SEOUL — North Korea said Monday it will send a 140-member musical ensemble to South Korea as part of its delegation to the Winter Olympics next month, amid tentative but progressing talks between the estranged countries. Discussions are continuing over fielding a joint women’s hockey team.
The agreement on the musical group came at the latest meeting aimed at ensuring North Korea’s participation at the ‘‘peace games’’ in Pyeongchang next month and also aimed at lowering tensions on the peninsula.
The orchestra, along with singers and dancers, will give performances in Seoul and in Gangneung, a city on the east coast that is the venue to some of the Olympic events, marking the first time in almost 16 years that a North Korean arts group has performed in the South.
‘‘We believe that a great symphony will be enthusiastically received,’’ Kwon Hyok Bong, director of the performing arts division of North Korea’s Culture Ministry and a former leader of the official Unhasu Orchestra, said at the start of the talks.
‘‘In that sense, we hope that the talks will go smoothly and help our art troupe perform well in the South,’’ he said, according to pool reports from the talks, which took place on the northern side of the Demilitarized Zone.
South Korean Sports Ministry spokesman Hwang Seong Un said that the two Koreas have agreed in principle to field a joint women’s ice hockey team, the Associated Press reported. The proposal requires International Olympic Committee approval. If realized, it would be the Koreas’ first unified Olympic team ever.
Officials from both Koreas are to meet with the International Olympic Committee at its headquarters in Switzerland on Saturday. The sides agreed Monday to meet again at their border on Wednesday for working-level talks ahead of the IOC meeting.
In a sign of continuing tensions over North Korea’s atomic weapons program, the US military said it is beefing up its presence around the Korean Peninsula ahead of the Olympics by deploying stealth bombers, at least one extra aircraft carrier, and a new amphibious assault ship to the region, the AP reported
Monday’s talks in Seoul were convened to start working on some of the logistical details after North Korea’s agreement last week to send a delegation to the Winter Olympics, which will open Feb. 9 on the southern side of the DMZ.
The delegation will include athletes — still to be decided — as well as high-ranking officials, a cheering squad, and a taekwondo demonstration group.
Joining Kwon in the North Korean delegation at the talks was Hyon Song Wol, the leader of the Moranbong Band, an all-female band formed in 2012 under Kim Jong Un’s direction. The women, with their short dresses and electric guitars, quickly became a sensation but the band become more orthodox in recent years.
Monday’s cultural agreement was a way to bolster broader relations between the two Koreas as well as celebrate their ‘‘cultural homogeneity,’’ according to South Korea’s Unification Ministry, which is in charge of relations with the North.
The North will send an advance team to inspect the performance venues and stage arrangements ‘‘at an early date,’’ a joint news release said.
North Korea wanted the musical group to cross the DMZ at the truce village of Panmunjom, near where the talks were being held, and South Korea had guaranteed safe passage.
Kwon named the musical group as the previously unknown ‘‘Samjiyon Orchestra,’’ including a combination of the state’s Unhasu Orchestra and the Samjiyon Band.
Samjiyon is an area near Mount Paekdu, the volcano that straddles the North Korean border with China and is the mythical home of the Korean people. The ruling Kim family claims a divine right to rule North Korea by saying they descended from this mountain.
The South Korean government had keenly wanted North Korea’s participation, partly to reduce the chances that Kim might order some kind of provocation to overshadow the games. It even convinced the US military to delay drills due to be held in March until after the Olympics were over.
But underscoring Pyongyang’s fickleness, the North’s official Korean Central News Agency issued a thinly veiled threat to call off the whole endeavor.
The regime was angry over South Korean President Moon Jae-in’s assertion last week that President Trump deserved a ‘‘great deal’’ of the credit for creating the environment for the talks — as the American leader had previously claimed in a tweet.
‘‘They should know that train and bus carrying our delegation to the Olympics are still in Pyongyang,’’ the KCNA reported Sunday, accusing Moon of trying to ‘‘curry favor with his discontented master.’’
Contradicting South Korea’s hopes that the Olympic talks could be a gateway to nuclear negotiations, North Korea has made it very clear that it has no desire to talk about its weapons program .
