Live performance is now one of the dominant art forms worldwide. In the United States and Europe, Japan, India, and Africa, an ever-increasing number of artists, including Robert Wilson, Marina Abramovic, Pina Bausch, Karen Finley, and Matthew Barney, in a variety of styles, are engaged in evocative, contemplative, and critical performance works. This is the most complete and profusely illustrated survey of performance from the 1960s to the present.

RoseLee Goldberg, the acknowledged authority on performance art and author of Abrams' 1979 Performance: Live Art 1909 to the Present, begins her discussion with the emergence of performance in the work of Yves Klein and Piero Manzoni and later in that of Meredith Monk and Laurie Anderson. She shows how performance explores and reveals the unexpected and the forbidden more than any other art form.