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Note: this is just my own subjective interpretation of his performance, feel free to disagree with me if you understand something differently!
Taeyong delivers a full story with his stage performance of GTA (Grand Trouble Artist), where he embodies a new character and acts out an action-packed story through his dance.
The first time we see him, he is wearing a mask, hiding his identity. For many of his performances he also wore a glowing crystalized mask, which signals that the character has gotten wealthy by criminal activities.
He then removes the mask and reveals his identity. It seems like he is starting a new game by doing so, because he knows people will come after him and he wants to stir up some trouble.
Then Taeyong’s character is infiltrated but he is not worried, as it is like a game to him. The title GTA is a reference to the video game GTA (Grand Theft Auto), where you carry out missions in different cities – criminal activities such as robbing banks, stealing cars etc.
Taeyong’s character is then cornered, and through a dance break he acts out a battle against the men (a police force of some sort). His different dance moves represent different types of attacks back and forth between him and the men.
And then he makes a great escape through a spray of toxic gas, which we see with his excessive coughing and how the men pass out on the ground for a while. This gives him a head start but he makes sure that the men know where he is going.
Several times throughout the performance, we see how Taeyong’s character runs ahead, but then slows down to let the men in black suits catch up, which shows how much his character likes danger, and finds the chase fun and thrilling.
This part is very interesting, we see him reach up one of his hands and he moves it from side to side, and at the same time the men move from side to side but while hanging like rag dolls. It suggests that he is controlling them at his will, playing around with them as he wants.
We see him try to run off again, but still making sure the men are after him and can keep up with him. It is no fun for him if he can’t tease and play around with them.
In the end, we see that the men finally catch him, but interestingly enough Taeyong just laughs at this part – he does it in every fancam so it is definitely intentional. This suggests that he doesn’t mind being caught and dragged away.
My theory: Since we see how his character loves drama and playing with danger, I believe he intentionally let himself be caught, so he can start a new game with them in a new scene. Remember, the GTA game carries out missions in different cities not just one.
Taeyong himself also mentioned that he was working on a GTA part 2, so it is possible that he wanted to tell a second addition to the story and that it doesn’t just end with his character getting caught.
Here, Taeyong himself explains a bit about his thoughts on making the performance to the song. He states that it’s a concept of thieves and police, and that he in this industry sometimes wanted to disappear and appear again like a thief does.
Btw the video clips explaining the performance are from a recent video I made on youtube about his acting, so if you want to see more here is the link:
Also, I based my explanations on two different fancams of his performance, be sure to check the full original versions out too they’re amazing:
