Dreamcatcher Returns To A Live Audience Stage, Adds To Achievements in Mid-October 2021
K-Pop — Dreamcatcher Recall
Dreamcatcher finally gets to see their fans in a festival of rock, K-Pop, and other music, punctuating a week of more firsts for the group.
In South Korea, mid-October brings with it the return of fall weather, with cooler temperatures and a move towards the last portion of the year. But as far as Dreamcatcher is concerned, this year also had something additional to come back around to — a live performance stage with an audience they could see and interact with. After last year’s KMDF had mostly socially distanced cars and this year’s Together Again K-Pop concert turned out to be unfortunately titled after moving online-only, the Jeonju Ultimate Music Festival signaled Dreamcatcher’s first opportunity to go back to at least some sense of normalcy with a “traditional” live performance.
A lot has changed since Dreamcatcher’s last appearance at JUMF during their debut year, not the least of which is the difference between then and now of the group’s first-time achievements, which continued to be added to. Let’s take a look at how the group went through both familiar and new territory this past week!
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Dreamcatcher’s return to the live audience stage didn’t disappoint, as they helped anchor a solid lineup of artists for the first day of JUMF 2021. The festival itself has always trended towards a more genre-diverse presentation, which has been great as a whole for people like me with different tastes in pop. This year was no different, with hard rock, trot, and ballad singers joining up with a variety of K-Pop artists to entertain an audience that braved light-to-medium rain conditions to watch some great performances. The above video link will take you straight to Dreamcatcher, but I’d take a peek at some of the other artists as well — they were definitely solid.
As for Dreamcatcher, they handled their two-song set wonderfully as always, performing their latest title track “BEcause” as well as 2020's “The Tree of Language” extended promotions B-side “Black or White”, with a brief little exchange with fans in the middle, where Dreamcatcher expressed their happiness at being able to see fans again, some of whom were armed with the lightsticks that the company debuted just this year. You could definitely tell that the group was ecstatic to finally perform in front of fans they could see again, and one can only hope that things continue to trend back towards normal to see more of that in the future.
One of the good things about a return to a traditional live audience stage was the return of fancams and fansite pictures from the event, long since missing from Dreamcatcher’s live performances due to COVID restrictions. JUMF 2021 provided an opportunity for fansites like S_invincible to capture high-quality images of the event and to catch yet another first for Dreamcatcher — Gahyeon being chosen to help MC the first day of the event along with MIRAE’s Dongpyo. Newly blonde-haired and excited, Gahyeon brought her bright energy and smiles to the stage as she helped talk about the event and introduce artists. I wrote a bit in the “Summer Holiday” retrospective that Gahyeon was being seen as more prominent lately, and being picked for MC duty was just one more tick in the column to support the argument. While there were a few first-time jitters on her part, Gahyeon did just fine and helped indirectly boost the group’s visibility with her additional work.
Speaking of firsts, Dreamcatcher reminded us this past week that one of those was the filming of a promotion video for one of their special edition merchandise packages. The DAY and NIGHT versions of these videos revealed an eerie vibe, set in what looked to be a forest with a vacation house and showcasing some of the imagery that we last saw during the “Nightmare” series of title tracks. Seeing how the behind-the-scenes played out, as the group and production crew filmed and took pictures throughout a very busy day and night, showed off just how much work it took to do this video and photoshoot. And of course, there were the always-entertaining candid moments and short interviews by the members, from JiU, Dami, and Handong planning out how they’d be posing to Yoohyeon vibing along with classic song “What Makes You Beautiful” (which incidentally the group covered in 2017) only to accidentally hit the makeup artist behind her.
Accompanying this making film this past week were two online fansigns for “Mysterious Mansion” as well, with the group getting to have more interactions with some lucky fans. The delay in these fansigns due to their self-quarantine seemed to be a hidden blessing, as they coincided with many people getting their merchandise bundles from Dreamcatcher’s vendor partners. I think anyone who orders will be pleased — while there have been a few minor packing issues (mostly with the inside of the “Dreamcatcher Mind” version), for the most part, it seems fans will be pleased, especially considering the fact that the boxes and their contents appear to be quite a bit larger than usual. Hopefully, Dreamcatcher’s first foray into a dedicated merchandise bundle of this nature will turn out to be a successful one.
In a bit of a delayed “first” from all the way back in July, fans began finally receiving their ordered Crossroads DVD packages from MyMusicTaste. While these have no doubt been a long time coming, and I certainly hope that Dreamcatcher Company and MyMusicTaste work to avoid any delays in the future, the production quality of this package can’t be denied. The above unboxing video gives you a bit of an idea about all the goodies included (with two photobooks, the DVD media of the concert plus behind-the-scenes, and posters/high quality still pictures), but for those of you who have yet to receive your order, this package is heavy, no doubt because of the hefty photobook content filled with concert and rehearsal stage pics. This is a great addition to any Dreamcatcher collection for sure and yet another reminder that 2021 is a year of milestones for the group.
As for the usual content for this week, we had things switch up just a bit for SuA’s regular appearance on Wendy’s Young Street. SuA, Wendy, and Taehyun teamed up on Thursday rather than Tuesday and worked in a K-Pop dedicated segment with quizzes and discussion, as well as a nice little bonus — all of them getting to sing and perform live. There were a bunch of nice highlights from this, but by far one of the most show-stealing was SuA’s rendition of 2PM’s “10 out of 10”, showing off her rapping and singing range. Due to this being pre-recorded, we didn’t get to see this live, but hopefully, the clips that got posted to the sbsyoungstreet Instagram will be enough to show just why SuA has secured a regular guest spot on the show.
One of the better parts of promotions is that we seem to get some time-delayed content long after they’re ended, and that’s what happened this week with Show Champion releasing a bit more of their backstage content, with Dreamcatcher featuring prominently at the beginning. This kind of stuff is always interesting to watch, especially as show appearances appear to have a ton of downtime and plenty of opportunities to catch groups to do fun little segments.
Dreamcatcher’s appearance on “The Man Who Grills Meat” also continued this past week, with part 3 finally getting to Dreamcatcher eating a healthy meal grilled right in front of them while swapping backstage stories with the host. As always for this channel, the subtitles will be a little delayed for this (part 2 has theirs up now), but even if you aren’t able to understand the language, you can tell this kind of casual conversation suits the group quite well. If the last part’s preview is any indication, however, the addition of wine should make for some entertaining talk when it drops.
We’re two weeks out from Dreamcatcher’s Halloween Midnight Circus concert, but no doubt the content keeps rolling on for the group. As always, I’ll be here to recap all the goings-on from one of K-Pop’s most unique and talented groups, so be sure to clap, follow, and signal boost the link to your Dreamcatcher fan friends! See you next week!
