Contemporary Performance

Contemporary performance is hybrid art that integrates text, dance, objects, music, costumes, lighting, image, sound, sets, and vocal expression into complex interactive systems. Contemporary performance names a body of work that builds on an aesthetic history beginning in the 1880s with Alfred Jarry and early Dada experiments and unfolds through the European and American avant-garde and Performance Art of the 1970s and 80s, arriving today with a global reach and rich diversity of form. Contemporary performance collages are often non-narrative, technically rigorous, and carefully orchestrated anarchic chaos. They unsettle perception, demand critical engagement from audiences, address conceptual debates within aesthetics, draw on a diverse range of cultural interests, and bring pleasure to populations across the globe.

Venues producing Contemporary Performance today include:
(in New York City:)
Performance Space 122
The Chocolate Factory
Dance Theater Workshop
The Kitchen
HERE
CAVE
The Collapsable Hole
BAM

(in the UK:)
Battersea Arts Center, London (BAC)
BITE Festival at the Barbican
SPILL Festival
Fierce Festival,Birmingham
Tramway, Glasgow
Artists working in Contemporary Performance today include:
Bodies in Flight (Bristol, UK)
Desperate Optimists (London, UK)
Forced Entertainment (Sheffield, UK)
Gob Squad (Berlin, D)
Reader (Glasgow, UK)
Reckless Sleepers (Nottingham, UK)
Third Angel (Sheffield)
Lone Twin (UK)
Forkbeard Fantasy (UK)
Giant Productions (Glasgow)
Goat Island Performance
FrenchMottershead
Corali
Forced Entertainment (uk)

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