Courtesy of the EUROPEAN JOURNAL OF THEATRE AND PERFORMANCE
Performance Studies and University Professor Emeritus Richard Schechner has been featured as the Scholar in Focus in the latest issue of the European Journal of Theatre and Performance.
Guest editors Luk Van den Dries and Pieter Verstraete introduce the article by saying, "Schechner’s list of merits is long, too long to summarise here, but by far his most foundational contribution is that he completely reimagined our field of study by looking at theatre differently; as a phenomenon that is more than just entertainment and even more than ‘only’ art. By putting performance rather than theatre at the centre of his research, which typically focused on a broad spectrum of activities ranging from. rituals and big political events to everyday role-playing, he established a new field of study and paradigm that is still expanding today. His book Essays on Performance Theory (1976) marked a landslide shift in theatre scholarship and the beginning of an interdisciplinary field now widely known as performance studies. This theoretical paradigm has as much revolutionised anthropologies and sociologies of performance as it has extended discourses of postmodernism, poststructuralism, and post-colonialism in pursuit of analysing our present-day societies and state of humanity with always a role for theatre to play or to take a lesson from. Performance Studies, together with Schechner’s investigative and instructive praxis as a director birthing the concept of environmental theatre ever since the 1960s, would leave indelible marks in curricula, institutions, theatre training, and practices all over the world."
The article focuses across several generes of Schechner's work, including some of his scholarly and creative writings, exerpts from notebooks and drawings. The full piece is in the latest issue, Volume 5, of EJTP. Check it out using the link below!