The Performa festival drives me nuts. Founded by RoseLee Goldberg in 2004, Performa throws a very large umbrella over anything in town that can consider itself performance art—such a notoriously loose category that my actual kitchen sink, ignored dishes moldering away, has applied for a slot. Look, I’m in favor of anything that throws commissioning money at the arts (hooray!); however, even a devoted art-lover might be put off by the terrifying printed schedule (as impossible to fold as a London street map and printed in light, eyesight-destroying gray) or the website (confusing and alarmingly loud). Not to worry! First, Howard Halle alerted you to the splashy offerings from the artsy-art perspective; now we theaterites want to take a whack at the performance end. Keep reading for our top four…

1. Rabih Mroué: The Lebanese video artist is best known for his Looking for a Missing Employee, a sly monologue-with-video about a notorious Beirut case, in which the official narrative devolved into Kafkaesque absurdity. In these two evenings at P.S. 122 (this Saturday and Sunday…hurry up and buy tickets!), Mroué himself is missing: First a local actor reads a letter from Mroué, and then we all sit back to listen to a collection of his works on tape. For a man who speaks so theatrically about absence, perhaps it’s a draw that he won’t be there.

2. Yvonne Rainer: No history of the downtown dance scene is complete without Rainer, the un-choreographer and filmmaker who revolutionized our ideas of “everyday” movement. On a double bill with Deborah Hay, Rainer revisits some of her own works from the ’60s by reconstituting them into a new meditation called Spiraling Down.

3. William Kentridge: This is another one you’ll have to bustle to see, as the legendary, multitalented South African artist is performing this coming Monday and Tuesday only. In I Am Not Me, the Horse Is Not Mine, Kentridge does a comic lecture-performance about working on an opera of Gogol’s The Nose, while roaming about in front of a video of his own painterly process.

4. Joan Jonas: Kids, this is the big’un. Jonas, the video-performance pioneer, is at the Performing Garage for five nights starting Tuesday, November 10, performing her Reading Dante, a collage of stunning film work interrupted and reflected (sometimes literally) by the elegant Jonas herself. Jonas’s work has such visual richness, such sheer imagistic dazzlement, that it will be a go-straight-to-the-ninth-circle, do-not-pass-go sin to miss. (Get a sneak peek here.)