Expressions of literature or fine art create work that leaves a distinct record. By comparison, the performing arts never create work that remains afterward. Performance is a momentary art shown only in the present, and it is never affected by anything after the show. Performing arts are solely present at the time and place of a performance, making it practically impossible to preserve and store the work. In fact, maintaining and preserving the actions performed on scene has become an unresolved question in the world of performing arts. In order to maintain and preserve such moments, artificial interventions are essential, such as taking photographs or making videos. This paper aims to discuss some theoretical issues that should be taken into account in the process of documenting the performing arts. This paper will first discuss the authenticity of performance in terms of the object of documentation. Authenticity is a concept related to the identity of work. It will continue by examining Margolis’s theory of arts before exploring suitable media to record performances, such as records, body, memory and repertoire. Lastly, this paper will raise a question as to how to reflect aesthetic elements that need to be considered along with other factors in performance documentation. Ultimately, this paper suggests that performance documentation should begin to recognize the gap between performance and record. Such an approach should integrate ethnography and narrative.

This study aims to investigate the activation plans of Korean cultural artists through the modern reception of performance art and to design a new conscious transition of traditional art into popular art. Today, the Seoul Performing Arts Company is a group representing Korean art with unprecedented experiments involving external and internal changes. This study examined the developmental plans of the Seoul Performing Arts Company and its comprehensive artwork, including singing, dancing, and music. The study employed Microsoft Excel, a data processing program, to summarize the list of performances by the Seoul Performing Arts Company and to analyze the three genres of singing, dancing, and music. In addition, the company performers were interviewed about the meanings of modern singing, dancing, and music. These study methods allowed investigation of the characteristics of traditional art genre with singing, dancing, and music as well as the direction and strategic aspects of comprehensive art. This analysis seeks to reorganize perceptions of traditional art as public art exceeding the boundaries of genres in the performance industry while continuing to create comprehensive Korean artwork containing a mutual communicative structure.

The purpose of this study was to examine the relative importance and priority of the components of a contemporary dance work aiming to boost the popularity of domestic contemporary dance performances based on expert opinions. It seeks to improve the harsh performance environment of contemporary dance, a major problem caused by poor financing, to contribute to dance performances in modern society. In the first stage, a survey of 20 selected dance performance experts was conducted using open-ended questionnaire to determine how to structure a dance work to increase the popularity of contemporary dance performances. In the second stage, the analytic hierarchy process (AHP) was utilized to carry out a pairwise comparison of the selected components to determine their relative importance and priority. The findings of the study were as follows: Eleven factors were selected as the components of a dance work geared to improving the popularity of modern dance performances, and 31 details were selected. The audience’s consciousness of the choreographer was selected as the top priority, followed by communicability, the completion and composition of work, sympathetic choreography, a communicable repertoire, the superb competence of the dancer, professional direction, diverse forms of work, the professionalism of the staff, public-friendly music, harmonious lighting/stage setting, and eye-catching costumes. If a dance work is based on the choreographer’s philosophy and possesses all 11 components suggested by the experts, it will exhibit artistic value and have popular appeal. Such an excellent dance performance will be fully appealing to the public. This study is of significance in that it investigated the opinions of experts to suggest practical advice on how to create a dance work to increase the popularity of dance performances. However, this study also had some limitations; for instance, the suggestions were only based on the perspective of individuals already engaged in dance performance. Therefore, sustained research efforts should be made to consider the circumstances and perspectives of other genres related to dance performance to enhance the popularity of dance performances.

The purpose of this study is to vigorously investigate international developments in Korean Dance by domestic private dance troupes. The study is based on the performance records of private international dance troupes from the early 2000s, troupes that were active since 1980. The Chang Mu Dance Company and the Didim Dance Company are among Korea’s leading performers and feature dancers who play a prominent role in the globalization of Korea by presenting performances that captivate audiences around the world. The recent Korean Wave may also trace its origins to the popularity of these dance troupes.

This study aims to examine the contemporaneity of performance archive and reconsider the historicality of dance, focusing on practice and theory in contemporary dance. For this, I explored theories and discourses that arose in contemporary arts, and I have analyzed the cases of archive practice. Over past two decades, choreographers in contemporary dance have experimented contemporaneity and history through archive practice. This study focuses on historical concepts of archive in order to find the meaning of the choreographer’s re-enactment. In this study, I refer to Walter Benjamin and Michel Foucault’s proposal on history and archive to construct the theoretical frame of this study. “Actuality” in Walter Benjamin’s philosophy is heterogeneous time modes of the past and the present in singular moments, and it presents reality. Foucault suggests archive as a system of transformation and severance. He exceeds common perception of linear history with an archeological approach. To examine how choreographers apply archive to their work in a level of choreography and body as medium of dance, I have chosen the works of two choreographer: Yvonne Rainer and Boris Charmatz. Rainer uses the methods of “repetition” and “representation”, which transmit from one body to others in her . She suggests performative archiving to produce new creations in the process of returning to the original. Charmatz writes new history, which is established between dance history and a dancer’s memories in the present time. They both emphasized that a body is the subject of both dance and real life because every segment of history inhabits the body. Therefore, there are no distinctions between archive and body in dance. In this study, I discuss performance archive being toward embodied actualization with the choreographic approach. Performance archive is not only a form or style of dance but also questions, engagement, relationships, and enactment of the objectivity and subjectivity of dance. In this light, the choreographic is the way to create both dance and history.

