The 21st century is the age of culture, and it is the age when the culture itself implies and takes the nation`s competitiveness initiative. It is the important duty for the artists to create the economic value of arts by producing the cultural produc...
The 21st century is the age of culture, and it is the age when the culture itself implies and takes the nation`s competitiveness initiative. It is the important duty for the artists to create the economic value of arts by producing the cultural products that fit to the tastes of modern audience, and for the purpose of creation, it is important for them to seize the unique cultural codes from the contemporary and existing cultural products created in the relationship between the age and culture. The <Swan Lake> has been giving rebirth to the cultural code that reflects the cultural specialty of each age on the basis of universal cultural code of mankind, the so-called Love and Rescue, for more than a century since the first performance in the 19th century. It is possible to say that there exists a modern cultural code in the Matthew Bourne`s <Swan Lake> that reflects the culture of 20th century, which is not seen in the <Swan Lake> that shows the classical cultural code of the 19th century. And so, in this study, it was attempted to study the cultural codes of the Matthew Bourne`s <Swan Lake>. As a result of the study, the type of character containing the androgyny of Male Swan, the various cultural codes reflecting the popular culture of England in 1960s and the myth that contains their social and cultural implication were figured out, and the six types of cultural codes, such as Code of prohibited love,” “Code of satire,” “Code to break away from fixed ideas, Code of realism, Code of sexuality, and Universal codes for reality and ideal, were derived from the analysis. The six types of cultural codes prescribe the identity of the work, engaging in the story, structure and establishment of individual codes at the depth of the Matthew bourn`s <Swan Lake>. This shall be identified as a differentiated cultural code from the simple story of love and rescue of a prince presented in the <Swan Lake> of 19th century, and the Matthew Bourne`s <Swan Lake> may be called the cultural contents that provide the dance culture of 20th century with a new cultural significance, setting up an cultural code in which a human of androgynous existence seeks the ideal love that transcend the sex, class and species and realizes the ideal in the unrealistic world through death. Therefore, the cultural codes derived from this study will be able to be used as the base of the development of new dance culture contents, playing the role of the core cultural code that the modern spectators like. The significance of this study lies in the presentation of more systematic and objective analysis standard and providing the possibilities of various interpretation for the dance works as it is focused on the analysis of dance works from the view point of cultural semiotics.