Abstract:

The contemporary experience of the performing arts is torn by the tension between a strongly institutionalized cultural tradition and the new practices that challenge both the way of thinking and the dramaturgic project as a development of a previous dramatic text, as its privileged form of reception, by a spectator radically dissociated from the show that is being developed on stage.
The performing arts practices that emerged with the modern era and especially with the push of the vanguards of the twentieth century has fostered a re-conceptualization of the scenic based in the fruitful dialogue with the other art forms. This has derived in a cross-disciplinary and inter-medial set out of the conformation of the contemporary show. The insistence on the term “practices” refers to its irreducible diversity, further than any genre adscription, production displays or traditionally privileged modalities of reception. And also makes reference to the centeredness of the body understood as that who acts, between other bodies that interacts, transforming in spectators, participants of a show that recovers the meaning of action as an act of sense, with the capability of transforming a situation, to affect and move the cognitive and emotional configuration of its participants.
To reflect on the contemporary scene also means to think the location and active part of the spectator. While the dominant form of classical show had reduced its role to that of a mere addressee of the show, lacking the competence and capability required to take active action in its development, the new performing practices have moved the spot light towards the activity of the spectator as an interlocutor and participant of the proposal.
The stage representation of the spectator by the renovators of the modern scene has been essayed both from a perspective of integration in the proposal of a new total scene, as by the procedures of strangening and distancing, with the goal of producing a conscience uprising of its culturally and socially compromised situation that has been produced.
The new cooperative spectator has an active role profile to which new competencies and capabilities of interaction with the scenic text are acknowledged. This is due to the concurrence of a plural voice dialogue that is not absent of conditioning by the institutional framing where it takes place, nor of the possibility of a position of resistance based on the critical interpretation and on the contest of the communicational project that the show sustains.
The academic teaching of the performing arts had privileged the study of the text of the performance and of the dramaturgy understood as stage representation guided by the sense presumably fixed by the text. However, the new practices of the performing arts, has called the attention towards the scenic fact understood, taken as a whole, as an strategy oriented towards shifting both the cognitive and emotional participation of the spectator-interlocutor, by shifting the logo-centrism installed in the classic dramaturgy towards the stage representation as a specific chrono-topo in which meaningful performances are specifically produced. Consequently, to tackle the aesthetic dimension of the communication it is necessary to review the educational set outs and teaching-learning methodologies of the arts and contemporary stage representation practices.

Keywords:

Communication, performing arts, teaching.