On March 20, 1926, a 14-year-old Korean girl was in Seoul, watching a performance of the internationally renowned dancer Baku Ishii and his troupe.

Her name was Choi Seung-Hee, and she was so inspired by this Japanese pioneer of avant-garde dance that two days later she was aboard a Seoul-Pusan train, heading to Tokyo, where she would study under this master of modern dance.

Choi, portraying a bodhisattva in this photo, captivated novelist Yukio Mishima.

Little did she know, she was on her way to becoming a star, whose career would last from the 1930s to 1945 and take her to the top theaters in Europe and the Americas.

Based in Tokyo, Choi was known as Sai Shoki in accordance with the customary Japanese way of reading her Korean kanji name. A new documentary movie directed by Tomoko Fujiwara has brought the career of this almost legendary dancer into a clearer focus.

"Almost legendary" because Choi completely vanished from the Japanese scene after the end of World War II.

About a year after the end of Japan's colonial rule of Korea, brought on by the war's end, she moved to North Korea from Seoul, partly because her Marxist husband An Mak chose the North and partly because she had been blacklisted in postwar South Korea due to the erroneous belief that she was a pro-Japan artist.

An, who once served as North Korea's vice minister for cultural affairs, was purged in 1958. In November 1967, Asahi Shimbun reported that Choi and her family members had been detained by North Korean authorities. Since then, her fate and whereabouts have been unknown.

Because of these circumstances, Choi was neglected and almost forgotten by South Korea until the late 1980s, when the Seoul Olympics brought a slight thaw in relations with the North. Now, according to Fujiwara, there are plans in South Korea to make a TV drama based on Choi's life.

Tomoko Fujiwara directed the documentary "Densetsu no Maihime: Che Sun Hi."

Fujiwara had her own reservations about making this film. "I asked myself, 'Is it right for a Japanese to make a documentary about this great dancer from Korea?' " she said. "But I decided to go ahead because time is running out. I had to undertake the film now while people who knew Choi are still living."

In the film, titled "Densetsu no Maihime: Che Sun Hi (Choi Seung-Hee: A Legendary Dancer)," Kim Mae-Ja, South Korea's leading female dancer, visits Japan and even China to retrace Choi's career and her artistic endeavors to revive and reinvigorate traditional Korean dance and fuse it into Western-style modern dance, thus creating a new, accessible theatrical art.

The movie's approach helps to familiarize the audience not only with Choi and Kim, but also the world of Korean dance. It includes performances of various traditional Korean dances and performances by Kim and her students at her Changmu Art Academy in Seoul.

"Kim is not necessarily following the same path as Choi," Fujiwara said. "Choi's foundation as a dancer was Ishii's modern dance while Kim thoroughly mastered the basics of traditional Korean dance.

"In her own way Choi assimilated traditional Korean dance, which she had seen as a child, and skillfully integrated it into modern dance," Fujiwara added. "Kim, while steeped in traditional dance, is modernizing it to express the feelings of contemporary women."

Fujiwara is the first filmmaker to focus her camera on this subject, but she is following in the footsteps of several writers.

Yuzaburo Takashima, a former stage manager of Nichigeki Theater, once a landmark theater of Tokyo's Ginza area, published a biography titled "Sai Shoki," in 1959 and an expanded edition in 1981, which included notes written by several people who knew Choi or had seen her performances.

In 1994, Takashima, Chong Byong Ho, a South Korean ethnographer, and Kim Yong Gwon, a writer born in Japan, published a photobook with text titled "Seiki no Bijin Buyoka: Sai Shoki (Sai Shoki: A Beautiful Dancer of the Century)" from publisher MT Shuppan Co., Tokyo.

Choi's career is a story of an artist from a colony struggling to establish her own style and identity in the country that ruled her own, and to raise the quality of her art to an international level.

"Through the documentary, I would like the audience to feel the strength of Korean dance and the power of Choi's art, which easily transcended national boundaries," Fujiwara said.

"I also want them to know about this wonderful woman. She had an amazing ability to do the one thing she undertook thoroughly and completely. I think what was behind this was her anger and agony over the fact that her nation had become a Japanese colony."

One of the things that distinguished Choi's art was a strong following among Japanese literati.

In autumn of 1934, Yasunari Kawabata, who later won the Nobel Prize for Literature, wrote in a magazine article: "Without hesitation, I would say Sai Shoki is the No. 1 (female dancer) in Japan.

"Sai Shoki's Korean dance teaches Japanese dancers of modern dance that basing one's dance on one's ethnic roots produces strength. Of course, Sai Shoki is not dancing Korean dance without modification. The life of her dance is derived from the fact that she has created new dance by renovating what is old, strengthening what has become weak and reviving what has become extinct."

Although belonging to a generation younger than Kawabata's, the celebrated novelist Yukio Mishima was also a fan of Choi, one who was fascinated by her dances that featured bodhisattvas.

"Around that time, I was attracted to beauty associated with or reminiscent of Buddhist statues," he said in a book published posthumously in 1973. "It seems that I developed this fondness after I bought a portrait of Sai Shoki at her last recital at Teikoku Gekijo Theater (in Tokyo in 1944).

"It was a seminude portrait from a Buddhist statue dance. The photograph seemed somehow erotic to me. I never got tired of looking at the photograph, in which a cloth decorated with just a few pieces of jewelry was draped over her body. This photograph was always kept deep inside a drawer of my desk."

Choi was born to a well-to-do family in Seoul in 1911, the year following Japan's annexation of Korea. However, by the time Choi began to study dance under Ishii, her family's fortune was gone, due to the social and economic change brought by Japan's colonial rule.

