performing arts

What is Performance Art? How does it differ from Theater?

The term "Performance Art" started in the United States in the 60's. It was originally used to describe any live artistic event, which included poets, filmmakers, musicians, dancers, etc. Even though the descriptive word came about in the 1960's, there were earlier precedents for performance art. The live performances of the Dadaist meshed poetry and visual arts. The German Bauhaus, founded in 1919, included theater workshops that explored the relationship between space, sound and light. Direct influence also came about later in the 50's on through the 60's with the Beatniks and the happenings that took place in the Lower East Village in NYC. Earlier movements such as the Italian Futurists were also very involved in paving the way for what was to come in the 70’s.

By 1970 the term, performance art was used globally and specifically defined as live art, not theater. Even though theater and performance art often times share the same stage, in practice they are very different. Performance art is not a form of representational art, rather a moment of acquiring multiple characters and creating a fusion between one and the next, but never allowing the true self to ever fully disappear. A performer of performance art is usually oneself either telling a story, a feeling, an opinion, whether it be through video, movement, music, television, poetry, sculpture, spoken dialogue or any mix of these. An actor usually is personifying someone else under very specific conditions. Performance art leaves more leeway for improvisational efforts to factor whether it is text based or strictly movement. The script is a security paper reassuring a certain aspect of structure, but does not hold an absolute strict compromise. No two performances are ever really alike. A script for an actor is a bible; it tells how and when an action will happen. All cues, lines and characterization get memorized and obsessively rehearsed so that every time performed an almost identical performance is released. Rehearsals for performance artists are much more conceptual and often times will include researching, gathering props and costumes and having discussions with collaborators in their rehearsal time. Maybe this is so due to the little or no technical training that a ...

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... culture and identity. It allows the artist to be an insider and outsider at the same time, crossing the border of points of view at all times. It functions on different levels of society’s social structure, sometimes right on par with current events and other times defying all common everyday needs and resistance.

Performance art fluctuates between boundaries of all art. Its conceptual territory lies within the contradiction, the ambiguity and the extreme, making it difficult to define borders.

Performance art is a means of art that cannot be bought or sold. It is a chance where all art forms converge in many different mixes, whether it be music, video, painting, poetry, movement, etc. In a postmodern society where all genres loose their limits and are hard to define, performance art has become an absolutely hybrid art form.

Bibliography

1. Fusco, Coco. “English is Broken Here”. New York: The New Press, 1995.

2. Goldberg, Roselee. “Performance Art, From Futurism to the Present”. Singapore: C.S. Graphics, 2001.

3. Acconci, Vito, “Public Space in a Private Time”, url: www.kuntmuseum.ch.

4. www.lipmagazine.com