Today performance could be seen as the sensitive spot of "the contemporary": if for some it represents a simple toolbox, a set of techniques and procedures affording an active grasp of contemporary reality, for others it is the ideological locus of a calling into question of postmodern thought, offering a radical alternative that does not seek to work with history, but on the contrary posits as a founding act the absolute negation of history and as a goal what lies beyond it; for still others, it is the privileged locus of a relation to history, of a movement from past to present, the join where the recall, invocation and reactivation of gestures permits a renewed link to the powers of modernism.

L. Goumarre & C. Kihm (Translation C. Penwarden)