R Schechner
Biographic Data
| ID | 17470 |
|---|---|
| NAME | R Schechner |
| GIVEN NAMES | R |
| FAMILY NAME | Schechner |
| SIGNATURE | SCHECHNER R |
| AFFILIATIONS | New York University |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-9303-6261 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 214 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 611 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 214 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1961 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 8 |
Robert Wilson 1941–2025
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Richard Foreman 1937–2025
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You Never Know Who’s Out There in the Dark Listening”
Here There Are Blueberries (2018–ongoing), the Tectonic Theater Project’s most recent work, tells the story of a photo album from Auschwitz collected in 1944 by Obersturmführer Karl-Friedrich Höcker, adjutant to camp commander SS-Sturmbannführer Richard Baer. The photos, now at the US Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC, show Nazi soldiers, their families, and concentration-extermination camp staff relaxing and socializing. Tectonic not o…
Postpone the Great Game
Selections from "A Yeers Worth"
The Crash of Performative Circumstances
Portfolio
Four Poems
From Richard Schechner’s India Notebook 1978
Saudi Arabia’s Jawqat al-Masrah. (Theatre Choir Club)
At the 2022 Sharm El-Sheikh International Theatre Festival for Youth, Saudi women performed in a public square without hijab. Al-Enezī’s al-Sujanā ʾ al-ahrā r (Free Prisoners) is not only about art and liberty, it enacts it
Fragments of a Revolution
With the Iranian protest movement “Woman, Life, Freedom,” public spaces have become scenes of collective performance. As women openly defy the authoritarian and religious powers, theatre artists are faced with a question: What role can we imagine for theatre when citizens themselves perform their struggle to reclaim the public space and sphere of power
New York – 1984 – Notebook 71
Richard Schechner, carnet de notes de 1984 : Einstein on the Beach à la Brooklyn Academy of Music. [animation:richardschechner]
Postpone the Great Game
The Great Game of the 19th century was the struggle between Russia and the British in Afghanistan to control India. The Ukraine war is a new version of the Great Game. In the 1930s to defeat the Japanese, an existential threat to China, Mao Zedong and Chiang Kai-shek postponed their civil war. Climate change is the world’s existential threat. Let’s postpone all wars to deal with climate change
Jim O’Quinn and Lee Breuer
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Oh, I Know I’ve Been Changed
From the notebook of Richard Schechner concerning the Workcenter of Jerzy Grotowski and Thomas Richards in Paris, 2–7 July 2019
The Director’s Process
In her conversation with TDR , Hadestown director Rachel Chavkin discusses the development, casting, music, and choreography of the Broadway hit musical—a retelling of the ancient Greek myth of Eurydice and Orpheus
Orthography Is Political
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Performance Studies
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 explorati…
Playing
Christian Biet
Double Edge Theatre in Its Ashfield Community
The founding artistic director of Double Edge Theatre talks about the process of moving from Boston to rural Western Massachusetts where the theatre has become part of the Ashfield community
Remembering Paul Gray, John O’Neal, Jerry Rojo, Andrzej Wirth, and Phillip Zarrilli
Endgame Earth
Letters, Etc
March 01 2019 Letters, Etc. Richard Schechner Richard Schechner Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Scholar Author and Article Information Richard Schechner Online Issn: 1531-4715 Print Issn: 1054-2043 ©2019 New York University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology2019New York University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology TDR/The Drama Review (2019) 63 (1 (241)): 8. https://doi.org/10.1162/dram_e_00813 Ci…
The Free Southern Theater, by the Free Southern Theater
Performance Studies
This book provides a lively and accessible overview of the full range of performance for undergraduates at all levels and beginning graduate students in performance studies, theatre, performing arts, and cultural studies. Among the topics discussed are the performing arts and popular entertainments, rituals, play and games, and the performances of everyday life. Supporting examples and ideas are drawn from the social sciences, performing arts, po…
Between Theater and Anthropology
Performance Theory
The Future of Ritual
Pontos de Contato' revisitados
Em 1985, publiquei 'Pontos de contato entre o pensamento antropológico e teatral' como primeiro capítulo de meu livro Between Theater and Anthropology (Entre o Teatro e a Antropologia), de título bastante claro. As coisas mudaram muito desde então. Veio a 'virada performativa' na antropologia, e, com ela, uma nova galáxia de contatos entre o pensamento antropológico e o teatral. No ensaio a seguir, discuto três (novos) pontos de contato. Eles não…
Pontos de contato entre o pensamento antropológico e teatral
