‘Performance’ as an art form is hip: what is it, and why is it so popular?

Performance is not only the English word for ‘performance’ – the term represents a completely unique branch of art, a branch that seems to make a larger part of the tree every year. The art form originates in the Avant-Garde movements in the early twentieth century. With currents such as futurism and Dadaism, artists radically opposed the traditional forms of art. In the sixties and seventies, the genre received a new impulse with, among other things, the Fluxus-Happies and the Body Art phenomenon, where artists used their own body as a medium. Iconic artists such as Marina Abramović and Joseph Beuys laid the foundation for what we recognize today as a performance art: an art form in which the artist is often present live and in which the boundary between work and the world is often not clear.

Performance is hip in the Netherlands: more and more artists, whether they come from the dance, scenography, visual art or theater world, call themselves performers and create performances. This month, the art-loving adventurer has no fewer than two festivals dedicated to the genre to choose from: the Utrecht Mime and Performance Festival Zéro and the International Performance Festival Feeling Curious? In Rotterdam. At the same time, Museum De Pont shows in Tilburg This youiiyou (2023), A live work by performance artist Tino Sehgal.

But what does ‘performance’ actually mean?

“Performances are performances where you really experience something,” says Berith Danse, director of the Amsterdam square theater and jury chairman of the VSCD MIME/Performance Prize. “It is always an experiment. You can participate in something, and you have no idea what to expect in advance. The fact that it is so popular also has to do with the audience. That is no longer possible to look at a long, old -fashioned chat theater. That needs something more exciting.”

The experimental nature of the art form also ensures that the jury discusses every year about the criteria of the prize, and therefore about the definition of the genre. Danse: “Performance is averse to criteria. It cannot be pushed into a box.”

Zoom in

Diverse forms of art

Almost everyone who talks about the art form comes with the same message at some point: Performance is not, or very difficult, to define. Various forms of art are classified under the heading: installations in museums, dance performances, interactive events, happening in public space, personal theater solos, social experiments. What connects all those different art expressions? Or is ‘performance’ might be nothing but a recipient for everything that is not divided into traditional categories?

“In a sense, every student himself fills in what he means by Performance,” says Giovanni Brand, himself performer and since this month training coordinator of performance training at the Maastricht Theater Academy. Since 2000, students at the Academy can not only let themselves be a director or actor, but also as a theatrical performer.

Brand understands that this is not really satisfactory as an answer, “but it is precisely that freedom that is the great asset of the training. We want to challenge students to separate themselves from stuck ideas about what theater should be. Nobody will tell you during the training that something is not allowed.” Apart from one rule then: “In principle, it is intended that the maker himself is present in his work. If only in the form of a voice-over.”

The very first student ever graduated as a theatrical performer at the Toneelacademie, in 2003, is director, actress and performer Lizzy Timmers. “At the end of the first year,” she says, “the teachers said: we have a plan, it’s not finished yet, but maybe we can start with you.” That plan was the performance training. “The theater landscape was changing. Post -dramatic theater made a rise; theater in which it was not worked from a classic stage text, but from musicality, for example, or assembly principles, or collaborations with other art disciplines. The school wanted to give students the opportunity to develop within that development.”

Super -skeptic

And so Timmers, who did not see himself as the next Halina Reijn “, started in the year 2000, on her own, a pilot of a course that nobody knew exactly how that shape should take shape. “I was allowed to shape the curriculum for myself. I had a lot of fun in it. I have a good time with that freedom.” Some others found the experiment nonsense. Timmers: “I remember that I had made a kind of lecture performance all over performance. The entire school came to watch. In the first row was the actor class that now forms Wunderbaum. They were all super conception. As actors, we can just as well experiment with new forms?, They found them. Who the fuck needs performance?“She laughs.” I still see it as an enrichment: a course specifically aimed at investigating new forms of telling. “

Also in her place in performance training, Lisa Schamlé, volume 2015, who at the Academy the space was interested in integrating photography into her work. Schamlé: “People love categorizing, also because outdated patriarchal standards prescribe it, but I find the gray area interesting, where disciplines merge into each other. Viewing a photo in a photography museum is a 2D experience. If there is also a person present in the room, as part of the work, the person’s experience is always a spanter. Cold object. ”

At the Zéro Festival in Utrecht, Schamlé will show its performance next Saturday Me, a dePictionin which her own body causes this tension. Schamlé: “The performance is about the ideal of beauty, and how everyone with a body is a victim.” During the performance, which previously played at the IDFA documentary festival, Schamlé is dressed in a silver -colored bathing suit on a mirror object looking at itself. The public can walk around freely. Halfway through the performance, Shamlé loosens her view from her reflection and looks at visitors through the mirror.

Interaction with the public

“I had not foreseen in advance how penetrating the meeting with the audience would be,” she says. “As long as you focus on your own body, people dare to look at you unabashedly, but as soon as you look at them, they feel caught. Vulnerable. It happened that someone had to cry.” It is the interaction with the audience that is the great power of Performance Art for Schamlé. “There is the tension in that. In the theater you are anonymous as a spectator, as a kind of voyeur. In a performance, at least in mine, the public part of the work becomes a part of the work.”

Didi Kreike also studied Performance in Maastricht. In 2018, they completed the training, and then set up R3LN4CHT, a collective that works at the intersection of (queer) nightlife and art. R3LN4CHT can be seen at the Zéro Festival with Enforcementsobey a three -hour happening over the phenomenon. Previously Enforcements Performed at dance festivals such as Down the Rabbit Hole and Poing Festival. Kreike: “For Zéro we are moving the experiment to the theater hall. Spectators are allowed to step in and stay as long as they want, while six performers and a DJ, disguised as traffic controllers, are constantly interventing in space.”

Duration is an important element in their work, says Kreike. “With more traditional forms of theater, the public travels a fairly fixed route: cozy at the bar, then to your chair in the dark, show, applause, perhaps a drink, and home. Start and end of the experience are clearly defined. In my work that is diffuser. Safety Sirens (2025) For example, people were allowed to stay as long as they wanted, because the work was played in a run. We play a lot on dance festivals; Then the performance flows into a party. For me, performance is really outside the lines. “

Extremely difficult choreography

There are also makers who explicitly choose not to put their work under ‘Performance’, although it has all the qualifications. Choreographer Jan Martens for example. In his performance The Dog Days are over 2.0The opening performance of Performance Festival Feeling Curious?, he lets his dancers perform such an extremely difficult, exhausting choreography that they impossible to make it clear. The show is not only about what this does to the dancers, but also about what looking at performers who, in this way, toil, sweating, abandoning, failing, does with an audience.

“In my work I am inspired by principles from the PerformanTradition,” says Martens. “By Marina Abramović, for example, and her use of elements such as exhaustion, repetition and transformation through time.” He therefore understands that his work is labeled as performance. “But rather than that, I would stretch the boundaries of what is understood by dance.”

Looking up, stretching, breaking boundaries – between disciplines, between the public and work, between reality and construction – that is, according to all stories, the métier of the performer – and more and more artists are on that border area. According to performer Lisa Schamlé, it is the impact of a broader social development: “I believe that people are slowly starting to see that it is time to reject box thinking.” Mime/Performance Price Jury Member Berith Danse: “The genre was just always far ahead of its time. Long live the vague sector!”

To share





Mail the editors