ABSTRACT
The performing arts are almost as difficult to define as performance itself .1 Their significance depends on the social, religious or theatrical contexts in which they occur.2 Tragedy as performed in Ancient Greece, for example, was a mix of dance, music, scenic spectacle and spoken text, more opera than what we might term theatre today. Documenting the history, craft and practice of the live perfoming arts is a very wide brief. Far from being fixed entities, the performing arts have an astonishing capacity to combine with one another, or evolve new forms (such as performance art), or reinvent themselves (such as pantomime), or change radically in response to shifts in taste and fashion. The Cirque du Soleil, for example, have replaced traditional animal acts, which attract social disapproval, with a magical fusion of acrobatics, physical theatre, music, song, mime, costume and lighting.
