The Power of Performance: A Three Week Conversation with Richard Schechner and Dan Friedman

“We ask you to consider the almost unimaginable because it is so hard for people to take seriously those who are not doing business, making war, or enforcing the will of God: to take seriously the personal, social and world-making force of performance.”

—from “Can We Be the (New) Third World?”

By Richard Schechner

Join us for a three-week class with Richard Schechner, one of the founders of Performance Studies, innovative theatre director, editor of TDR: The Journal of Performance Studies and life-long social justice activist. In conversation with Dan Friedman, artistic director emeritus of the Castillo Theatre—and with you—Schechner will explore the power of performance in daily life as articulated in his “Performance Third World Manifesto” presented at Performing the World 2012.

• April 4 – To perform is to explore, to play, to experiment with relationships.
• April 11 – To perform is to cross borders.  These borders are not only geographical, but emotional, ideological, political and personal.
• April 25 – To perform is to engage in lifelong active study. To grasp every book as a script—something to be played with, interpreted and reform/remade.  To perform is to become someone else and yourself at the same time.  To empathize, react, grow and change.

Sessions held virtually, on Zoom, on Fridays, April 4th, 11th, and 25th (at 12PM Eastern US Time - click dates for times in your part of the world)

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LEADER BIOGRAPHIES

Richard Schechner is Editor of TDR: The Journal of Performance Studies and University Professor Emeritus at New York University. He is the author of many books including Environmental Theater, Performance Theory, Between Theater and Anthropology, Performed Imaginaries, Performance Studies: An Introduction, and Schechner Plays (in press). His books and essays have been translated into more than 22 languages. Schechner has directed performances, led workshops, taught, and lectured on every continent but Antartica. Among his many theatre productions are Dionysus in 69 (from Euripides' The Bacchae), Sam Shepard's The Tooth of Crime, Bertolt Brecht's Mother Courage and Her Children, Jean Genet's The Maids and The Balcony, August Wilson's Ma Rainey's Black Bottom, Anton Chekhov's Three Sisters and Cherry Orchard, Shakespeare's Hamlet, his own adaptations Makbeth and Richard's Lear, and the immersive-devised Commune and Imagining O. A fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Schechner has been awarded numerous fellowships, awards, and honors, including a Guggenheim, two Fulbrights, Lifetime Career Achievement Award American Association for Theatre in Higher Education, Lifetime Achievement Award Performance Studies International, Leverhulme Trust Fellowship UK, Erasmus Mundo Fellowship European Union, and three honorary doctorates.

Dan Friedman is a playwright, director, theatre historian and life-long grassroots educator and activist. He is a founder of the Castillo Theatre and a co-convener of Performing the World. His book, Performance Activism: Precursors and Contemporary Pioneers, the first book-length study of performance activism, was published by Palgrave in 2021. He currently is on the faculty of the East Side Institute, managing producer of Institute’s podcast, All Power to the Developing, and project manager of Let’s Learn! a global community-engaged educational project of Lloyd International Honors College of the University of North Carolina at Greensboro in collaboration with the East Side Institute.