Dancing elements shown in Namsadang Nori organizationally and technologically intervene dramatically expressed performances. The effect of dancing elements is to insert dancing elements appropriate for performance elements, to extend artistic expressive areas, to add the beauty of composition and of form to performances, and to enhance the artistic completeness of performances. In addition, dancing elements combined with arts include aesthetic values to express the vitality and personality of performances and highlight performance characteristics artistically beyond technical skills. For these reasons, dancing elements in Namsadang Nori as a cultural prototype embed considerable significances. The expressive meaning of dance and the extended artistic area speak to the present audience. They also serve as a performance content that diversifies dancing elements.

The purpose of this paper is to examine how nationalism has been operated and emerged in the process of establishing the National Theater of Korea and Sejong Center for the Performing Arts, National Gugak Center, and Seoul Arts Center. I analyze the records about the construction of the theaters from the viewpoint of nationalism. Also I examine how the nationalistic view had been expressed architecturally and how the characteristics were revealed in the performances. The history of the construction of the theaters was entirely led by the state during the 3rd, 4th and 5th republics. The 3rd, 4th and 5th republics, all of which had been ruled by undemocratic regimes, emphasized nationalism in order to compensate their lack of legitimacy. The ‘nation’ has worked as a very effective concept to unite the whole people into a single identity, and traditional culture as well as art have been used as the most effective means of raising national pride. As such, the construction of the theaters as an infrastructure for expanding traditional performing arts was essential, and it was actively promoted in this background. At the height of this flow, which began in the 1960s, there was the 1988 Seoul Olympic Games.

The period from the late 1930s through the 1940s was a tumultuous time in China because of two devastating wars—the War of Resistance Against Japan (1937-1945) and the Chinese Civil War (1945-1949). This essay examines the impact these wars had on concert dance, at the time still a newly emerging art form in China, by examining the case of Liang Lun 梁倫 (b. 1921), a dancer from Guangdong who began his dance career during the 1940s. Although Liang is widely considered to be one of the founding figures of modern Chinese dance, he has received almost no attention in the English language scholarship. This essay thus serves as a preliminary examination of Liang’s early choreographic repertoire, as well as a reflection on the ways in which Liang’s experiences reflect broader trends in Chinese dance during the wartime period.

This paper explores the concept of 'Performing Body on Stage' based on the choreographic work Glory which considers the critical point of view on system and body in relation to Korean sociocultural context. Glory focuses on the physical experience of Korean male dancers, experiencing the military service and dance competitions, questions the system recreated in the body, and asks "is the body free in dance?" To shape this into work, the dancer’s reflective testimonies are used as the materials of choreography, and the conceptualized and contextualized structure is developed into the form of ‘choreographic documentary’. In this paper, I refer Judith Butler’s proposal on ‘vulnerability and resistance’ to construct the frame of this study. I analyze the choreographic approach to the dancer’s body and how a ‘vulnerable body’ can be transformed into a ‘political subject’ through the choreographer’s practice in Glory. When the apparatus which are invisible but attached to the body are visualized on stage, the body exposes the social and political form. In this sense, finding the index of precarity associated with physical vulnerability was not only the process of choreography but also becoming subject in this work. Having physical autonomy in dance is that one actualizes the potential of artistic creation latent in individual diversity, not the military body identity, which moves in an interminable manner with the same identity. This artistic act of the choreographer is political as well as aesthetic in terms of re-asking about the nature of the dance and contemporary arts at the same time.

This paper looks at Formosa (2017), the last full-length dance work by the founder and artistic director of Cloud Gate Dance Theatre of Taiwan, Lin Hwai-min. As a former writer and trained journalist, he is a socially aware choreographer who expresses his concern for his society through dance. I first contextualize his oeuvre with his earlier pieces based on the theme of Taiwan such as: Legacy (1978), Portrait of the Families (1997), White Water & Dust (2014 double bill), and Rice (2013), leading up to this full-length multi-media production. I also explain the hybridized Cloud Gate corporeal training from the East (e.g. taiji daoyin, Chinese martial arts) and the West (e.g. ballet, Martha Graham modern dance technique), as I unravel how Lin Hwai-min executes his citizenship through choreography.