Performance Art vs Theatre: What Is the Difference?

Two words that get mixed up

The phrase performance art vs theatre comes up because both involve live action and an audience. Add the broader label performing arts, which covers dance, theatre, music, circus and more, and the vocabulary gets tangled. The short version is that performing arts is a category of live art forms, theatre is one of them, and performance art is a practice with roots in the visual arts.

Performing arts as a category

Performing arts is the umbrella for art forms in which people present work live: theatre, dance, music, opera, circus, spoken word and related forms. So is performing arts the same as theatre? No. Theatre is one member of the family, usually built around characters, text or a fictional situation, performed by trained actors and repeatable from night to night.

Performance art as a practice

Performance art grew in the twentieth century within the world of visual art, especially from the 1960s and 1970s, when many artists moved away from objects and used their own bodies, actions and time as material. What qualifies as performance art is hard to fix by definition, and the field has always resisted tidy rules. Common traits:

• The artist often appears as themselves instead of a fictional character.
• The piece may be a single action, a long duration or a score for others to follow.
• It is frequently shown in galleries, public spaces or festivals rather than in a standard theatre.
• It may happen once, or change each time it is repeated.
• The audience can be a witness, a participant or part of the material.

Signs that help you tell them apart

No single sign decides it, but these questions often help:

• Is there a fictional role, or is the performer present as themselves?
• Is the piece repeatable as a script, or tied to one moment and place?
• Does the programme place it in a theatre season or in a visual art programme?
• Is the main interest a story, or an action, a duration or an idea?

Many works answer yes to both sides. Performance art and dance also share a border: some choreographers work in galleries, and some performance artists use choreographic methods. How performance art relates to contemporary dance is a matter of context and intention more than technique, so ask what the makers say about their own work.

The overlap at festivals

Mixed festivals do not insist on strict labels. A programmer might place a piece by a theatre company, a piece by a choreographer and a durational action by a visual artist in the same weekend, and let the audience decide how each one speaks. If you enjoy the confusion, you will probably enjoy such a festival. To see how choices like this are made, read how festivals are programmed, and for neighbouring forms see contemporary dance versus modern dance and installation art.