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The Sacred and Liminality in Shakespeare Performance —focusing on Oh Taesuk’s The Tempest

This article aims to reveal that Oh Taesuk’s The Tempest produces the emotion of the sacred and as a result, the audience experiences liminality, the concept of the intersubjective understanding between the stage and the audience. The Tempest is sacred in several ways. Firstly, it is sacred because it is a ritual (Gut) and secondly, it creates the emotion of Shinmyung to the audience by the fun aspects of the ritual. However, the strongest sacredness of the work originates from the fact that the work is an event. The event is a Lyotard’s concept that the unrepresentable is expressed. The expressed unrepresentable produces a sublime feeling, which is an emotion that is the product of an event. The sublime is the sacred. Therefore, in the scenes in which the sublime is expressed, the sacred can be noticed. There are many ‘events’ in The Tempest, such as when the white cloth is moved to and fro and the actors wave red fans wildly shouting “it’s a fire”, and when Jilgi strikes a drum against Seja. After Jilgi strikes the drum, he is ready to get rid of the feeling of enmity toward Seja. In these scenes, the waving of white cloth and the red fans does not ‘exactly’ signify something. They are just ‘hinting’ the situation so that their meaning is not fixed and the audience’s imagination composes the story. Striking the drum is the expression of Jilgi’s inner mind, which is expressed in a materialistic way. Therefore, striking the drum expresses the unrepresentable. The sacred that is induced in the performance plays a role that it creates a change of the audience, causing them to be in the liminal state. The liminality causes the audience to be open to the outer world and to be changed. The intersubjective understanding can be possible in the liminal state. The artistic work that induces some kind of emotion from the audience and especially the work that brings about the sacred feeling can create transference and a change in the audience. Oh Taesuk’s The Tempest is a good example of a production that creates some emotion and makes the audience experience a liminal state.