“Making Performance Art” is a comprehensive body of performance art work that integrates hundreds of distinct performance art conventions and aims to articulate a functional vocabulary for performance art, giving audiences a framework for discourse. Both iterations of the performance involved performing eight separate performance art conventions within a two-hour span. Conventions explored during the performance:

Performance as staged event

Performance as staging

Performance as dance

Performance as (repeatable) show

Performance as relic

Performance as action

Performance as “total” installation

Performance as lecture

Performance as work

Performance as sculpture

Performance as image-generating action

Performance as observation

Performance as spiritual exercise

Performance as language

Performance as narrative

Performance as a praxis of articulating identity

Performance as memory work

Performance as attention

Performance as demonstration

Performance as political strategy

Performance as act

Performance as life

Performance as life-art-work

Performance as celebration

Performance as sign system

Performance as space of tension

Performance as sound experience

Performance as process

Performance as act of positing meaning

Performance as interpretation

Performance as socially marked role play

Performance as social practice

Performance as mimesis

Performance as ritual

Performance as catharsis

Performance as theater

Performance as situative production

Performance as situative experiment

Performance as culture-forming presentation

Performance as achievement

Performance as dilemma

Performance as communication

Performance as medium for communicating art

Performance as gestural situative event

Performance as tool

Performance as personal field of experimentation

Performance as a transitional form of art

Performance as agreement

Performance as personal field of experimentation

Performance as sport

Performance as leisure