On The InSomnia Road: The Best Of Dreamcatcher On Tour
K-Pop — Dreamcatcher Recall
With K-Pop’s Dreamcatcher returning to live concerts and travel in 2022, here’s a look at some of the most memorable and fun moments of the group’s previous tour stops.
Like many groups in K-Pop, and in the music industry in general, 2022 is the year that Dreamcatcher is returning to the touring road in order to perform in front of their global audience. For some groups and soloists from South Korea, this attempt to return to normalcy after two years (and counting) of a worldwide pandemic is the first opportunity for them to come on out to see fans outside of their native country. But for Dreamcatcher, this is old hat. Built from the beginning to be a group that has touring as a focus, Dreamcatcher has been traveling the world since their debut year in 2017, visiting cities and countries all over the world, and forging the international fanbase that would become some of the core of their support. In that time there’ve been plenty of fun and memorable moments captured by fans, so with Dreamcatcher soon to make some new ones, here’s a look at some of the best of Dreamcatcher on tour.
[embed]https://youtu.be/TQkFaz_zCCI?t=269[/embed]
Date: April 7th, 2019
Concert: Invitation to Nightmare in Seoul
Part of the K-Pop concert experience is fun little activities during audience-speaking parts during shows, and Dreamcatcher has taken full advantage of them over the years. Some segments are meant to play to the crowd, which is exactly what JiU was doing when proposing the group do a “Cute Dance to Sexy Music” competition. It’s always fun to see the different members meet these challenges in their own unique ways, from Gahyeon playing to her maknae/youngest member vibes, to Yoohyeon and Handong choosing to do theirs together by running around to the crowd to Dami dancing completely differently to the song’s pace. But without spoiling anything, Siyeon essentially wins this competition hands-down.
For a similar fun game (with pretty much the same outcome), you can check out Dreamcatcher trying to compete doing Gahyeon’s opening rap part in “PIRI” in Manila.
[embed]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nedCp7R8sqc[/embed]
Date: December 8th, 2017
Concert: 1st Tour Fly High — Brazil
For a first-year group from a smaller company, going on tour might seem like a risky prospect, especially when you do so despite more than half the group participating in a highly-visible survival show meant in part to garner more exposure (that choice, it seems, would turn out to be extremely wise in hindsight, given what happened, but that’s neither here nor there). But Dreamcatcher has always been a group that has done things differently, and going on their first tour in South America during debut year was right in line with that. Brazilians proved their passion and appreciation for Dreamcatcher with their loud support as the group performed their debut year discography.
With the group’s song list still growing early in their careers, Dreamcatcher’s concert time was augmented with their expansive cover performance ability, and this fancam-captured rendition of SNSD’s “Into The New World” was a welcome staple. It’s always a safe bet to choose songs that are likely to be well-known by the general K-Pop audience (a strategy that Dreamcatcher employs to this day with their recent suit-clad cover of Blackpink’s “Kill This Love” at KPOP.Flex), and Dreamcatcher, like always, put their own spin on the song, which has become one of their most well-known debut year special clips.
[embed]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PGedZPYZXHo[/embed]
Date: July 29th, 2018
Concert: Welcome to the Dream World — Chile
Regular readers know I’ve linked the above video in a couple different contexts now, but at over 519,000 views as of this writing, I don’t think anyone will blame me for doing so again, as it’s one of Dreamcatcher’s most well-known covers, and even moreso for it being a part of their 2018 Latin America tour setlist.
Subunit performances are one of the nice surprises of a live K-Pop concert involving a group, mostly because unless you know the setlist beforehand, you oftentimes see something the subunit members haven’t ever done before. “Trouble Maker”, itself the result of an award-winning 2011 collaboration by Hyunseung of Beast and HyunA of 4Minute, was already well-known and received for its iconic, sultry choreography and catchy and unforgettable chorus, so for Dreamcatcher to pick up and perform it was already a treat for fans. But the combination of JiU and Handong, who both played to their strengths both from a vocal and dance standpoint, made it even better.
