A 21st Century Global Aesthetic - Neo-Teatrum Mundi

Abstract

As youth from diverse nations interact and play together online, they may adopt masks of universal archtypes in order to know and be known by others. The masks also represent an emerging new global aesthetic and sense of self in society. As Steven Johnson (1997) states, “All great symbolic forms address the conflict between the private self and the larger community that frames that self, whether this valuation lies at the surface of the work or is buried somewhere in its underlying assumptions.” In this paper, I report information collected from interviews with over 100 youth and young adults from 17 countries who perform and create artworks based on popular media conveyed narratives, role-playing games, comics, manga, and animated stories. I argue that the symbolic functions of these expressions constitute a kind of neo-teatrum mundi—or “life as theater and theater as life”. Youth publicly present themselves as archetypes-characters drawn from globally known narratives while privately integrating multiple self and social identities. Finally, I present an analysis and interpretation of the visual characteristics of neo-teatrum mundi and draw implications for an interdisciplinary arts education of the 21st century.