The Search for Narrative

Practical and academic, the interrelationship of the visual and performing arts opens unique frontiers to aesthetic pioneers. Divergent in aim from the historic search for similar tonalities between the Synchronists and Stravinsky or atonal musicians of the 1950s-70s and minimalist painters and sculptors, the present use of the visual arts as a source for performing arts productions suggests a new-found narrative. The striking silence of paint and charcoal is enlivened by the portrayal of individual traits and interactions between artists and models, artist and viewer. Visual artists, talking about personal desires and aesthetic intentions are immediate sources for creative storytellers in the literary and performing 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. The silence and pensive qualities of the figures of Jan Vermeer, the 17th century Dutch painter, have been the catalyst for two books, The Girl in Hyacinth Blue (1999) by Susan Vreeland and the Girl with the Pearl Earring (2001) by Tracy Chevalier. David Huddle has two running narratives in La Tour Dreams of the Wolf Girl (2002) putting Georges de La Tour in and out of contemporary space. M the Man who became Caravaggio (1998) by Peter Robb tackles the issue of patronage intertwined with personal and artistic introspections. In recent memory, theatrical and dance performances "Contact" by Susan Stroman and John Weidman, "Art" by Yasmina Reza, "Sunday in the Park with George" by Stephen Sondheim, book by James Lapine, "Les Miserables" by Claude-Michel Schfonberg/music and others, "Picasso at the Lapin Agile" by Steve Martin, and "The Sleep of Reason" by Antonia Buero-Vallego have taken the not-so-dead-life (natura morta) or still life of painting into the vital arena of the performing arts. The 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.