Live art: Definition and documentation

Abstract

This paper considers the inter‐disciplinarity of ‘Live Art’ as a field of work and as a performance practice. Setting contemporary British Live Art against earlier British and North American performance art practices, the paper considers the intersection between performance art and theatre and precedents for contemporary Live Art's resistance to critical discourse and definition. In this context, the paper goes on to address the implications of such work for the relationship between critical discourse and its object, for performance theory, and considers the relationship between critical discourse, documentation and the ‘event’ both would remember. In doing so, the essay introduces and discusses the implications of the differing responses to these problems which shape the varied contributions to this issue of Contemporary Theatre Review.

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