The Methuen Drama Companion to Performance Art

The Methuen Drama Companion to Performance Art offers a comprehensive guide to the major issues and interdisciplinary debates concerning performance in art contexts that have developed over the last decade. It understands 'performance art' as an institutional, cultural, and economic phenomenon rather than as a label or object. Following the ever-increasing institutionalization and mainstreaming of performance and its methods of display, representation, and mediation in the wider cultural sphere, the book’s chapters identify a marked change in the economies and labor practices surrounding performance art and its institutional curating and presenting practices, reflective of an advanced stage of capitalism that approaches art production in tandem with event production. Embracing what we perceive to be the 'oxymoronic status' of performance art—where it is simultaneously precarious and highly profitable—the essays in this book map the myriad gestures and radical possibilities of this extreme contradiction.

The Companion activates an interdisciplinary perspective to better attend to performance art’s legacies and its current practices. It brings together specially commissioned essays from leading innovative scholars from a wide range of approaches including art history, visual and performance studies, dance and theatre scholarship in order to provide a non-hierarchical merging of the disciplines within and between the humanities. It provides ten methodological directions that examine possibilities of transformative change—the core of performance art’s transgressive radical legacy. The book also includes a section on new directions and resources devoted to performance art. The chapters will thus provide multifocal perspectives on recent research trends to offer an array of intertwined methodologies.