traduzido de:SCHECHNER, Richard. "Points of contact between anthropological and theatrical thought". In: Between Teatre and Anthropology. University of Pennsylvania Press, 1985. Copyright Richard Schechner, reprinted with permission. First appeared in Between eater and Anthropology 1985. University of Pennsylvania Press. tradução: ANA LETÍCIA DE FIORIrevisão técnica: JOHN COWART DAWSEY, DIANA PAOLA GÓMEZ MATEUS
By Means of Performance
Drama, Script, Theatre, and Performance
The phenomena called either/all “drama,” “theatre,” “performance” occur among all the world's peoples and date back as far as historians, archeologists, and anthropologists can go. Evidence indicates that dancing, singing, wearing masks and/ or costumes, impersonating either other men, animals, or supernaturals, acting out stories, presenting time at time, isolating and preparing special places and/or times for these presentations, and individual…
The Ramlila of Ramnagar [India]
Ramlila is a cycle play lasting ten to thirty-two days performed annually outdoors in the Hindi speaking region of north India. Its season is around the Dasarha holidays in September-October. The performance is based on Tulsidas’ late 16th-century epic poem Ramacaritamanas (RCM), a Hindi version of Valmiki's Sanskrit Ramayana. Although thousands of Ramlilas are performed, we shall describe only one—the 31-day cycle of Ramnagar across the Ganga Ri…
Toward a Definition of Performance Studies, Part I
Axioms for Environmental Theatre
The theatrical event includes audience, performers, text (in most cases), sensory stimuli, architectural enclosure (or lack of it), production equipment, technicians, and house personnel (when used). It ranges from nonmatrixed performance to highly formalized traditional theatre: from chance events and intermedia to “the production of plays.” A continuum of theatrical events blends one form into the next: It is because I wish to include this enti…
Victor Turner's Last Adventure
Anthropology in performance
During the period of June 26 to July 7, 2012, the Research Center in Anthropology, Performance, and Drama (Napedra - Núcleo de Antropologia, Performance e Drama), located at the University of São Paulo (USP), promoted a two-week event which was called “Encounters with Richard Schechner”. This was one of a series of events sponsored by Napedra as part of its thematic project, “Anthropology of performance: drama, aesthetics and ritual” 1 The follow…
The Illumination of Leimay's Becoming - Corpus
In Becoming - Corpus Ximena Garnica and Shige Moriya have created a work about the misapprehensions of what appears before us followed by revelations of what we are able to see: illusion without magic or otherworldliness, fantastical imagery linking memory to the lurking presence of the uncanny
The Conservative Avant-Garde
The avant-garde, regarded as "radical" or "new," is conservative. To understand what and why this is, we must not only understand what "conservative" is, but also look at the historical circumstances of the epoch 1960s-present. The avant-garde is conservative in the "reduce, recycle, re-use" sense, not in the Tea Party sense. The avant-garde is a brand, a niche, a circulating stasis. Far from being the domain of youth, today's avant-garde include…
Performance Studies
This important new introductory textbook by a prime mover in the emergent field of Performance Studies is a defining moment for the discipline. It provides a lively and accessible overview of the full range of performance for undergraduates at all levels and beginning graduate students in performance studies, theatre, performing arts and cultural studies. It includes discussion of the performing arts and popular entertainments, rituals, play and …
A Forum on Theatre and Tragedy
In the immediate aftermath of September 11th, I invited a number of theatre and performance scholars to respond to the concept of tragedy in the context of these world-changing events. The following forum showcases the generosity of a wide range of scholars who signed on to this project with enthusiasm and conviction. More than ever, I believe that our intellectual labor can make a difference. The forum demonstrates much more than the vitality of…
Ways of Speaking, Loci of Cognition
The Death of ATA
TDR Comment
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Speculations on Radicalism, Sexuality, & Performance
Feelings kicked up thinking about relationships among (student) radicalism, (Freudian) sexual theory, and (new) theatre are tangled. I want to map those feelings—which I think are not peculiar to me. They are tied to a revulsion against the mass media, which—as Kelly Morris puts it—play Sioux to youthful Custers. Identifying “what's new,” journalists draw the innovators out, encourage (even demand) exaggerated claims and premature conclusions, en…
An Interview with Grotowski
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The Bacchae
At the heart of Euripides’ masterpiece, The Bacchae, is a communal sacrifice. The city of Thebes is sacrificed to Dionysus to satisfy his capricious ego. In supporting this thesis I will contest several widely held theories about the play: (1) that Dionysus represents Fate or any of its equivalents; (2) that the god is a life force or some other pantheistic “god of ecstacy in religion”; or (3) that the play gathers its primary force from the enco…