In October 1927, 11/2 years after she joined Ishii's troupe, Choi was already performing solos in the troupe's show back in Seoul. (A Korean bank employee was so moved by her performance that he quit his job and joined Ishii's troupe.)

Her initial stint with Ishii eventually ended though. In 1929, at age 18, she left his troupe to open her own dance studio in Seoul. Looking back at her days at Ishii's studio, Choi said in a newspaper interview: "For those three years, I practiced and practiced, forgetting myself and everything."

But she had become skeptical because Ishii's style was becoming oriented toward mainstream entertainment and the troupe's direction depended too much on Ishii's creativity. Choi had a strong desire to create something new. While she didn't attain success with her school, she did find a husband in Seoul, a Marxist literary theorist, with whom she had a daughter in 1932.

Choi returned to Ishii's troupe in March 1933 and by fall of that year, she reached a turning point in her career. It came in her performance of "Eheya Noara (Dance of the Carefree)." It was the first Korean piece she had ever performed in Japan and the first of a series inspired by traditional Korean dance.

The piece proved to be a hit. The day following that performance, newspapers reported of an amazing dancer, praising Choi's formidable physique and versatile chorographic talent.

In "Eheya Noara," the dancer wore a traditional Korean hat with a broad brim and a long, loose robe fastened with a narrow string and danced slowly but cheerfully, smiling throughout.

It was actually Ishii who proposed that Choi perform Korean pieces in Japan, although she initially resisted the idea. Ishii later

wrote: "I told her, 'If you want to embark on an international dancing career, you have to reconstruct the spirit of your nation and people and present it to the audience while using techniques and skills that are internationally accessible. If you don't perform Korean dance, who else will do it?' "

Fujiwara said that through her documentary, she rediscovered Ishii's greatness -- that his heart was big enough to accept Choi back and that he had ability to bring out the best in her.

When Choi held her first recital in September 1934, featuring "Eheya Noara" and other original pieces, she attracted many literati, including novelist Kawabata. By the end of 1935, Choi's face was a common sight in photo pages of magazines and advertisements, and it is said she earned 10 times more for performances than Ishii.

Choi's career reached its pinnacle from 1937 to 1940 during her tours of the U.S., Latin America and Europe. She made more than 140 appearances and at one point performed before an audience of 2,700 in Salle Pleyel, the largest theater of Paris.

During her overseas tours, although Choi carried the passport of a Japanese national, she started calling herself a Korean dancer in her programs, rather than a dancer from Japan, apparently to stress her native identity. According to Takashima, this was perhaps motivated by her husband An who, as an informal manager, was trying to promote Korean dance on the international scene. Such phrases as "Asia's Celebrated Dancer and "One of the World's Greatest Dancers" were also used.

Overseas newspapers showered praise on Choi. Paris Figaro wrote that with her sculpture-like lines, the marvelous expressiveness of her hands and the use of comical and sometimes menacing masks, Choi evoked a deeply emotional response.

Den Haag-Rotterdam Krant compared Choi to La Argentina (Antonia Merce y Luque), an acclaimed dancer of the late 1920s and early 1930s who helped establish Spanish dance as a theatrical art.

After Japan entered the Pacific War, Choi, like other artists, had to entertain Japanese troops in Korea, Manchuria and China. She, however, accomplished certain feats at a time when Japan was waging total war in the Asia-Pacific region.

In December 1942, she held a 17-day-run recital at Teikoku Gekijo Theater (Teigeki), appearing in 24 performances in a row. She put on a similar performance in early 1944, again at Teigeki, appearing in 23 shows, 20 days in a row. This was her last public performance in Japan.

In his book Takashima recounts her swan song: "In the rear seats, I noticed a group of people in formal Korean clothing. As soon as Sai Shoki appeared on the stage, majestically wielding two large swords to percussion accompaniment, they cheered in Korean and the whole theater was temporarily filled with their voices.

"It was as if the anger of the oppressed people went back and forth between the stage and the audience's seats. People who were distressed felt joy, people with sadness found hope and their every dissatisfaction with Japanese society disappeared through the heavenly glory of Madam Sai's dance."

"I cannot forget the power these people showed as a race. I felt something akin to fear," he wrote.

Tomoyoshi Murayama, a playwright and stage director, summarizes Choi's wartime activities, in an essay quoted in Takashima's book:

"During the Pacific War, when other dancers followed the government policy, performing dances aimed at whipping up war sentiment, she resolutely resisted the trend and never performed such dances," he wrote.

He notes that none of her Teigeiki recitals pandered to Japanese militarism. The pieces were either traditional Korean dance, or Oriental and Buddhist pieces, which employed little movement and had a mystic quality. "This was a wise and courageous selection of pieces," Murayama wrote.

Although Fujiwara could not find films of Choi's performances in Japan, her documentary contains rare treats. One is a color promotional film, apparently produced in the U.S., that shows Choi's bodhisattva dance and another dance, perhaps somewhat autobiographical in its themes of exile and unwilling bondage, dance portraying an ancient Chinese beauty sent to a barbaric land for a marriage of political convenience.

Fujiwara's movie also includes an archive film showing a young, seminude Ishii performing an avant-garde piece titled "A Man in Captivity" and archive films from China showing Choi teaching dance to Chinese students and performing several pieces in Beijing, around the time of Korean War.

The late novelist Kim Dal Su, who settled in Japan in 1930, expressed the sentiment Koreans in Japanese society held toward Choi, in an essay also quoted in Takashima's book.

"Although I have never seen her performances, her existence itself represented hope for us. This was the most important thing. The mere fact that she existed made the world appear different. Only Choi Seung-Hee was able to capture the hearts of people who were struggling to find hope. But that was enough."