Glossary

A

Actionism (Viennese Actionism)

A radical, often confrontational current of performance associated with Vienna in the 1960s, using the body, ritual, and taboo-breaking action as its primary medium; influential on later body- and endurance-based practice.

Archive (in performance studies)

A body of material — documents, photographs, video, oral testimony, objects — assembled after the fact to preserve knowledge of works that, by nature, cannot be collected or exhibited in their original live form.

B

Body art

A branch of performance art in which the artist's own body is the primary material and site of the work, often used to explore identity, endurance, pain, or physical limits.

C

Costume

Clothing or bodily covering designed or chosen specifically for a performance, functioning not as everyday dress but as a device that transforms, conceals, or marks the performer's body for the action.

D

Durational performance

A work structured around an extended, often continuous span of time — hours, days, or longer — where duration itself is the central material and the audience's relationship to waiting, fatigue, or attention becomes part of the meaning.

Documentation

The photographic, video, textual, or object-based record made during or after a performance. Because the live event itself cannot be owned or resold, documentation is often the only trace through which the work circulates, is studied, or enters an archive.

E

Endurance

A quality or strategy in performance where the artist sustains a demanding physical or mental state — pain, exhaustion, repetition, restriction — over time, testing the limits of the body and the viewer's capacity to watch.

Ephemerality

The quality of being temporary and unrepeatable — a defining condition of performance art, whose "object" is an event that exists only once, in time, and cannot be fully recovered afterward.

H

Happening

A loosely structured, often participatory event first developed in the late 1950s–60s that blurs the line between visual art and theatre, typically unscripted or only partly scripted.

I

Intervention

An artistic action inserted into an existing public space, institution, or social situation, usually without prior announcement, that disrupts or reframes the ordinary functioning of that context.

Improvisation

Action generated in the moment rather than fully predetermined, allowing a performance to respond to the specific audience, space, or unexpected events of a given showing.

L

Live art

A broad umbrella term for time-based, often hybrid practices that take place in the presence of an audience — encompassing performance art, but also crossing into theatre, dance, and installation.

P

Performance art

An art form in which the artist's own body, actions, and presence, carried out live before an audience or a camera, constitute the work itself, rather than serving as a means to produce a separate object.

Participatory / relational

Work in which the audience is invited to take an active role — completing, altering, or co-producing the piece — shifting the performance from something watched to something enacted together with viewers.

Prop / object-based performance

Performance in which physical objects — everyday items, constructed props, or materials — are used as active collaborators in the action rather than as mere stage decoration.

Public space performance

Performance staged outside dedicated art venues — in streets, squares, transport, or other everyday settings — where unprepared passers-by become an unintentional, often unaware, audience.

R

Reperformance / reenactment

The act of restaging an earlier performance, either by its original author or by another artist, raising questions about authenticity, documentation, and what survives of a live work over time.

S

Site-specific

Work conceived for, and inseparable from, a particular physical location, drawing on that place's history, architecture, or social meaning rather than being portable to any venue.

Score / instruction

A written or verbal set of directions that specifies actions to be carried out, allowing a performance to be repeated, delegated to other performers, or interpreted differently across stagings — a practice rooted in Fluxus event scores.

W

Witness / spectatorship

The role of the person present at a live performance. Unlike a viewer of a finished object, a witness's presence, attention, and sometimes physical proximity to risk are treated as part of what completes the work.