The Enactment of the "Not" in Ionesco Les Chaises
On east seventh street
An Interview with Grotowski
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The Bands of Change
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Flexible Theatrical Space
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Extensions in Time and Space
The Seventh Street Environment
Axioms for Environmental Theatre
The theatrical event includes audience, performers, text (in most cases), sensory stimuli, architectural enclosure (or lack of it), production equipment, technicians, and house personnel (when used). It ranges from nonmatrixed performance to highly formalized traditional theatre: from chance events and intermedia to “the production of plays.” A continuum of theatrical events blends one form into the next: It is because I wish to include this enti…
An Interview with Joseph Chaikin Chaikin Fragments
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Containment is the Enemy
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Speculations on Radicalism, Sexuality, & Performance
Feelings kicked up thinking about relationships among (student) radicalism, (Freudian) sexual theory, and (new) theatre are tangled. I want to map those feelings—which I think are not peculiar to me. They are tied to a revulsion against the mass media, which—as Kelly Morris puts it—play Sioux to youthful Custers. Identifying “what's new,” journalists draw the innovators out, encourage (even demand) exaggerated claims and premature conclusions, en…
Dionysus in 69
Conformists in the Heart
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Guerrilla Theatre
What was most striking (from the New York perspective) about the Maydays of 1970 was that students were organizing themselves to use facilities and resources, not to destroy them. The nihilism so powerfully present in the Columbia uprising of 1968, and always prominent in “revolutionary” rhetoric within the student movement, was transformed into something more fundamentally revolutionary. “Burn it down,” “trash it,” “shut it down” were not heard …
Audience Participation
Many think that because participation is new to them, it is new to the theatre. These same people automatically participate in responsive readings at church, flag saluting, standing for the national anthem at sporting matches, cheering, and agreeing to umpire a few innings of sandlot baseball. In fact, participation in theatrical events is a very old, widespread practice. It has been limited in our culture for several hundred years for a variety …
Kinesics and Performance
At least as far back as Darwin's The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals (1872) scientists have studied analogic (as distinct from digital) modes of communication. Clearly all artists other than writers are technicians of the analogic. Analogic codification constitutes a series of symbols that in their proportions and relations are similar to the thing, idea, or event for which they stand. [...] Such a form of codification deals with co…
Drama, Script, Theatre, and Performance
The phenomena called either/all “drama,” “theatre,” “performance” occur among all the world's peoples and date back as far as historians, archeologists, and anthropologists can go. Evidence indicates that dancing, singing, wearing masks and/ or costumes, impersonating either other men, animals, or supernaturals, acting out stories, presenting time at time, isolating and preparing special places and/or times for these presentations, and individual…
TDR Comment
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Selective Inattention
Theatres, Spaces, Environments
The Ramlila of Ramnagar [India]
Ramlila is a cycle play lasting ten to thirty-two days performed annually outdoors in the Hindi speaking region of north India. Its season is around the Dasarha holidays in September-October. The performance is based on Tulsidas’ late 16th-century epic poem Ramacaritamanas (RCM), a Hindi version of Valmiki's Sanskrit Ramayana. Although thousands of Ramlilas are performed, we shall describe only one—the 31-day cycle of Ramnagar across the Ganga Ri…
Ritual, Play, and Performance
Anthropological Analysis
According to Squat, the downstairs stage of Andy Warhol's Last Love is Warhol's Factory: the place he used to manufacture his art-objects. And upstairs the Blue Room, where the first part of “Warhol” is staged, is the actual living space of Eva Buchmüller and Istvan Balint. The street is 23rd Street, a theatrical environment only by virtue of the casement glass window separating Factory from street. As in Pig, Child, Fire!, the street is used in …
The Performance Group's production of Cops
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Art (127 works) · Theatre and Performance Studies (92 works) · History (81 works) · Computer Science (78 works) · Visual arts (70 works) · History (62 works) · Sociology (52 works) · Art history (47 works) · Drama (42 works) · Political science (39 works)