The Rise of Performance Studies Rethinking Richard Schechner's Broad Spectrum

The essays in this anthology are situated within the larger context of a critical engagement with Richard Schechner's work as a theatre practitioner, teacher, scholar, activist, and visionary. Through a wide variety of approaches, the contributors acknowledge the profound impact that Schechner#xE2;#xAC;"s work has had on our understanding of performance as a mode of cultural practice and on the emergence of Performance Studies as a discipline. Some essays are embedded in intensely personal reflections on Schechner#xE2;#xAC;"s work as a practitioner and teacher, while others take stock of critical concepts that are central to Schechner's work as a theorist and scholar. Yet it is not enough to say that the essays offer a critical survey of the broad spectrum of Schechner#xE2;#xAC;"s cultural and intellectual endeavours. The essays all converge in an acknowledgement that few individuals within the theatre and performance communities have positioned their work so consistently or so consequentially as Schechner has within the key debates that have defined Performance Studies as a discipline.

James M. Handing is Professor of English at the University of Mary Washington, USA. He is a former editor of Theatre Survey, and the author of Cutting Performances: Cottage Events, Feminist Artists, and the American Avant-Garde, and Adorno and a Writing of the Ruins: Essays on Anglo-American Literature and Culture. He is currently finishing a new monograph entitled Theories of Avant-Garde Performance. Cindy Rosenthal is Professor of Drama and Dance at Hofstra University, USA. She co-edited Restaging the Sixties: Radical Theatres and their Legacies (2006) with James Harding, and Living on Third Street: Plays of the Living Theatre 1989-1992 (2008) with Hanon Reznikov. Current projects include Ellen Stewart's La Mama - The First Fifty Years: An illustrated Oral History, a monograph analyzing Ellen Stewart's life and work through oral histories and poster art (forthcoming). She also works as a performer, director, and adapter.