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5 unusual facts about Richard Schechner


Performative turn

Performance studies emerged through the work of, among others, theatre director and scholar Richard Schechner, who applied the notion of performance to human behaviour beyond the performing arts.

The concept of performance has been developed by such scholars as Richard Schechner, Victor Turner, Clifford Geertz, Erving Goffman, John Austin, John Searle, Pierre Bourdieu, Stern and Henderson, and Judith Butler.

Richard Schechner

With The Performance Group Schechner directed many productions including Dionysus in 69 based on Euripides' The Bacchae (1968), Makbeth based on Shakespeare's Macbeth (1969), Commune group devised piece (1970), Sam Shepard's The Tooth of Crime (1972), Bertolt Brecht's Mother Courage and Her Children (1975), David Gaard's The Marilyn Project (1975), Seneca's Oedipus (1977), Terry Curtis Fox's Cops (1978), and Jean Genet's The Balcony (1979).

The Performance Group

The Performance Group (TPG) was a New York City troupe of experimental theater started by Richard Schechner in 1967.

Theatre of Cruelty

"Though many of those theatre-artists proclaimed an Artaudian lineage (Jerzy Grotowski, Peter Brook, Richard Schechner among them)," Susie Tharu argues, "the Artaud they invoke is marked by a commitment as ahistorical and transcendent as their own."


Kim Weild

Among her many collaborators and associates are Anne Bogart (SITI Co.), Diane Paulus, Tina Kronis and Richard Algers, George Balanchine, Caryl Churchill, Max Stafford-Clark, Simon Curtis, André Gregory, Antoinette LaFarge, Judith Malina, Larry Moss, Mike Nichols, George Morrison, Sabrina Peck, Abraham Pulido, Richard Schechner, Paul Sills, Tadashi Suzuki and Robert Wilson.


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