The characteristic feature of contemporary theater understood as an international phenomenon, the feature which determines the unique specificity of contemporary performance art is, without a doubt, the mutual interpenetrating of performing styles and cultural conventions. The essence and the artistic shape of this phenomenon are too deep and intricate to be viewed and explained exclusively by recourse to the obvious, and nearly banal aspect of the world at the threshold of the 21st century, i.e. the phenomenon of globalization.

Naturally everything had begun much earlier than it began for good. There is no need to trace the process deep into the prehistory. It is enough to recall the artistic shock caused by the productions staged in Paris by the theatre from the Bali island in 1931. This exotic theatre of dance, song, pantomime and music became a revelation and an inspiration for contemporary Europeans who contested their native traditions and the predominance of the psychological theatre.

Antonin Artaud, great reformer of theater, was enchanted by the pure theatricality of the Bali theatre. But it was not the theatricality understood as the display of form only, but rather the essence of this theatricality, i.e. the form of the Bali convention as the stimulation of spiritual dimension. The elements of performance which transform the very performance into a kind of meta-physical trance such as the structural blending of dance, song, coloring and dramatic narration, the ritual dimension, the archetypal nature of the stage image, expressive sensualism and ecstasy of the Asian actor.