Performance Art as Lifestyle: Art in Action for Health Promotion

Performance art is both a visual arts practice and kinaesthetic approach to place-based health. The perspective of this commentary is to promote the attributes of performance art to showcase its capacity to extend people into new configurations of cultural engagement with beneficial effects. Performance art is an opportunity to engage both mind and body in actions that transform predictability and encourage wellness within the context of people’s life studios (their everyday lives). Wellness is defined here in relation to connection, capacity, curiosity and a commitment to shaping lived environments with mental and physical agency. This is the performance of flexible minds and bodies which assert vitality in terms of purposeful living and social connectivity. This perspective article will showcase how a collaboration between a Northern Ireland performance art group (Bbeyond) and the Belfast School of Art for the Being Human Festival situated civic society as a scene for healthy living. The aim of this proposal is to consider how performance art may contribute to the promotion of public health as a form of civic art making that moves people.