Performing arts
Art forms in which performers use bodies, voices, instruments, or other actions to present work to an audience, including theatre, dance, and music.
Performance: An enacted event in which people present actions, roles, or works to others. Performing arts take shape through enacted events rather than only through fixed objects.
Theatre: An art form in which performers enact stories, characters, or ideas before an audience. Theatre combines acting, text, movement, and design in staged performance.
Rehearsal: A practice period in which performers prepare, refine, or coordinate a work before presentation. Rehearsal develops timing and coordination before a performance reaches its audience.
Visual arts: Art forms primarily encountered through visual objects or images, such as painting and sculpture. Visual arts often persist as objects, unlike performances that unfold through action in time.
Performer: A person who presents artistic work through embodied action, voice, or instrumental skill. Performers supply the expressive actions at the center of these art forms.
Dance: An art form that uses patterned bodily movement as expression or composition. Dance makes the body’s movement the principal material of performance.
Improvisation: The creation or shaping of material in the moment rather than from a fully fixed plan. Improvisation lets performers compose actions or sounds during the event itself.
Recorded music: Music captured and reproduced through a recording medium. Recorded music can circulate without the performers’ simultaneous presence.
Audience: A group of people who attend to a performance or other presentation. The audience’s presence helps define performance as an act of presentation.
Music: An art form that organizes sound through elements such as rhythm, melody, and harmony. Music is performed through voices, instruments, or electronic sound.