Performing Arts/Performance Arts

Performance, in everyday life, refers to acts done to obtain a result. Performing arts refers to live art events executed by one or more performers. They can comprise theater, musical comedy, dance, and opera: art forms that create art through the performances of people rather than by creating objects, forms of art that still have a continuing appeal even in the media age (film, television, and the Internet) where usually one hears or assists at reproductions of live events via a medium.

Performing arts have mainly a “social” appeal—they collect people around the happening, whereas the Internet, in contrast with television, has shifted the focus toward subjective and (identity) issues: Facebook and YouTube subscribers and communities are often used as means to confer “distinction” (Bourdieu 1984) to everyday people. If in the television age, the public was often a passive spectator of programs of all kinds, then in the Internet age, the public has acquired a more active role in the choice of its entertainments and interests.

Given the ambiguous state of the term art, we may state that, as distinct from “canonical” aesthetic art, performing arts comprise art forms that were not previously given the status of art, such as forms of popular arts (pageants, mummery, pantomimes, circus arts) and “happenings” performed on the street by street artists, musicians, actors, even jugglers, attempting to catch the attention of passersby with their craft, or performed in other nontraditional places. Those forms of art aimed at provoking the reaction of the public rather than its admiration could be described as committed performing arts, and to mark this peculiarity, they have been called “performance arts” (Goldberg 2001). Ideological engagement and the politicization of art are, in this case, the characteristics of the kind of affirmative, committed distance that performance art takes both from entertaining performing arts and other canonical performing art forms.

Performances are social events. They are “embodied” live events performed in front of a public, and they entail, in addition to presence of the performer(s), the presence of an audience. The audience is the target of the event and its presence is meant to be a participatory one. The audience is made part of the live event and renders the happening a unique experience. The fact that the audience can directly intervene distinguishes performing arts from even the same performances once they are reproduced via media (e.g., TV, computer, and video). The media, by rendering the live event reproducible and thus shareable by all, places it in a context where the public cannot directly interact with the performer, thus shifting the performance into the realm of “representation” rather than keeping it in that of a happening. The implicit positive effect of the media is nevertheless its diffusion and circulation.

The major changes in the performing arts can be witnessed in the theater. Starting from the 1960s, theorists began to object that theater performances, in particular, often conveyed elitist values unrepresentative of the new ethnic, class, and gender minorities that were claiming their own right to authorship and representation. Therefore, during this period, the passage from so-called universal aesthetic performances, comprising operas, musicals, and ballets, to an increase of community-based performances was felt to be more democratic and egalitarian (Schechner 2007). In this sense, even a director's culture-specific rereading of a play is an instance of performance art: in this case, the actual, historical moment of its production becomes dominant and determines the emphasis on topical cultural issues. Rather than producing the supposed original play, directors may create happenings even out of traditional performances: theatrical productions meant for the time being and as a means for critique and historical commitment (the various time- and place-specific performances of Shakespeare's Othello are an example). Nevertheless, all other performing arts—music, dance, and opera—have followed suit in dealing with less universal [Page 1080]matters. The advent of pop music and the evolution of melodrama and the ballad opera into the musical (theater) are cases in point.

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