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Quo Vadis, Performance History?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 November 2004

Richard Schechner
Affiliation:
NYU

Extract

Frankly, I'm not much of a historian. That is, the past interests me mostly as grist for my theoretical mill. I am not nostalgic. I don't often trek through ruins—whether of stone, paintings, videotape, paper, library stacks, or my own many notebooks. Of course, I've done the right thing when it comes to this kind of activity. I have climbed the pyramids at Teotihuacan and in Mayan country, sat on stone benches of the Theatre of Dionysus in Athens and in Epidaurus (where I was tormented by some really awful productions of ancient Greek dramas), and visited the theatre museums of four continents. On the art-history front, I've gazed at more paintings and sculptings than I can readily organize in memory. But my strongest meetings with “history” have been at the cusp of the past and present—living events always already changing as they are (re)performed. This has been the core of my “anthropology-meets-theatre” work whether among the Yaquis of Arizona, at the Ramlila of Ramnagar in India, in the highlands of Papua–New Guinea, at Off-Off Broadway in New York, in the interior of China, and at very many other events in a wide variety of places.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
© 2004 The American Society for Theatre Research, Inc.

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Footnotes

Richard Schechner is University Professor at NYU and Professor of Performance Studies in its Tisch School of the Arts. He is artistic director of East Coast Artists, editor of TDR, and the author of many books, the most recent of which are Performance Studies—An Introduction (2002) and Over, Under, and Around (2004).