Biography

Richard Schechner, one of the founders of Performance Studies, is a performance theorist, theater director, author, editor of TDR and the Enactments book series, University Professor, and Professor of Performance Studies. Schechner combines his work in performance theory with innovative approaches to the broad spectrum of performance including theatre, play, ritual, dance, music, popular entertainments, sports, politics, performance in everyday life, etc. in order to understand performative behavior not just as an object of study, but also as an active artistic-intellectual practice.

He founded The Performance Group and East Coast Artists.  His theatre productions include Dionysus in 69, Commune, The Tooth of Crime, Mother Courage and Her Children, Seneca’s Oedipus, Faust/gastronome, Three Sisters, Hamlet, The Oresteia, YokastaS, Swimming to Spalding, and Imagining O.

His books include Public Domain, Environmental Theater, Performance Theory, The Future of Ritual, Between Theater and Anthropology, Performance Studies: An Introduction, and Performed Imaginaries. As of 2018, his books have been translated into 18 languages. His theatre work has been seen in Asia, Africa, Europe, and North America. He has directed performance workshops and lectured on every continent except Antarctica.  He has been awarded numerous fellowships including Guggenheim, NEH, ACLS, and fellowships at Dartmouth, Cornell, Yale, Princeton, and the Central School of Speech and Drama, London.

Learn more here.

Books

University of Pennsylvania UP, 1985

Between Theater and Anthropology

In performances by Euro-Americans, Afro-Americans, Native Americans, and Asians, Richard Schechner has examined carefully the details of performative behavior and has developed models of the performance process useful not only to persons in the arts but to anthropologists, play theorists, and others fascinated (but perhaps terrified) by the multichannel realities of the postmodern world.

Schechner argues that in failing to see the structure of the whole theatrical process, anthropologists in particular have neglected close analogies between performance behavior and ritual. The way performances are created—in training, workshops, and rehearsals—is the key paradigm for social process.

Routledge, 2020

Performance Studies: An Introduction (4th Edition)

Richard Schechner’s pioneering textbook is a lively, accessible overview of the full range of performance, with primary extracts, student activities, key biographies, and over 200 images of global performance.

The publication of Performance Studies: An Introduction was a defining moment for the field. This fourth edition has been revised with two new chapters, up-to-date coverage of global and intercultural performances, and an in-depth exploration of the growing international importance of performance studies. Among the book’s topics are the performing arts and popular entertainments, rituals, play and games, social media, the performances of the paleolithic period, and the performances of everyday life.

Routledge, 2014

Performed Imaginaries

In this collection of essays, performance studies scholar and artist Richard Schechner brings his unique perspective to bear upon some of the key themes of society in the 21st century.

Schechner connects the avantgarde and terror, the counter-cultural movement of the 1960s/70s and the Occupy movement; self-wounding art, popular culture, and ritual; the Ramlila cycle play of India and the way imagination structures reality; the corporate world and conservative artists. Schechner asks artists to redeploy Nehru’s Third World as a movement not of nations but of like-minded culture workers who must propose counter-performances to war, violence, and the globalized corporate empire.

Routledge, 2003

Performance Theory

Few have had quite as much impact in both the academy and in the world of theatre production as Richard Schechner. For more than four decades his work has challenged conventional definitions of theatre, ritual and performance. When this seminal collection first appeared, Schechner’s approach was not only novel, it was revolutionary: drama is not just something that occurs on stage, but something that happens in everyday life, full of meaning, and on many different levels. Within these pages he examines the connections between Western and non-Western cultures, theatre and dance, anthropology, ritual, performance in everyday life, rites of passage, play, psychotherapy and shamanism.

Relevant Reading

TDR 64:1 (T245) 2020

Endgame Earth: Clinging to Optimism

Tragedy’s theme is the rule of law, and from that, obedience to properly constituted author-ity: Destiny, the fates, God, nature, human government. People get in big trouble when they go against the law. From Oedipus and Antigone to the collective catastrophes of global warm-ing, overcrowding, and mass extinction. Today’s tragic problem is that the constituted authority of nature is ignored or assaulted by the constituted authority of governments and corporations.

TDR 64:3 (T247) 2020

Forum: After Covid-19, What?

At the start of May, Richard Schechner sent all TDR editors three questions—as prompts, not a straitjacket. The questions:
1. How will performance art, theatre, dance, and music be permanently changed or different?
2. How will teaching and scholarship be permanently changed or different?
3. How will these changes affect you and those artists, scholars, and students closest to you?

Hemispheric Institute / El Instituto Hemisférico

The Hemispheric Institute gathers artists, scholars, writers, learners, and activists from across the Americas. We focus on social justice and research politically engaged culture and performance. We share this work in digital archives and amplify it through dialogues and public scholarship, residencies, publications, and gatherings.

The Paradigm Shifters series is brought to you by NYU Center for the Humanities & NYU Skirball.

Hosted by Uli Baer, PhD, Director of NYU Center for the Humanities.