Unstoppable Stones: Rihei's Infinite Path from Dance to Musical
Creatrip Team
2 months ago
Rihei, famed as leader of the dance crew CocaNButter from Mnet’s Street Woman Fighter, debuts in musical theatre with Sisyphus (running through March 8 at YES24 Stage). Playing the Poet (Poet) who sings poems, she tackles multi-role challenges across gender and age while adapting from explosive, short dance performances to the stamina-focused demands of musical acting. Born in Jeju, Rihei long admired musicals and kept that dream alongside a dance career; an audition for Orchard Musical Company became the chance to prove her ‘true’ passion when she moved the director to tears. Sisyphus interweaves Albert Camus’s themes and the myth of Sisyphus in a play-within-a-play about four actors in a postwar ruined theatre. Rihei describes the work as grueling but joyous (“so damn hard, so damn happy”), notes the physical shift from sprint-like dance to marathon-like musical runs, and vows to keep training in voice and acting to break stereotypes that dancers can’t be musical actors. She frames her future as “infinite,” committed to steadily “rolling the stone” forward on stage.
