Performance Art in Portugal [Paperback]

This book explores histories which have only recently been rediscovered by artists and researchers.

This study explores the history of Portuguese performance art, in its various speculative and performative forms. The author approaches this relationship with the re-emergence and centrality of these (semi-)peripheral histories at an international level, whilst identifying some of their unique traits: their cycles of emergence and retraction in Portuguese history; their multiple and complex ontologies; the intertwined relations between the art of performance and the social performance of the Portuguese (regarding topics as sensitive and fracturing as those of the long dictatorship, the colonial war and the revolutionary process, or even the integration of Portugal in the European Community and, more recently, the various 21st century social, political and economic crises). This reading in turn covers the development of the relationship between performance and hybridism, namely, analyzing the recent dimension of meta-hybridism, in the processes of artistic homage that contemporary Portuguese creators have been establishing through access to the histories and archives of this historical genre.

This book will be of great interest to students and scholars in theatre and performance studies, performance art and arts in general.

Acknowledgements

Introduction

Chapter 1. A Critical Conceptualization from Hybridism

Chapter 2. From Proto-Performances to Performance Art

Chapter 3. Performance: A Disciplinarily (IN)Operative Concept

Chapter 4. From Hybridity to Performance Meta-Hybridism

Chapter 5. Conclusion: Art of Performance as the Art of the (IN)Communicability of History