Cabaret Voltaire to the Happening: Tracing Performance Art's Lineage

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

Performance Art's lineage runs backward through two separate wartime provocations before it reaches its own postwar name. The Italian Futurists staged confrontational public evenings, serate, from around 1910, reciting manifestos and provoking audiences into shouting matches and occasionally physical fights as a deliberate part of the work rather than an unwanted side effect of it. Dada radicalized the same basic idea at the Cabaret Voltaire in Zurich from 1916, where Hugo Ball's sound poetry, recited in a cardboard costume that made him barely able to walk, and Tristan Tzara's chance-generated readings treated the live, unrepeatable evening itself as the artwork, in open hostility to a wartime culture Dada held responsible for organizing mass slaughter with a straight face. Both currents lapsed as organized movements well before World War II. Performance Art as a named, continuing discipline re-emerged specifically through Allan Kaprow, a former painting student who staged 18 Happenings in 6 Parts at New York's Reuben Gallery in 1959, dividing an audience into groups and moving them through scripted but partly improvised actions across several rooms. Kaprow's own writing on the Happening insisted that this was not theater with better production values but an extension of painting's own logic, action painting's gesture pushed all the way from the canvas into real, occupied space, with the audience now physically inside the gesture rather than looking at its residue.