What is Performance Art?

Speaker: Sally Banes

January 13, 1999 | 6.30 pm
Little Theatre, National Centre for the Performing Arts, Mumbai

The series will serve as an introduction to the mongrel, elusive, indefinable, often controversial genre of performance art. Performance art exists on the borders between visual art, theatre, dance, and music, and it also sometimes involves other, non-live time arts, such as video, film, and digital imagery.

The first talk in this series will consider the history of Western performance art from its origins in Richard Wagner’s idea of the gesamtkunstwerk, through the American Happenings of the 1960s up to the notorious work of Karen Finley and Ron Athey in the U.S.A. in the 1990s.

The second talk will be a theoretical and critical consideration of the interdisciplinary genre of performance art. It will include a discussion of the difficulty of defining performance art and an investigation of its relationship to popular and mass art as well as to other forms of gallery art.

Both talks will be illustrated with video excerpts.

The speaker, Sally Banes, is the Marian Hannah Winter Professor of Theatre History and Dance Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and the former performance art critic for the Village Voice for this series of talks. She is the author of several books, including `Dancing Women: Female Bodies On Stage, And Subversive Expectation: Performance Art And Partheater In New York 1976-85′.