It’s possible that with Dreamcatcher’s discography as big as it is and the busy May and June that they’ve already have, that we won’t see subunit performances for the upcoming tour. But if we do, one can only speculate if there will be a performance that will top this one as far as being talked-about for years to come.
For a similar performance, there’s SuA and Yoohyeon performing Ariana Grande’s “7 Rings” in 2019 in Los Angeles.
[embed]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IscS0EAbZ_U[/embed]
Date: December 15th, 2019
Concert: Invitation to Nightmare in the US — Jersey City
Even though K-Pop groups are known for practicing and performinng precise, cool-looking choreography for their songs, sometimes it’s the songs that have no choreography and which allow the group to move freely around the stage that have some of the most impact on the crowd.
As a touring K-Pop group, and one based in the often energetic vibe of rock, Dreamcatcher is flush with songs that don’t have any choreography but seem to be made for the concert experience — to get people cheering, head-banging, and active, and that’s what a song like “Mayday” does. While there are plenty of great fancams from Dreamcatcher’s heavier rock-based concert tunes, this one is fun in part because of the Handong cutout that someone made, brought to the show, and handed up to Dreamcatcher to use. Handong’s temporary hiatus from the group to participate in a idol survival show in her native China left a gap that was sorely missed, but fun and humorous actions from the members involving cutout Handong made her absence slightly less sad. As for the performance as a whole, you can see that Dreamcatcher is well-suited to amping up their audiences with a ton of songs like this in their toolbox. If their recent Primavera Sound performance is any indication, they’ll have a lot more to draw from (and a lot more fans to appreciate it) during tour titme this summer.
[embed]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BaW7i1bTy5E[/embed]
Date: May 2, 2019
Concert: Invitation to Nightmare in Asia — Tokyo
While I was just talking about how some of the non-choreographed songs have some of the best concert vibes, there’s of course just something to be said about Dreamcatcher’s comfortable wheelhouse of stage performance-ready aggressive choreography, and it’s even better when that choreography is one that hasn’t been seen before for a song during concert time. Japanese title track “I Miss You” from 2019’s “The Beginning of The End” got a great treatment during the Invitation to Nightmare in Asia tour with new choreography that showed just how much more powerful and impactful a song can be live with both vocals and dance behind it.
Dreamcatcher’s current absence of Japanese distribution partner leaves doubt as to whether or not we’ll ever see songs with choreographies like 2020’s “Endless Night” (whose promotions/performances were cut due to the COVID-19 pandemic) on a tour stage, but that doesn’t mean we won’t get a surprise aspect of a performance of a Korean Dreamcatcher song, such as 2020’s “Tension” sung in all-English at Primavera Sound. Concert tours are, after all, partially for unveiling new sides of live song renditions. Could we see 2021's “Whistle” make its tour premiere, performed for an online concert audience but never for an offline one? What about 2018’s “Scar”, composed in part by Dami and the only Dreamcatcher song to have never been performed live to date? Could 2019’s “Curse of the Spider” receive a meme-filled choreography to match the never-uploaded VHS-style self-made MV from a Dreamcatcher 1st fan meeting? Only Dreamcatcher knows right now.
As Dreamcatcher gears up to return to their touring roots, the best part of this happening as a fan is simply them being back on the road for the first time in two years. In that time, the group has come out with so much more music, plenty of it made for interaction with actual live audiences that can show Dreamcatcher just how much they appreciate and enjoy their music. We’ll know what Dreamcatcher has in store for us after the first show of their newest World Tour, but regardless of that foreknowledge or not, Dreamcatcher fans are in for what will no doubt be a great live concert experience. As I’ll be at one of these tour stops you can expect a nice recap as per usual of everything that happened live and about all of the fun memories from Dreamcatcher’s return to the global stage. Be sure to come back here next week at the same time for the usual summary of the week’s Dreamcatcher activities, including their appearance at this year’s Dream Concert in South Korea. See you then!
