Perhaps, the only true point of contact between them is the dancer or performer’s body, its physical presence. Beyond that, their modes of expression vary and diverge significantly, from their initial inspirations to their final outcomes. These differences are not superficial but rather essential, embedded deep in their very foundations.
The contrast between performance art and contemporary dance fundamentally lies in their approach to research and the direction it takes: vertical in one case, horizontal in the other. In performance art, research is both the core and the driving force - it is inseparable from the event itself, shaping both its origin and its destination, far beyond the final form presented to the audience.
This research is intimately linked to the performer’s lived experience, making performance art a fertile ground for discovery. Each act of breaking, whether it is a standard one, a form, or a code, carries with it the magic of epiphany. Performance art does not merely create meanings or forms; its very essence lies in their emergence.
Performance art astonishes both the audience and the performer because it disrupts. It brings things into being; it is, by its nature, primal and evocative. It always seeks to be an origin, to question everything. Each performance is a fresh beginning, a reinvention of everything, rejecting fixed rules or boundaries. And that, perhaps, is its beauty.
Performance art becomes spiritual when it reaches the root. After all, theatrical research like spiritual exploration must be radical, otherwise it wouldn’t be research at all.
And with research as its driving force, performance art disrupts from within. It excavates, it unsettles. By its very nature, it aspires to question everything, including its own language, which is always, wonderfully, fragile and unstable.
On the other hand, in certain types of modern dance, the ones that rests on more solid foundations and perhaps plays with classical elements without any distortion, aesthetic innovations come from the highest level, but research often stops at an earlier stage. It doesn’t always dig. It moves in a horizontal direction, far from the descent into the underworld of creation that defines performance art.
The performing artist in ballet is not asked to put themselves on the line. They enter and exit the performance intact, untouched in their own interiority. The audience, in turn, enjoys the spectacle without being called upon to interpret it, or not to the same extent at least. This is why in the field of contemporary dance, research can be described to be horizontal. It unfolds through choreography, set design, costumes, and, of course, gestures. But there is a code. And there are variations around it.
In short, there is always a reference point against which interpretations can be measured. One does not rewrite everything from scratch each time. Instead, one writes and rewrites on an existing canvas, as the great masters of ancient painting once did, proceeding step by step, through small, imperceptible conquests.
However, this is not the time to make an apology for one form or another. Rather, our aim is simply to invite the audience to reflect on certain aesthetic categories, so that we may better understand, with clearer eyes, the performances of tomorrow and the experiments to come.
A journey into the aura of key practices and figures of spirituality and performance art between body, gesture and vision.
