Julia Moon Shoots for the Stars
June 18, 2004
Like baseball players, the most talented dancers go west, where ballet companies offer artistic challenges, status on the international dance stage and above living wages. Principal ballerina Yuan Yuan Tan took that path to the San Francisco Ballet, as did Sue Jin Kang of Stuttgart Ballet and Miyako Yoshida of England’s Royal Ballet, to name a few.
Julia Moon, on the other hand, traveled in the reverse direction from the United States to Korea. In the process, she helped secure Asia first-class citizenship in the sometimes-stodgy ballet world.
Born in Washington, D.C., Moon danced professionally with the Washington Ballet as a teenager. But in 1984 she moved to Seoul to help start the Universal Ballet, bankrolled by her father-in-law, the controversial religious leader Rev. Sun Myung Moon. For nearly two decades, she was the company’s undisputed star.
Back in 1991, I saw Moon perform in Tokyo. As the lead in Shim Chung, the company’s signature piece, she was so delicate and if movement could be poetic, well then, so poetic.
Despite her artistic accomplishments, Moon had critics. When the Kirov Ballet invited her to guest star in its production of Giselle, some attributed her success to the financial support of Rev. Moon. A well-known dance mistress for the American Ballet Theater said she doubted Moon would ever become a dancer for the “world market.”
When asked about the criticism, Moon denied knowing about any such thing. “I’m hearing this for the first time,” she says resolutely, though without a hint of anger. Perhaps she is so sheltered, she is protected from bad news. Or maybe, she is so confident in her purpose, she has no time for detractors.
Now the general director for the Universal Ballet, Moon was in San Francisco to promote the company’s first appearance in the Bay Area. The company will bring its full-length ballet Romeo and Juliet to UC Berkeley’s Zellerbach Theater in August.
“For the past 20 years, all the focus has been on production and dancers,” she says. “We were not able to develop promotion and planning and PR, because we were so busy raising the standards of the product.”
The product currently attracts an international audience. Under the leadership of Oleg Vinogradov, the former artistic director of the Kirov Ballet, Universal Ballet regularly tours Asia and Europe, and employs some 20 dancers from across the globe, from Russia to the United States, Turkey to China. The other 40 members of the company are Korean.
The company also has two world-class schools, one in Seoul and the other in Washington, D.C., which boast a long list of medallists in international ballet competitions.
Moon says growing up she only knew of two Asian ballerinas, Yoko Ichino of the National Ballet of Canada and Yoko Morishita, who made frequent guest appearances with American Ballet Theater.
These days, she says, “In almost every major company you’ll find Japanese, Korean and Chinese dancers.” At this year’s prestigious Prix de Lausanne ballet competition, Asian dancers, two Korean girls and a Japanese girl, won three out of the eight scholarships awarded, she notes.
“In Lausanne they are looking at the Korean schools,” she says. “They are interested in the training there because they see Korea is doing something right.”
It doesn’t hurt that the Universal Ballet organization is generously supported by Rev. Moon, whose empire includes ownership of the Washington Times and UPI Press Agency. Unlike other companies that are dealing with funding cuts, the Universal Ballet has enough cash to produce full-length classics and repertory works by today’s best choreographers. It also hires the best teachers, coaches and costume and lighting designers, and has built state of the art studio complexes.
Moon dismisses any notion that the church has influence over the company. “Rev. Moon is not trying to promote his name,” she says. “We’re not doing bible ballets or religious works, we’re doing the classics. It’s the beauty of ballet that promotes goodness. It doesn’t need to be related to anything religious.”
Personally, Moon is deeply connected to the Unification Church. She is the daughter of an upper-class Korean American family, and her father is one of Rev. Moon’s closest supporters. She married Rev. Moon’s son in the 1980s after he died in a car crash.
She trained in Korea, the London’s Royal Ballet School and Monaco’s Princess Grace Academy of Classical Dance, before dancing professionally with the Ohio Ballet and Washington Ballet.
At the Universal Ballet, Vinogradov and other top teachers coached her, and she was given coveted roles and performing opportunities. As the company toured America and Europe, with stops at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, New York State Theater and the Sadler’s Wells Theatre, even naysayers seemed persuaded that the Universal Ballet deserved international status. Reviews were positive, and critics recognized Moon as a first-class artist.
Surely she could have left Korea for any number of troupes in the United States or Europe, but she remained loyal to the Universal Ballet. Similarly, she says, the current crop of dancers could easily embark on careers in the West.
“I have to be able to offer them something equal to or better than the other companies,” she says. “For dancers, what is important is casting, repertory and what choreographers and teachers there are to work with them. … The last is salary.
“The artistic elements are more important because they are artists and if they wanted to be rich they wouldn’t have started ballet anyhow.”
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