertising their classes.

At the end of April, the Hankyoreh had a video chat with 52-year-old Bernd Chrischilles, who operates the website kpopdance.de and several K-pop dance studios in major cities in Germany, including Berlin. A resident of Cologne, Chrischilles has had to close his studios for five weeks now because of the COVID-19 pandemic.

“Our studios are probably the only K-pop dance studios that can help people make the move to Korea,” Chrischilles said. He runs Lindy Hop (a type of swing dance) and K-pop dance studios in Cologne and Dusseldorf, on the Rhine River, and K-pop dance studios in several cities in the Ruhr, about 500km to the west of Berlin. His studios employ 10-12 teachers, serving 700 students in 30 or so courses. The classes vary in size, from as small as five to six to as many as 20. Chrischilles recently opened a new branch in Berlin, his eighth studio.

Chrischilles got into dance through the Lindy Hop. He’d been a marketing manager in 2004, when he decided to make dancing his career. In 2006, he opened Hopspot, a studio focusing on the Lindy Hop. Currently, he and his wife are running both Lindy Hop studios and K-pop dance studios.

“About five years ago, we were looking for dancers who could teach a new type of dance, something different than the Lindy Hop. Around that time, a Korean dancer with some actual experience in a K-pop group came by and offered to set up a K-pop dance workshop. It was through that chance meeting that we ended up opening a K-pop dance studio.”

Dancers from one of Chrischilles’ studios put on a performance.

One particularly passionate student who’d been involved since the early stages of that workshop went on to compete in the qualifying rounds of the K-Pop World Festival, which was held in South Korea in 2016. That naturally led to the formation of a professional team.

“We really wrestled with the question of how to run our classes and what routines to use,” said Chrischilles, who played a big role in those efforts. “The Lindy Hop is different from K-pop, but when you’re teaching or learning dance, the rules and the basics are the same.”

Today, the students in their K-pop dance classes are in their teens and 20s, ranging in age from 11 to 27. “If you ask young people why they’re so passionate about K-pop dance, they’ll tell you that K-pop dance is unique, something that makes them different from others,” Chrischilles said. “They feel that, while K-pop music is already well-known, being able to do K-pop dance makes them special. They have a very strong bond with others in the community, too. Even outside of class, they meet up personally, share interests, and become friends.”

The studio offers its own course for becoming a dance teacher. The students are monitored closely, and those who have the most passion and talent are put on the instructor track. Chrischilles’ dance studios operate on a four-level system. At the lowest level, students learn a few simple dance routines, but once they reach the highest one, known as the master level, they have to learn all the moves for a given song. Instructors choose the songs based on what students are interested in, which is nearly always the latest release. So they end up learning a new song and a new routine every two weeks.

“When that BTS song set a new record on YouTube a while back, Sat.1 [a private television network in Germany] visited our studio and asked if they could record us doing a dance for the song. The song had only been out for one day, but the teachers learned the choreography in one day so that the network could record them guiding the students through the dance.”

Chrischilles performs the Lindy Hop, a type of American swing dance, with his wife. (provided by Chrischilles)

Based on trends prior to the COVID-19 outbreak, demand for classes was on the rise. Chrischilles estimated that there are about a thousand young people in Germany who are into K-pop dance. What makes Germany adolescents so passionate about it? “K-pop is special first of all because of the positive energy in the music. It’s also a good way for teenagers to distinguish themselves from other people. The exotic elements and everything else connected with K-pop stars is coordinated so professionally, and every single move in every single song is instilled with an immense amount of energy. I guess those are the things that captivate K-pop dance fans. There’s also a huge degree of interest in the Korean language. Most of the students who are learning dance want to learn Korean, too. We even teach them some basic Korean, and we use Korean greetings in class.”

How does Chrischilles hope to make it through the coronavirus era? “My goal is to stay close to our students. Our teachers are in touch with individual students to help them learn on their own. They send the students a video of a few dance moves, which they can then repeat and practice on their own. But what people really enjoy about K-pop dance is getting together to communicate and share our feelings, which is why it’s so hard to do dance classes online. We’re trying to encourage the students by reassuring them that this too will pass and that we’ll soon all be dancing together. To be sure, this is a really tough time for everyone, financially speaking.”

By Han Ju-yeon, special contributor in Berlin

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