Reconstructing Performance Art : Practices of Historicisation, Documentation and Representation

This book investigates the practices of reconstructing and representing performance art and their power to shape this art form and our understanding of it.

Performance art emerged internationally between the 1960s and 1970s crossing disciplinary boundaries between performing arts and visual arts. Because of the challenge it posed to the ontologies and paradigms of these fields, performance art has since stimulated an ongoing debate on the most appropriate means to document, preserve and display it. Tancredi Gusman brings together international scholars from different disciplinary fields to examine methods, media, and approaches by which this art form has been represented and (re)activated over time and its transnational history reconstructed. Through contributions and case studies spanning various countries, regions and artistic fields, the authors outline an innovative theoretical-methodological framework for capturing the processes and strategies for transmitting the tangible and intangible heritage of performance art.

This book will be of great appeal to students, researchers, and practitioners in the fields of Theatre and Performance Studies as well as Visual Arts and Art History, who have an interest in performance art, its history and presence in the contemporary artistic and cultural landscape.

Tancredi Gusman is Assistant Professor in Theater and Performance Studies at the Department of History, Humanities and Society, University of Rome Tor Vergata. From 2017 to 2019 he led the EU Horizon 2020 project "Between Evidence and Representation: History of Performance Art Documentation from 1970 to 1977" at the Freie Universität Berlin and was Marie Skłodowska-Curie Research Fellow at the International Research Center "Interweaving Performance Cultures." He is currently co-convenor of the Historiography Working Group of the International Federation for Theatre Research (IFTR). His research investigates the politics of representation and spectatorship, and the histories of performance art, performance documentation and theater criticism.