In recent years, contemporary performance artists have been breaking down the boundaries between dance and theater, deconstructing hierarchies and creating new modes of expression centered on the language of the body. In this process, the audience has become more than just an observer, but a creative participant, playing an important role in reinterpreting the meaning of the work.
Recently, a new trend of performing artists has begun to emerge, who have sought to blur the boundaries between dance and theater and create new forms that deconstruct the traditional structure of the work. These artists have rejected the logic of narrative and emotion that traditional theater art has primarily sought to convey, and instead have created a new language centered on the expression of the body and space. Above all, they emphasize the language of the body, which is devoid of logic and reason. To maximize the diversity of expression, they redefined the relationship between words and gestures and sought to provide a direct sensory experience for the audience.
In dance, actors spoke as in theater, and in theater, actors’ gestural expressions were emphasized as in dance. Directors sometimes performed on the stage of a theater, and sometimes used everyday spaces such as streets, fields, or factories as stages. These attempts encourage the audience to not just listen to the story, but to be in the middle of the performance and feel the work with all their senses. To achieve this, directors have tried to improvise based on the actors’ experiences rather than relying on written scripts. Furthermore, they directed their performances as movies. This was part of an attempt to break down the boundaries between the mediums of stage and screen, and to let people experience art in various spaces.
In the movie “The Complaint of an Empress” by Pina Bausch, known for her dance theater, each scene unfolds like a theater stage. Instead of having a coherent plot, the movie is like a montage of different scenes that evoke different associations. A montage is a technique in film or photography where two or more scenes are edited together. The director uses close-ups of the actors to observe their facial expressions and behaviors in detail, and watches them from a distance as they move through the city and forest. The city and natural settings are stripped of their associations with their surroundings and become abstract spaces that are unfamiliar and new, not their original geographical locations. The actors in the space are shown to be lost and wandering. The city streets where there is no distinction between day and night, the forest glades with dry branches scattered here and there, the wide grassy fields, the dark forest, etc. reflect the sad inner world of our existence with their light and darkness. Being alienated from light and being trapped in darkness are essentially the same thing. Through these symbolic images, the director creates works that are not fixed and finished, but are in the process of being created.
These works are constantly reinterpreted through interaction with the audience. The audience is no longer just an observer, but a part of the performance, projecting their own experiences and emotions to reconstruct the work. This interaction is another characteristic of contemporary performance art, where the art is intended to elicit a variety of interpretations and reactions rather than convey a specific message.
As mentioned above, directors of contemporary performing arts try to convey the pain and hurt of the actors’ bodies on stage directly to the audience in various ways, rather than through the fiction of dramatic events. To do this, directors give new value to “object”. An “object” is an object with a symbolic function that creates a new feeling in a work of art. Furniture, bags, books, clothes, etc. that have a fixed function in everyday life take on a completely different symbolic meaning on stage, giving the performance a poetic quality. This is a big difference from the way we have been used to thinking of “objects” as props for the stage. People who used to play relatively important roles in performances are now transformed into “objects” like mannequins. The hierarchy between humans and objects, which was a convention in the performing arts, has disappeared.
By using objects that can be easily found around us and freely intertwining scenes, the performance takes on a ritualistic and poetic character that allows for more diverse interpretations. In this way, contemporary performance art goes beyond mere reproduction to become a language that symbolizes the behavior and state of the represented subject, and a language of presence that has not been bypassed by the bypassing of tradition. The surface of the image becomes the story itself. In this process, the audience does not simply consume the scene, but becomes a creative participant who constantly creates new meanings.
