The Search for Narrative

Abstract

most cursory cultural investigator cannot help but notice that the visual arts have become a significant source and impetus for the narrative of contemporary books, theater, and dance. In recent memory, the following theatrical and dance performances Contact by Susan Stroman and John Weidman, by Yasmina Reza, Sunday in the Park with George by Stephen Sondheim, book by James Lapine, Les Miserables by ClaudeMichel Schfonberg/music and others, Picasso at the Lapin Agile by Steve Martin, and The Sleep of Reason, by Antonio Buero-Vallego have taken the not-so-dead-life (natura morta) or still life of painting into the vital arena of the performing arts. quest to seek intra-discipline aesthetics among dance, music, theater, and the visual arts is not the charge, but instead a turn to establish a narrative that has brought about this invasion of interactivity between the arts. Clearly defined boundaries between the arts have been fading since Fluxus, Happenings, and Performance Art for over half a century. In the early part of the twentieth century, Marcel Duchamp's chess games and use of the fourth dimension of time in his numerous produced and pondered pieces all speak to the interrelatedness of the arts. Contemporary novels based on historical themes and subjects have created characters based on the lives and works of famous and intriguing artists such as Michelangelo Caravaggio, Georges de La Tour, and Jan Vermeer. silence and pensive qualities of the figures of Jan Vermeer, the seventeenth-century Dutch painter, have been the catalyst for two books, Girl in Hyacinth Blue by Susan Vreeland and the Girl with the Pearl Earring by Tracy Chevalier.1 Vreeland combines the mystic of the Vermeer paintings' characters with the impoverished history of the refugee status of its owners. In various parts of Vreeland's book the authenticity of the Vermeer painting becomes a subtext for describing the work.