Author: Richard Schechner
Publisher: Seagull Books
Year: 2004
Language: English
Pages: 347
ISBN/UPC (if available): 8170462622
Description
The essays collected in this book represent Schechner's lifetime in performance studies. Political theatre, the avant garde, the secular and sacred rituals of performance, the nature of belief and its suspensions in theatre, aesthetics, performance theory, and performance studies have been his recurring subjects even as his knowledge has changed and deepened from seeing performances of all kinds, all over the world.
So he is in a position to compare the incomparable Yaqui and Ramlila, dixi and namahage in a manner that furthers the study of ritual and indicates the ways performance is similarly and differently imbricated in different communities.
Schechner has also learned that the avant garde is more than a historical occurrence localized in, or originating in a single culture. Schechner asserts that we can also understand the avant garde as a particular kind of articulation of the traditional and the oral. The range and depth of Schechner's scholarly endeavour informed by his artistic practice has led him to think about the deep structure of performance and theorize its construction across cultures.
This confluence of practice and scholarship, where each realm wholly informs the other, is second only to Schechner's far ranging contact with diverse types of performance in generating his exceptional thinking on the meaning and importance of performance as the paradigm for the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.
REVIEW
What I find uncanny about Schechner's writing is how he has answered so many of the question I have put to Myself, An excellent, Panoramic and useful collection demonstrating schechner's powerful insights into the relationships between the avant garde and the traditional as these are played out in a number of cultures, performance theorists and practical people of the theatre will use this important book far into the future.
-J S Rothbard, Writer, Poet, Performance, Theorist, Critic
Contents
FOREWORD
Carol Martin
Theatre into the Twenty-First Century
Performance Speces: Ramlila and Yaqui Easter
The Performance Group in India: February - April 1976
Restoration of Behaviour
Performers and Spectators: Transported and Transformed
From Ritual to Theatre and Back: The Structure/Process of the Efficacy-Entertainment Dyad
Dixi, Namahage, and the Question of Folk Performance
Believed-in Theatre
Rasaesthetics
APPENDIX A:
Rasabox Actor Training/Michele Minnick
APPENDIX B
Experience Rasaboxes / Paula Murray Cole