STRATEGIES OF THE NEW THEATRE
international symposium

THEATRE PHENOMENA CONSEQUENCES
A Questionnaire for Further Theatrical Re-examination

The current contemporariness is based generally (or more than that?) on the foundations of the tradition (of great history, a history of artistic trends) or the tradition of Post-modernism.
The contemporariness is established, defined and nominated primarily by (geo)political, social economic, technological medial communicational cultural phenomena:
The following important features stand out/are prominent:

1. post(industrial) age / the age of new technologies / knowledge and information are in the foreground; the age of a supremacy of information, the dictate of the media (the shadow governor) a new game of seduction (manipulation?);
2. the emergence/opening of new virtual spaces (new power centres), an omnipresent obsession with TV programmes, the bizarre phenomenon of so-called reality shows placing all life processes-situations into different media formats (pronounced communication code, context changes/innovates the essence) the creation-promotion of a profile of the contemporary society of the media;
3. context of disintegration of subjectivity individuality is constituted relative to the others (group, mass); dispersed area of various ways of understanding/expressing a noticeable divergence of identity;
4. art activism enforcing the social context of creating, more of the ethical - less of the aesthetical issues (new codes of ethics!?), interlacing of recent art practices and the set theoretical postulates, a demanding exploration of the relationship between the everyday ordinary life and art with trans-generational and communicational sensitivity;
5. communication as more important than the very deed-act, they reach finality (sense) only through an interaction with the space/time, historical/media memory, audience;
6. ideology of artistic and other consumerism emotionality/Utopism of great dreams is substituted with the consumption of a product, the field of vision is reduced to controlled glances at commercialised subjects (the billboard galleries) new forms of understanding the visual and material cultureetc.

Zoran R. Popović