The Routledge Companion to Performance Art

This global anthology offers a constellation of practices, genealogies, contexts, movements, events, artists, theories, and debates around performance art and its meaning, current and future research, and emerging critical discourse.

At the core of this collection is the understanding that performance art and its organizations emerged globally, without a single point of origin. Each chapter engages artists and practices from different moments and regions, foregrounding how cultural and social conditions shape distinct motivations, methods, relations, and interpretive frameworks. The first section of the book is devoted to multiple genealogies, rather than one central history, of performance art’s formations throughout every inhabited continent on earth. The second section explores performance art as a situated practice of ethical engagement, political critique, and worldbuilding across diverse contexts. Chapters in the third section trace performance art’s afterlives in dynamic interfaces that reshape histories, challenge dominant narratives, and persistently reconfigure relationships among bodies, actions, and institutions. The final section of the book offers a constellation of performance art documents and microhistories from global contexts. Considerable space in this book is devoted to the institutional infrastructure for performance art, including organizations, spaces, publications, and festivals.

The book is of interest to scholars working in contemporary art, performance art, conceptual art, art history, performance studies, anthropology, curatorial studies, theatre, dance, music, critical theory, and photography.