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The main goal of this paper is double: to reconstruct the genealogy of the concept of performance in contemporary arts et in social sciences (sociology, linguistics, anthropology) and to show how at the end of 50’s in US the question around a praxeological vision of art crosses, in a surprising and interesting way, a dramaturgic vision of social action as performance.If, in contemporary arts, the emergence of “performance”, as an artistic practice, shows a particular interest for language and questions dichotomies as “front stage vs back stage”, “art vs. life” etc, we can observe, at the same time, in social sciences, with the pioneering works of Gurvitch (1956) and Goffman (1959), the emergence of a vision of social interaction through the lens of performance and theater.In this paper, we question the historical conditions of this phenomenon, a possible dialogue between art and social sciences and the theoretical and the epistemological issues of performance and contemporary arts for the study of interactional practices and for the history of ideas in sociolinguistics.