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.

The purpose of this study was to examine the opinions of experts in dance performance about the barriers to the popularity of contemporary dance, ways to improve the popularity of it, and relative importance of an effort to seek ways of boosting the popularity of Korean dance focusing on Communication. It ultimately meant to improve the harsh performance environments for dance, which was caused by inadequate finance, in order to put performing arts of dance on the right track in the modern society. In the first stage, in-depth interviews were carried out to find out problems with performing arts of dance and how to resolve the problems. The subjects in this study were 20 experts in performing arts of dance who were selected by purposive sampling. In the second stage, a hierarchical structure was generated about how to increase the popularity of dance, which were found in the first stage. Third, analytic hierarchy process(AHP) was utilized to measure relative importance and priority. The findings of the study were as follows: Five areas and five methods were selected as a means to increase the popularity of dance on communication. Five areas were audience communication with the choreographers, communication of the artists and artists, communication between staff members, communication between the audience and the artists. As a result of making a pair wise comparison of the five areas, 0.282 with a significantly higher weight, the choreographer's identification of audience requirements was selected as the top priority. Second was to improve awareness within the dance community 0.170, third was a variety of ways to increase collaboration 0.120, fourth was a constitutional directions of unity for the work of the staff 0.095. Fifth, star choreographers and star dancers nurturing and hiring 0.086.

The contemporary notion of choreography as a structural system of human movements in diverse contexts becomes radically challenged in the context of digital performance. Digital performance works that do not necessarily have human dancers, but instead present digital images and sounds can hardly be seen as choreographic practices in an orthodox way. In this article, I primarily investigated how the notion of choreography is reframed in the context of digital performance by delving into the entanglement of choreography with a computational system. In creating an human-computer interface, choreographers shed light on how the human subject is perceived, cognized and embodied through the entanglement of its corporeal body and the machine. Then, their choreographic sensibilities substantiated in the interface design process do not constitute embodied knowledge of the human body as a biological organism, but that of the posthuman body as an integrated being of the biological and the mechanical. In this sense, I argue that postchoreography as a mode of choreography for the posthuman necessitates the understanding of how a machine perceives a physical input and acts upon a virtual world.

This study suggested the effect and implication of the emotionalisation programme as an education or a training tool for enhancing face expression of performers utilising FACS which is based on facial muscle anatomy and muscle behaviour. For this purpose, this study limited the body range of the training from head to neck, showing how this programme could be applied to performers. In order to verify the effectiveness of the programme, this study measured the pre-to-post test of the WLEIS scale on emotional intelligence. In addition, observational logs, self-report journals, and in-depth interview data were collected to examine the psychological and physical changes of the participants. The collected data were analysed quantitatively using statistical analysis package IBM SPSS Statistics 22 as well as qualitative analysis using NVivo 12 software. As a result of WLEIS, the average before and after the programme showed a statistically significant difference. According to the qualitative result, participants began to observe self and others, and was able to perceive two aspects of universal and personal emotion. By putting the emotional expression of the other persons on own faces of participants, the clearer standard of the facial muscle behaviour was acquired, their facial impression was changed positively, and the new emotional arousal was brought up. Therefore, it discovered the possibilities of this emotionalisation programme not only to extend to the general public who improve their face expression for emotional purpose but also to be a foundation of the face training.

This study aims to explore the performativity of dramaturgy with in the field of expanded choreography. I look into the concepts of expanded choreography after the 1990s and discuss Jeroen Peeters’s dramaturgy in the respect of performativity. The characteristics of expanded choreography are as follow. First, choreographers are capable of producing knowledge rather than an artifact. The knowledge that can be produced is not rigid but more comprehensive. Second, the choreographers carry out experimental choreography with the paradigm of interdisciplinary and meta-media performing arts. They All the collaborators can be considered as an author which used to be given to only choreographers. Third, many choreographers attempt to explore the relationship between the body and society. They consider the social engaging of dance into the choreography. To examine how dramaturgs elaborate their own performativity in the area of expanded choreography, I have chosen the physical dramaturgy of Jeroen Peeters. I found results as below. First, a theory can be discovered in the choreographic practice. Materials can be chosen not only body gestures and movements but also other media, philosophy, and theories. Second, the dramaturg should approach to the process of choreography with empirical research. The practice of dramaturgy is involved in embodied thinking, in structuring, and performative operation of whole process. Third, the role of dramaturgy is performatively changed in every individual work. In contrast with the classical dramaturgy, the new dramaturgy in contemporary dance not deal with the abstraction of knowledge but practice in the way of performativity.