Performance Art in Portugal

This book explores histories which have only recently been rediscovered by artists and researchers. It's aim is to explore the history of Portuguese performance art, in its various "speculative" and "performative" forms. The author seeks to identify the unique traits of this history in Portugal, contextualising them in the current international panorama, where we are witnessing the progressive centrality and even resurgence of these (semi-)peripheral stories in the world of art. It will present the cycles of emergence and retraction of performance art in Portuguese history; its multiple and complex ontologies and also the intertwined relations between performance art and the social performance of the Portuguese. In this last dimension, such sensitive and fracturing topics in Portuguese History are analysed, such as those of the long dictatorship, the colonial war, the revolutionary process, the integration into the European Community and, even more recently, the various social, political and economic crises experienced by the Portuguese in the 21st century. This reading in turn covers the development of the relationship between performance and hybridism, namely, analysing 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. Performance Art in Portugal will be of great interest to students and scholars in theatre and performance studies, performance art, and arts in general.