About performance: a conversation with Richard Schechner.

Madeira, Cl�udia; Cruzeiro, Cristina Pratas; Douglas, Anne; Elias, Helena

Abstract

Richard Schechner is University Professor Emeritus at New York University (https: //tisch.nyu.edu/about/directory/performance-studies/3508301, accessed 13 December 2021). As an experienced theatre director, scholar, and researcher, he pioneered the field of Performance Studies, which has opened spaces for deepening the confluence between social performance and artistic performance. He worked closely with anthropologist Victor Turner, from 1976 until Turner's death in 1983, in the development of questions around ritual and performance. Schechner's books include Public Domain (1968), Environmental Theater (1973), Performance Theory (1976, 2003), The End of Humanism (1981), Between Theater and Anthropology (1985), The Future of Ritual (1993), Performed Imaginaries (2015), and Performance Studies—An Introduction (4th edition, 2020). Many of these publications were developed in dialogue with performances and plays with groups Schechner founded, co-founded, or with which he was deeply involved: East End Players, The Free Southern Theater, The Performance Group, and East Coast Artists. A way of working emerged, seen in works, such as Dionysus in 69 (1968), Commune (1970), and Imagining O (2014), as well as the street "guerrilla theatre" Schechner staged in the 1970s that drew spectators into a more immersive and participatory experience of theatre. Schechner also created a singular relationship with the classic repertoire in pieces, such as Mother Courage and Her Children, Oedipus of Seneca, Faust/gastronome, Three Sisters, Hamlet, and The Oresteia. Schechner edits the TDR: The Journal of Performance Studies (Cambridge University Press) and the Enactments book series (Seagull Books). As guest editors of the Special Issue, Madeira, Elias, Cruzeiro, and Douglas prepared a set of questions for Schechner to discuss the central issues of Robert Owen's construct of Eight Hours Work, Eight Hours Rest, and Eight Hours Leisure (8-8-8). Owen developed this concept in the early 19th century in an attempt to reform the negative effects of industrialisation on people working under factory conditions, by creating a different temporality founded in eight hours work, eight hours leisure, and eight hours rest. We were interested in exploring with Schechner the meaning (or otherwise) of this concept for contemporary times. The conversation we present here explores the multiplicity of interests that underpin Schechner's radical approach to the theory and practice of performance. He draws together the body and the mind, and reaches far beyond Western perspectives and concepts to seek to understand and deepen issues in and around human and non-human performance, in theatre and in life. We asked him to develop, among a number of diverse issues, one of his fundamental concepts, that of restored behaviour. This is a concept that allows us to understand humankind precisely as a maker of worlds, implicated in a performance that is always under construction, between a script of inherited behaviour and a script for behaviour that is always undergoing review. Professor Schechner is currently working on two books about the Ramlila of Ramnagar, India, a 30 day cycle play, an annual religious environmental theatre event enacting the life of Rama, Vishnu's seventh avatar.

Citation

MADEIRA, C., CRUZEIRO, C.P., DOUGLAS, A. and ELIAS, H. 2022. About performance: a conversation with Richard Schechner. Arts [online], 11(1), article 14. Available from: https://doi.org/10.3390/arts11010014

• Journal Article Type: Editorial
• Acceptance Date: Dec 17, 2021
• Online Publication Date: Jan 22, 2022
• Publication Date: Feb 28, 2022
• Deposit Date: Apr 28, 2022
• Publicly Available Date: Apr 28, 2022
• Journal: Arts
• Electronic ISSN: 2076-0752
• Publisher: MDPI
• Peer Reviewed: Peer Reviewed
• Volume: 11
• Issue: 1
• Article Number: 14
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.3390/arts11010014
• Keywords: Theatre; Performance; Movement; Performers
• Public URL: https://rgu-repository.worktribe.com/output/1650132