Performance enables artists working in a multi-disciplinary way to combine many of the elements of their practice. The shared time-based characteristics of both performance and film and video have presented new means of exploring both mediums.

For Catherine Elwes early experiments with the video image and the sculptural implications of the video monitor were fused with a strong performative, or 'live art' element, as Tennis Dialogues shows. For Elwes, as well as other artists such as Tina Keane, the intervention of their own bodies into the art-making process also challenged a male dominated art world. For Grace Ndiritu her own body becomes a means of challenging Western attitudes to Africa as she re-examines the symbols of African culture, and media portrayal, in arresting works such as The Nightingale.

The act of performance can add an extra dimension to the experience of the moving image, extending it into the space of the audience, often in an interactive way. This has encouraged artists to experiment with different ideas of time; the time experienced by the artist when filming and the later temporal event of the film projection and the artist's intervention within that space. This multi-layered exploration of time is notable in Guy Sherwin's film performance Man With Mirror. It is also true of the film performances of Gill Eatherley, Malcolm Le Grice, Annabel Nicolson and William Raban for whom performance presented a means of challenging the normally passive experience of cinema going, by devising an 'expanded' cinema of interaction, collaboration and live event.