Even in the context of Nevada’s unearthly Burning Man festival—imagine Mardi Gras on Planet Tatooine—the Thunderdome is a sight to behold. The industrial geodesic behemoth looms large over the desert landscape, its giant rotating sign beckoning to festival-goers. And inside this postapocalyptic Roman coliseum, a variety of live entertainment unfolds on any given festival evening: industrial opera, flame-spewing acrobats and full-on, gladiator-style, one-on-one combat.

I first saw the Thunderdome three years ago, but only recently realized: This is the future, the next evolution of performance art. Thunderdome provides a new form of storytelling for a new era—an era in which we consider history an evolving, fractured narrative, not the straight line from A to B that we learned about in grade school. As history itself becomes dynamic and relative, not static and absolute, then art must shift to reflect that change.

Though painters and writers have been mining this territory since Ulysses, only recently have we gained the tools—mostly in the form of computers—to really manipulate time and narrative in our storytelling. These tools have created what Wired recently called the “cut and paste culture” of remixes, mash-ups and samples. It is an aesthetic and a culture of union, combining new and recycled, art and entertainment, sincerity and irony. It’s been integral to the development of hip-hop, electronic music and, lately, film. This is the era of the remix.

In the last 30 years, remix art has swept through traditional visual art (collage and ready-mades), writing (nonlinear storytelling), music (hip-hop and electronica) and film (Quentin Tarantino). But it has yet to saturate more low-tech media—such as performance art, theater and dance. After all, how do you sample bodies on stage?

Performance art revolutions are unrecognizable at first blush, but they can usually be spotted by their uncommon combinations of sport, improvisation, unusual locale and booze. Remixed with recycled culture, profound irony and a fractured narrative, the next evolution of performance art will shape—and be shaped by—a new prism of history. The next generation of performance artists will wield references to the cultural dustbin the way Jackson Pollack threw paint—layer upon layer. No doubt, the Thunderdome, a nod to Mel Gibson’s Mad Max movies, has cultural layers in spades.

Two Seattle events I attended recently solidified this idea of real-time remix art. The first was Iron Composer, a takeoff of the popular Iron Chef television show. Here, two musicians spontaneously compose a song while, for example, the booze-fueled audience pelts them with rubber bands. At the end, each composer performs the new piece for a panel of local “celebrity” judges, who declare a winner. Iron Composer combines a send-up of the TV show with a sly skewering of celebrity-driven culture. And, like all good live remixes, no two are ever the same.

I also saw the Rat City Roller Girls a few weeks ago. Sponsored by hip Seattle bars and record labels, this latest rehash of the roller-derby concept is a sort of hipster-NASCAR-meets-WWF. It’s also very much remix art, combining sport, booze and a former military base with a wink at the past and a hearty dose of irony. I couldn’t even tell whether the opening rendition of the Star Spangled Banner was sincere. Should I take my cap off? Are they still winking at me? When the audience is this confused, it has to be performance art.

All these recombinations—Thunderdome, Iron Composer and Rat City Roller Girls—represent the real-time remix in its infancy. (In terms of any actual “art,” well, let’s just say there’s more heat than light.) But soon a visionary talent will come along, and, like Hitchcock did with film, turn the real-time remix into one of our generation’s defining artistic contributions. If our concept of history has, in fact, changed, then this remix style is a natural evolution. It takes the past and refracts it, sampling bits and pieces of the cultural landscape and re-appropriating them like vintage jeans. Our understanding of history, the great narrative, is always in flux, and our art is constantly adjusting to capture it. It is that endless dance that makes contemporary art so important. You just have to know where to look.