Richard Schechner

Explores the nature of ritualised behaviour and its relationship to performance and politics

Writings on Culture and Performance

The Future of Ritual

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.

Between Theater & Anthropology

Includes discussion of the performing arts and popular entertainments, rituals, play and games as well as the performances of every day life. This text includes: biographies, source material and photographs; and more.

An Introduction

Performance Studies

First Published in 1988. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

Performance Theory

Willa Appel

The field of performance studies embraces performance behaviour of all kinds and in all contexts, from everyday life to high ceremony. This volume investigates a wide range of performance behaviour - dance, ritual, conflict situation, sports, storytelling and display behaviour - in a variety of circumstances and cultures. It considers such issues as the relationship between training and the finished performance; whether performance behaviour is universal or culturally specific; and the relationships between ritual aesthetics, popular entertainment and religion, and sports and theatre and dance. The volume brings together essays from leading anthropologists, artists and performance theorists to provide a definitive introduction to the burgeoning field of performance studies. It will be of value to scholars, teachers and students of anthropology, theatre, folklore, semiotics and performance studies.

Intercultural Studies of Theatre and Ritual

By Means of Performance

Slavoj Žižek

Jean

Walter Siti

Julia Kristeva

Werner Herzog

Jacques Rancière

Roberto Esposito

Francesco Casetti

Marie

David Freedberg

Paul Schrader

Toni Servillo

Edgar Reitz

Paolo Jedlowski

Yervant Gianikian

Angela Ricci Lucchi

Julio Bressane

Roberto De Gaetano

Georges Didi

Huberman

Luc Nancy

Mario Martone

Francesco Ceraolo

Louis Comolli

Raoul Ruiz

Marco Bellocchio

José Mondzain

Shinya Tsukamoto

Amos Gitai

24 conversazioni apparse su Fata Morgana con grandi figure della contemporaneità, studiosi e artisti che parlano del cinema facendone un luogo del pensiero e una forma di vita. Un viaggio in cui il cinema e l’immagine, più di ogni altra forma d’arte, si riscoprono indissolubilmente legati alla complessità del nostro presente. Per la prima volta riunite e tradotte in inglese in un’unica pubblicazione, queste conversazioni offrono al lettore una costellazione unica di autori e temi per pensare il cinema a partire dal nostro presente e viceversa. 24 conversations originally published by Fata Morgana with important scholars and artists who have intended cinema as a place of thought and a form of life. A unique constellation of authors and themes in which cinema and the image, more than any other art form, are inextricably intertwined with the complexity of the contemporary. Edited and translated into English for the first time, these conversations offer to the reader a unique constellation of authors and themes, which leads one to reconsider cinema starting from our present and vice versa. Roberto De Gaetano is full professor of Filmology at the University of Calabria (Italy). He is the author of important books on the relationship between cinema and philosophy (Il cinema secondo Gilles Deleuze, Bulzoni, 1996; Il visibile cinematografico, Bulzoni, 2002; La potenza delle immagini, Ets, 2012), cinema and the contemporary (L’immagine contemporanea. Cinema e mondo presente, Marsilio, 2010), and authors and forms of Italian cinema (Il corpo e la maschera. Il grottesco nel cinema italiano, Bulzoni, 1999; Nanni Moretti. Lo smarrimento del presente, Pellegrini, 2015). He is the Editor of the three-volume edition Lessico del cinema italiano. Forme di rappresentazione e forme di vita (Mimesis, 2014-2016), and the Editor in Chief of Fata Morgana. Francesco Ceraolo (PhD, Qmul) teaches Film Analysis and Theater and Opera at the University of Calabria (Italy). His work mainly focuses on the relationship between philosophy, performing and visual arts. Among his recent publications are Verso un'estetica della totalità. Una lettura critico-filosofica del pensiero di Richard Wagner (Mimesis, 2013) and the chapter entitled ‘Opera’ in Lessico del cinema italiano. Forme di rappresentazione e forme di vita (Mimesis, 2015). He has edited and translated into Italian Alain Badiou’s writings on the theater (Rapsodia per il teatro. Arte, politica, evento, Pellegrini, 2015). In 2015 he was awarded the ‘Arthur Rubinstein – A Life In Music’ Prize by Teatro La Fenice for his musicological scholarship. He is a member of the Editorial Board of Fata Morgana.

CINEMA, THOUGHT, LIFE. Conversations with Fata Morgana

Essays on Performance Theory, 1970-1976

Brooks McNamara

Jerry Rojo

Eighteen Projects

Theatres, Spaces, Environments

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.

