Aesthetic knowledge and aesthetic experience

Abstract

The essay’s starting point is Theodoros Terzopoulos’ production The Bacchae (1986), which caused public controversy in Greece for using body techniques that were perceived by critics as not exclusively Greek or at least European, but seemed to draw from various Asian performance traditions, most significantly from Japan. As Fischer-Lichte explains, body techniques, which are seen as culturally specific, can be potentially performed by any human body. However, “the ways in which these movement are carried out are particular: they have to be learned in a process determined by each culture.” Fischer-Lichte argues that an embodied aesthetic knowledge is a knowledge that goes beyond the ability to perform a certain body technique but encompasses different layers of knowledge “that are characteristic and essential for each culture,” such as emotional, social, economic, communal, behavioral, scientific, religious, etc. Using two examples, a Sino-Japanese kunqu production of The Peony Pavilion (Shanghai International Art Festival, 2009) with Bandō Tamasaburō, and Lear (1997) by the Singaporean director Ong Keng Sen, Fischer-Lichte demonstrates how performances can suspend spectators in a “liminal state” through the interweaving of various embodied aesthetic knowledges. It is through this process, in which various embodied aesthetic knowledges both challenge and supplement the audience’s knowledges, that an aesthetic experience as liminal experience is made possible, which allows for artists and spectators to generate new aesthetic knowledges.