Das Emanzipatorische Potenzial der Performance Art (The Emancipatory Potential of Peformance Art)

Sophia Firgau’s Das Emanzipatorische Potenzial der Performance Art (The Emancipatory Potential of Performance Art) is both a helpful introduction to performance art that could be well employed in both undergraduate and graduate classrooms, and a convincing scholarly argument for the transformative power of performance aesthetics. Firgau defines the genre of performance art, distinguishes it from both theater and public ritual performance, and explains the potential for personal, community, and civic transformation inherent in its formal characteristics. Firgau demonstrates that performance art transforms by crossing a number of conventional formal boundaries—for instance, those separating artist and audience and separating art and everyday life—and that, in so doing, it creates a threshold experience (Schwellenerfahrung) whose liminal nature emancipates by emphasizing process over prescribed outcomes