In this second edition, the author opens with a discussion of important developments in the discipline. His closing chapter, 'Global and Intercultural Performance', is completely rewritten in light of the post-9/11 world. Fully revised chapters with new examples, biographies and source material provide a lively, easily accessible overview of the full range of performance for undergraduates at all levels in performance studies, theatre, performing arts and cultural studies. Among the topics discussed are the performing arts and popular entertainments, rituals, play and games as well as the performances of everyday life. Supporting examples and ideas are drawn from the social sciences, performing arts, post-structuralism, ritual theory, ethology, philosophy and aesthetics. User-friendly, with a special text design, Performance Studies: An Introduction also includes the following features: numerous extracts from primary sources giving alternative voices and viewpoints biographies of key thinkers student activities to stimulate fieldwork, classroom exercises and discussion key reading lists for each chapter twenty line drawings and 202 photographs drawn from private and public collections around the world.

"There is an actual, living relationship between the spaces of the body and the spaces the body moves through; human living tissue does not abruptly stop at the skin, exercises with space are built on the assumption that human beings and space are both alive." Here are the exercises which began as radical departures from standard actor training etiquette and which stand now as classic means through which the performer discovers his or her true power of transformation. Available for the first time in fifteen years, the new expanded edition of Environmental Theater offers a new generation of theater artists the gospel according to Richard Schechner, the guru whose principles and influence have survived a quarter-century of reaction and debate.

Environmental Theater

Brian McAllister

Claudia Chibici-Revneanu

Kanta Kochhar-Lindgren

Prateek

Rob Harle

Indranil Acharya

Sruti Bala

Johannis Tsoumas

Dan W. Lawrence

Shreelina Ghosh

Shramana Das Purkayastha

Romi Grossberg

Proggya Ghatak

Yogitha Shetty

Sudev Pratim Basu

Azeez Akinwumi Sesan

Binayak Bhattacharya

Anuparna Mukherjee

Rajdeep Konar

Shukla Chatterjee (Mandal)

Samipendra Banerjee

Vikash Kumar

Amir Ali Nojoumian

S. Vimala

Fiona Sprott

Praggnaparamita Biswas

Stephen Oladele Ajayi

Sita Maria Kattanek

Suryendu Chakraborty

Sambuddha Ghosh

In this edition of Rupkatha we have the privilege of incorporating an introductory essay by Richard Schechner, in which he once again valorizes the anthropological foundations of performance studies and goes on to refer towards the infallible necessity of observing behaviour as a kind of transbiological agency and of tracing its effects in theatre and other kinds of representations. Schechner belongs to a tradition of performance scholars who believed in a kind of large, scientific ontology for the arts, a tendency which is evident when he quotes a New York University scholar. Perhaps the objective vision of a performance continuum is instructive for the future, as it creates an immediate stance, of both engaging as well as transcending the flow of experience in our lives which are organized and controlled by means of mimetically emerging actions. The performer acquires, in Schechner’s scheme, as a liminal activist, so wonderfully described by anthropologist Victor Turner, and analysed in the scientism of Geertz’ observations of culture as an influential medium in which the arts and performances get endowed with signification. It may be however also worthwhile to consider the very specific nature of the origins of performances and the need to abandon rather than yield to more global discourses of theatre: indeed the Western academics of performance studies may lead to universality and conformity of perspective in the face of actual cultural and discursive practices. This aspect of de-institutional learning of genres has been taken up in a couple of essays in this edition thus making the debate on performance studies in academic institutions more challenging and interesting to say the least. In this context it should be fitting to assume once again, that theatrical imitation, and the representations of other audio-visual or digital media shall survive and find their fulfilment only when there is organic cultural breeding –and that the assumptions of contemporary ethnography could lend no support in our true appreciation of the spirit of cultural beliefs and the arts in particular. Perhaps there is a need of re-structuring the academic components of cultural studies, one which might gain more energy and impetus of expression from inclusion of people who have no prior training in academic discourse but whose creative life stand out as exemplary precepts for communal harmony. In no case could it be truer than in that of performance arts, including the songs, dances, theatres, and poetry of the common non-writing people.

Rupkatha Journal on Interdisciplinary Studies in Humanities, Volume V, Number 2, 2013

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. With characteristic brio, Schechner urges us to play for keeps. "Playing deeply is a way of finding and embodying new knowledge", he writes. Performed Imaginaries ranges through some of the key moves within Schechner’s oeuvre, and challenges today’s experimental artists, activists, and scholars to generate a new, third world of performance.

Performed Imaginaries

Ms Barbara Schapiro

- The decline and fall of the (American) Avant-Garde.- The natural/artifical controversy renewed.- The end of humanism.- The crash of performative circumstances, a modernist discourse on postmodernism.

Writings on Performance

The End of Humanism

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.

Between Theater and Anthropology

Richard Schechner

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