Sense,Space,Experience:A Study Of The Body As A Medium For Constructing Meaning In Live Musical Theatre

In the context of evolving media technology,the comparison between musical theatre as a work of theatre art and its recorded and broadcast works by mass media has become an issue that is difficult to ignore.The outbreak of the New Crown epidemic has forced a large number of theatre performances to move from offline to online,and the issues of physical absence and loss of experience caused by online artistic performances are once again at the forefront.For the audience present at the musical,the body as a medium constructs a different meaning of musical theatre.The first chapter introduces the body as a medium of perception.Through the perceptual functions of seeing,hearing and touching,the individual is connected to the world,which is the basis for the availability of the bodily medium.In live musical theatre,the body with its sensory functions is the basic gatekeeper of the individual’s information channel.Different bodies differ in their ability to capture information in their perceptual organs and in the ability of their perceptual systems to process and integrate information,which determines the fundamental differences in the individual’s access to information.The distractions of sensory separation that individual audiences are subjected to in musical theatre scenes,and the differences in the choices and abilities of different bodies to unify different senses also shape the meaning of viewing differently,so that the information available to individuals with or without their bodies present is already different.Chapter 2 introduces the body as a bearer and connector of space.The body’s possession of space and its ability to move on its own provides the basis for the actor to construct the space of musical performance and narrative through the spatial movement of the self-body.The absolute physical position of the body in space and its relative position to the bodies of others can also produce different narrative meanings.At the same time,the result of the body’s embodied perception of space is directly reflected in the construction and deconstruction of spatial narratives in musical theatre,both for the performers and for the audience.The third chapter introduces the body as a bearer and transmitter of symbols.The complex bodily symbols presented on the musical stage,both in their construction and in the audience’s comprehension,both the actors’ bodies as symbolic carriers and the audience’s bodies as the foreground of the comprehension of symbols,are based on embodied cognition and do not merely remain at the level of the consciousness of the abstracted body.The discrepancy between conscious understanding and embodied perception of the bodily symbols presented in the musical performance shows that the body is a complex field that unites social and individuality.