ABSTRACT
Autobiographical narratives are spaces where an individual’s private stories are offered up for public consumption. Since its identification as a discrete practice, autobiography, with its reflection on personal experience, has prompted discussion about the relation between fact and fiction, the nature of selfhood and the mechanics of representation. These concerns can also be related to autobiographical performance, which is the subject of this chapter. The contemporary practice of autobiographical performance can be traced back through the Happenings of the 1960s and 1970s where the relationship between art and everyday life was blurred and the focus was not on the skilled performance of a character in a narrative but on participants being ‘themselves’ in a range of situations.
