Performance Art: From Futurism to the Present: Summary & Key Insights

To understand performance art’s roots, we must return to the early twentieth century, when Filippo Tommaso Marinetti and his circle of Futurists launched their infamous serate futuriste—public evenings of poetry, manifestos, and provocation. These were not conventional performances. They were charged with noise, speed, and aggression; audiences threw insults and objects, and artists retaliated with equal vigor. The Futurists exalted modern technology, the machine, and the city’s chaos. Their work celebrated movement and the breakdown of traditional forms.

In those settings, performance was weaponized. Marinetti’s emphasis on simultaneity and dynamism translated into works that merged poetry, visual design, and sound. The Futurists’ aim was to collapse art and life into one explosive continuum. This break from painting and sculpture marked one of the earliest moments when performance itself became an independent artistic medium. The relationship between artist and audience, long established as separate roles, was rewritten: both became participants in an unfolding experiment in modernity.

As the First World War obliterated the optimism of Futurism, Dada emerged from the wreckage—a movement of rebellion, absurdity, and anti-art. At Zurich’s Cabaret Voltaire, figures like Hugo Ball, Emmy Hennings, and Tristan Tzara performed chaotic, nonsensical acts that defied rational explanation. The purpose was clear: to ridicule the logic that had led to war. Dada was performance at its most anarchic—spoken word, sound poetry, dance, and costume colliding in spontaneous improvisation.

From Dada’s rejection of sense came the Surrealists’ pursuit of the unconscious. Breton and his followers turned performance into a tool of psychic revelation—automatic acts, dream reenactments, and unexpected juxtapositions. Though very different in tone, both movements demonstrated that performance was capable of expressing the invisible: emotion, absurdity, desire, revolt. In these gestures, artists discovered that art could exist outside the object, that it could inhabit a moment of purely lived experience.