Last week, I sat for 20 minutes in a near-empty room in the Abrons Art Center. It was a cold, grey day in New York and many in the small audience looked unhappy. At the back of the theatre there was a musician playing the oboe but he couldn’t seem to get a tune going. The event, which seemed to not want to start, was a performance by French artist Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster and composer Ari Benjamin Meyers called “K62”, part of Performa 09, New York’s biennial festival of performing arts. I sat there, waiting, thinking that performance art, which had been so sprightly in the 1970s, must be preparing to retire by now. I wished I had brought a book.

Eventually, a woman dressed in black informed us that there had been a mistake – we had been sent to the wrong venue. Our new location, the main theatre in the Abrons Art Center, was fuller but the stage was still near-empty, and even after half an hour things weren’t hotting up. The only real activity in the theatre came from four anxious female organisers speaking loudly into walkie-talkies. They seemed to be trying to locate a portion of the audience who were lost. “Jenny to security,” one of the women said. “Do we have any Ks?” “No sign yet,” a tinny voice replied.

Even when a small orchestra finally mounted the stage to play Mozart’s K97, the organisers seemed to become more, not less, animated. “K3 has landed,” one of them said during a diminuendo of the violins. A moment later, a small door at the back of the stage opened and in walked K3, a good-looking young man, dressed in a leather jacket. He took a couple of steps forward, shielding his eyes from the lights, and then staggered back, clearly alarmed to have found himself on a stage in front of hundreds of people.

Over the course of the next two hours, in the midst of musical recitals including an elaborately mimed performance from Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster herself, 20 bemused “Ks” crossed from the outside world on to the stage, like hapless homing pigeons. On opening the door, some put their hands over their mouths, as if they had just won a prize. Others stood still, momentarily paralysed, needing to be coaxed down to the audience’s seating by the organisers. For the audience, the experience was equally bewildering and as strangely tense as waiting for a relative at an airport. After the arrival of the 10th K, however, it occurred to me that the behaviour of these strangers, however real, had the appearance of being less authentic than the behaviour of the organisers, played by diligent actors.

Later, on the way to the after-party (which was to take place in a bar appropriately called “After”), K3 gave me his account of the evening’s events. Unlike those of us seated in the Abrons theatre, he had bought a ticket for K85, a performance described online as a “solo journey through New York, with location to be announced”. Before following a map to the small, anonymous door that thrust him so callously on to the stage, he had been sent to a barber’s shop, and then to a supermarket. Each location, he realised, had been featured in Martin Scorsese’s 1985 classic After Hours; each musician he met was playing music from that film. It was unreal – just like being in a film, he said. You had to be there.

. . .

Performance art has always relied on artist and audience “being there”; it is the sole prerequisite of the medium. But – as contemporary fiction and film so often illustrate – “being there” is more of a multimedia affair than we tend to think. In Tom McCarthy’s Remainder, for instance, the protagonist spends millions hiring organisers to recreate the specific conditions of a déjà vu – which is itself not a straight memory, but rather “various things all rolled together: memories, imaginings, films, I don’t know ...” In Charlie Kaufman’s masterful film, Synecdoche New York, a theatre director rebuilds his New York life inside a vast theatre, casting actors to represent each person in his life, even as he meets new people. In both cases, art not only mimics reality; it is more convincing than life itself. As McCarthy’s protagonist knows, real life can feel horribly inauthentic and actors can be more convincing than normal people.

It feels right that this year, the Performa programme should have featured participatory performances that included eating pasta, attending a public library, and reading a newspaper; some of the finest performance art depended not on political statements or dramatic gestures, but on pieces of reality served up to audiences like cinematic off-cuts. It feels right, too, that the festival should happen in New York, a city haunted by film sets, in which even the most mundane daily rituals seem at times to take on the smooth veneer of performance. As the audience left the Abrons Arts Center to move on to the after-party – amid dramatic squeals of, “Oh my God that was soconfusing!” – it was hard to know where the stage ended and the real world began. I suppose we shouldn’t have been surprised when “After” turned out not to be a nightclub at all. It was, instead, a small door leading to an empty stage, where we stood together in silence, feeling rather foolish.

Peter Aspden returns next week