Sung Im Her took her first dance class at age 19. She didn’t know what she wanted to do with the discipline until she caught Anne Teresa de Keersmaeker’s seminal Drumming, after completing two dance degrees. And it was another decade before the Korean dancer committed to choreography. You can tell. At 49, she doesn’t obsess over voice or signature style, as a younger artist might. Her goals are more vast and elusive: to translate social issues into atmosphere. The recent 1 Degree Celsius takes that “atmosphere” literally. Inspired by the harrowing warming of climate, 1 Degree Celsius imagines its seven dancers (including the choreographer) as both the sickening air and the people who breathe it. They do simple things—fall, crawl, spin, collapse—in rough-edged unison, and finally slowly wave large plastic flags of shame and surrender to however much of Earth will still have them. This plainspoken, messily human dance of despair and tiny hope is the first of Her’s to tour France and the U.S. —Apollinaire Scherr