It is odd to reflect that, until relatively recently, performance art was imagined to be a minority interest, even among the art crowd. One of the reasons why that is no longer the case — in New York at any rate — is the huge success of RoseLee Goldbergs Performa organization and its “biennial of visual art performance,” which opens its third edition this week. Goldberg is a genuine performance obsessive, and she has allowed her enthusiasm to give Performa a “biggest is best” ethos that rather takes the breath away, even by New York standards. Over the next three weeks the festival will present more than 110 works by something like 150 artists. It has been put together by 40 different curators around the world and drawn upon the contributions of 80 collaborating New York organizations. There are 11 original commissions and six additional New York premieres. Work comes in just about every shape and form that the term “performance” could possibly be imagined to embrace, takes place in every imaginable location — including the virtual alter reality Second Life — and promises in Goldberg’s words to “break down the boundaries between visual art, music, dance, poetry, fashion, architecture, film, television, radio, graphic design, and the culinary arts.”

In the interests of manageability, if nothing else, and to share some our own enthusiasms, ARTINFO offers a preview of some of this year’s Performa highlights. But frankly, these hardly scratch the surface. Check the Performa online calendar for more details of all of these events and the rest of the massive schedule, running through Nov. 22.

Click on the photo gallery at left to see images from the five selected offerings, or read on for more information.

History of the Future II
Fri., Nov. 6, and Sat., Nov. 7
Abrons Art Center

Of course there was performance art in New York years before Performa was even a glimmer in Goldberg’s eye, and this extravaganza focuses on work made here in the last 35 years — which is only a couple of years longer than Franklin Furnace, one of the city’s unique hotbeds of performance-art commissioning and promotion, has been in existence. Curated by founding director Martha Wilson in close collaboration with Salley May, long-time curator of P.S. 122s Avant-Garde-Arama, and Tom Murrin, a.k.a. Alien Comic, “History of the Future II” features video documents of historic work by performance legends like Linda Montano, Matt Mullican, Suzanne Lacy, and Dianne Torr. The contemporary generation is represented in live work by Nao Bustamante, Deb Margolin, Adam Pendleton, and others, and the whole thing is emceed by Carmelita Tropicana, who promises “cold roast beef and frozen fish pie; brand new body parts and wackily mutated worlds; Times Square the way it used to be; sublime subprimes; and a 5’6” artist boxing the 6’5” world heavyweight champion aboard the Staten Island Ferry …” Clearly this is an event not to be missed.

Lisa Kirk: Demonstration
Sun., Nov. 8
Seward Park

Where would performance art be without audience participation? Or a bit of political action? In the last few years it’s also been rather difficult to imagine it without some use of the Internet. Here’s a piece that brings all of those things together: Presented by Invisible Exports, and as part of Performa’s “Lust Weekend” (yes, that’s right), Lisa Kirk is arranging a good old-fashioned march through the streets of the Lower East Side, complete with picket signs. As a reflection of our hyper-individualistic times, however, this demonstration allows every marcher to word their own individual protest. Kirk gives us a lead with a few possibilities: “I AM A CHEATER,” “I AM A MOTHER,” and, rather more provocatively, “I AM A BOTTOM,” but participants can go to the Invisible Exports web site, email a personalized statement, and receive in return a PDF with instructions on how to turn it into a sign. Eager would-be demonstrators have already declared everything from “I AM A DISEMBOWELED UNICORN” (!) to the predictably blasé “I AM SKEPTICAL ABOUT THE EFFICACY OF THIS ART PROJECT.” It will be fascinating to see how revolutionary this particular piece will look, especially for those who remember Kirk’s solo show “REVOLUTION!” at P.S.1 a couple of years back.

Music for 16 Futurist Noise Intoners
Thurs., Nov. 12
Town Hall

Given its scale, it’s hardly surprising that Performa is thick with sub-festivals within the biennial. A couple of them — a celebration of the 100th anniversary of the first Italian Futurist manifesto, and a program of various sorts of noise music — come together in this rather special original commissioned event. The Futurists were iconoclastic innovators who felt that there was no area of life that could not be improved by dumping its traditions and starting afresh. One of their leading lights was Luigi Russolo who, deciding that music was due a once-over, conceived, built, and played live a range of mechanical noise-intoners that can be thought of as primitive, pre-electronic precursors to synthesizers. For those of us who imagined that these 1913 intonarumori existed as no more than grainy photographic images, it comes as a delight to discover that Performa has engaged Futurist expert Luciano Chessa to rebuild Russolo’s instruments and perform his original scores. The concert is all the more exciting because, in addition to vintage pieces, it includes a range of new pieces commissioned from composers as different as Blixa Bargeld, John Butcher, Elliott Sharp, and Jennifer Walshe. It should be quite an evening.

Candice Breitz: New York, New York
Thurs., Nov. 12, and Fri., Nov. 13
Abrons Arts Center

In one of the more intriguing of this year’s Performa commissions, South African artist Candice Breitz — best known for video installations that examine the real and constructed images of such music and movie stars as Madonna, Michael Jackson, Meryl Streep, and Sharon Stone — takes a seemingly simple idea, and wrests from it two evenings of improvisation that amount to a remarkable performance event. Breitz has recruited four sets of identical twins and split them into two separate performance companies — one twin per group. Then she has worked intensively with each pair of twins to develop a single performance character that each will play — though in a different cast and with inevitably different improvisational possibilities. Breitz’s longtime central interest is in the nature of identity and what she calls “the scripted life”; in this, her first live performance, she may just achieve her most telling exploration of her subject.

Alicia Framis: Lost Astronaut
Tues., Nov. 3 – Tues. Nov. 17
Art Production Fund - APF Lab

Finally, a bit of old-fashioned performance-art weirdness, which runs pretty much through the whole festival. Starting from the simple premise that, like all women, she was left behind in the race to reach the moon, Spanish artist Alicia Framis is fashioning herself as a Lost Astronaut in an original Performa commission. For two weeks she will live at a “base camp” she established at Art Production Fund in SoHo, and every day she will venture out — done up in a custom space suit — to explore not the moon but different parts of the city according to scores written for her by a range of invited artists and writers from Marina Abramovic to Katrina Sieveirding. Her schedule is posted on Performa’s Web site, letting you know when you might find her at Lincoln Center, say, or the New York Public Library. Or, in a sign of just how far performance art has come, you can follow her on Twitter or Facebook, or, if you really want to get involved, you can accept Framis’s invitation, on Facebook, to suggest instructions for her final day in New York.