RICHARD SCHECHNER

Richard Schechner is University Professor and Professor of Performance Studies at the Tisch School of the Arts, . He also teaches regularly at NYU's Abu Dhabi global campus. Schechner is a founders of the field of performance studies and the author of the widely used textbook, Performance Studies—An Introduction . His BA is from (1956), MA the (1958), and PhD (1962). He was the founding artistic director of The Performance Group and is artistic director of East Coast Artists. He is editor of TDR: A Journal of Performance Studies (the leading journal in the field). He is the editor of the Enactments book series published by Seagull Books and the Worlds of Performance Series published by Routledge. Schechner is the author of scores of articles and many books including: Public Domain , Environmental Theatre , The End of Humanism , Performance Theory , Theatres, Spaces, and Environments (co-author), The Engleburt Stories (co-author), Between Theatre and Anthropology , The Future of Ritual , Over, Under, and Around , Performance Studies: An Introduction, and Performed Imaginaries. Books of his writings have appeared in Spanish, Korean, Chinese, Japanese, French, Serbo-Croatian, Czech, Slovak, Portuguese, Dutch, German, Italian, Polish, Hungarian, Parsi, Turkish, and Romanian. In 1967 in New York Schechner founded The Performance Group with whom he directed a number of productions, including Dionysus in 69 and Commune (both group devised) , Makbeth (devised by Schechner after Shakespeare), Brecht’s Mother Courage and Her Children , Seneca’s Oedipus , Sam Shepard’s The Tooth of Crime , Terry Curtis Fox’s Cops , David Gaard’s The Marilyn Project , and Jean Genet’s The Balcony . Schechner left TPG in 1980. In the 1980s, Schechner devised and directed The Prometheus Project , Richard’s Lear, Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard in New Delhi in Hindi, August Wilson’s Ma

1 Rainey’s Black Bottom in South Africa – the first African American play to be professionally staged in South Africa, and Sun Huizhou’s Tomorrow He’ll Be Out of the Mountains in Shanghai in Mandarin. In 1992, Schechner founded East Coast Artists. With ECA he directed Faust/gastronome , Chekhov’s Three Sisters , Hamlet , YokastaS Redux (co- authored with Saviana Stanescu), and Lian Amaris’s Swimming to Spalding . Also in the 1990s-2000s he directed The Oresteia in Taiwan (his own adaptation translated into Mandarin and Taiwanese), Beckett’s Waiting for Godot , and Hamlet in Shanghai, Wroclaw, Poland, and Craiova, Romania. In 2009 a restaging of Schechner’s/Performance Group’s Dionysus in 69 was staged by the Rude Mechanicals of Austin, Texas. This production came to New York in November 2012. In 2011, Schechner led the team devising Imagining O, at the University of Kent, UK and Kerala, India. A new version of Imagining O opened the 2014-15 season of the Peak Performance Festival, Montclair, New Jersey. Schechner has lectured and led many performance workshops in Europe, Asia, Africa, and the Americas. Before founding TPG and ECA, Schechner was a producing director of the Free Southern Theatre (FST), one of the three founding directors of the New Orleans Group, and the founding artistic director of the East End Players of Provincetown, MA. The FST staged works in rural Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana as well as in New Orleans. The New Orleans Group was an association of performing and visual artists exploring environmental theatre and the then new genre of performance art. After completing his PhD, Schechner became an assistant professor and then associate professor at Tulane University where he also edited the Tulane Drama Review (TDR ). Schechner came to NYU as a full professor in September 1967. In 1992 he was promoted to NYU's highest rank, University Professor. When Schechner moved to NYU, he brought TDR with him. He edited

2 TDR until 1969; and resumed the editorship in 1985 -- and still edits it now. At NYU, Schechner was among the founders of the Performance Studies Department (so-named in 1980). The Performance Studies Department is a leading exponent of interdisciplinary thinking linking scholarship and artistic practice to anthropology, feminism, post-structuralism, queer theory, political and cultural studies, and the avantgarde. In 2010, the Performance Studies was ranked by the National Research Council as the number one PhD program in theatre and performance studies in the USA. Schechner is an advisory editor of the Asian Theatre Journal and the Journal of Ritual Studies . Schechner's honors include a Lifetime Achievement Award from Performance Studies international (PSi), a Career Achievement Award from the Association for Theatre in Higher Education (ATHE), a Guggenheim fellowship, two Fulbright fellowships, a Senior Research Fellow of the American Council of Learned Societies, an NEH Senior Research Fellow, and Erasmus Mundus Fellow of the European Union, the Mondello Prize, the Thalia Award of the International Association of Theatre Critics, two Asian Cultural Council grants, and an American Institute of Indian Studies Senior Research Fellowship, The Odznake Honorowa from the Polish Government for Supporting Polish Culture, a Humanities and Old Dominion Fellow at Princeton University, a Hoffman Eminent Scholar at Florida State University, an Emmens Visiting Professor at Ball State University, a Whitney Halstead Scholar at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, a Montgomery Fellow at Dartmouth College, Cline Centennial Visiting Professor in the Humanities at the University of Texas, and an Andrew H. White Professor-at-Large at Cornell University. In 2009, Schechner was the principal honoree at the 21 st Cairo International Festival for Experimental Theatre. He is an honorary professor of theatre at the Institute for the Fine Arts, Havana, Cuba and an honorary professor of the Shanghai Theatre Academy where in 2005 the Richard Schechner Center for Performance Studies was founded. The Schechner Center

3 sponsors research, hosts conferences, produces plays, and publishes TDR/China , a Chinese language edition of the journal Schechner edits. In the spring-summer of 2009, Schechner curated the Year of Grotowski (a UNESCO designation) in New York with events at Lincoln Center, New York University, Columbia University, the City University of New York, and the John Jay College of Criminal Justice. In 2009, the "RS & PS Conference" concerning Schechner's work and its impact on performance studies was convened in Israel. Performance Studies in Motion , based on this conference, was published in 2014. In 2011, The Rise of Performance Studies: Rethinking Richard Schechner's Broad Spectrum was published. Also in 2011, Schechner was the focus of “Schechner Saturday” at the Barbicon Center, London. In 2015, "Richard Schechner Day," offering a view of Schechner's artistic, scholarly, and creative writing work happened at the Segal Center of the City University of New York (CUNY). Currently Schechner is working with Rishika Mehrishi on a book about the Ramlila of Ramnagar – a 31 day cycle play of north India.

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