This study aims to explore the critical approach toward media in contemporary dance, which avoids conventional understanding of dance and artistic media. After reviewing important contexts and debates concerning contemporary dance, this study discuss the matter of its ambiguous boundaries and expansion through the concept of intermediality.

The idea of performance and dance with its ephemeral nature and media being used to preserve it, has constituted a conventional understanding of its temporality. However in contemporary dance, the archive expresses the request for extended temporality that enables the simultaneous existence of what is remaining, what is captured, and what is progressing in the performance. In addition, these archives expand into living spaces so that performances can lead to theoretical, educational, or political discourses, and function as a mediating space where heterogeneous entities such as art, virtual reality, and real life meet.

Moreover through this study, I wish to illuminate the expanded understanding of media in contemporary choreography as a criticism on previous media conventions, by introducing certain examples of autobiographical performance pieces in which the performer tells his or her own story. These works show the blurred boundaries among verbal languages, documents, and corporeal performance. They also bring participants in communication with performers, who can be understood as a physical archive of memories and experiences, roaming the ambiguous space inbetween reality and arts. Accordingly, an autobiographical performance creates an intermediality that allows the body-archive to experience and construct the virtual identity of the body in a fragmented manner.

This study explores a case of hooded crane dance performance that deals with the ecological environmental characteristics. In addition to choreographing movements and gestures, the subject of hooded crane performance was featured with theatrical dialogues. The data collection included choreography notes, photos, videos, memos, dialogues, and performance pamphlets collected twice in Nantes and Suncheon city between May and August 2019. The qualitative analysis of the data were presented in the following ways.

First, by reinterpreting the story of the wounded hooded crane (Doori) found in Suncheon the performance expressed the ecological life and adversity of the hooded crane from the opposing viewpoints between the ecological environment and humans. Second, the reactions of spectators suggested that the hooded crane dancing performance turned out to make them feel more interested in nature and ecology. Third, due to the real story of Doori, the performance played a role in reminding the meaning of the performance (i.e., ecological sensibility) while the locals appreciated the story in a friendly way. This study indicated the parts to be supplemented in future performances and expandability by attempting performances in the ecological environment of Suncheon Bay (tidal flats, etc.).