Performed Imaginaries [Hardcover]

In this collection of essays, performance studies scholar and artist Richard Schechner brings his unique perspective to bear upon some of the key themes of society in the 21^stcentury.

Schechner connects the avantgarde and terror, the counter-cultural movement of the 1960s/70s and the Occupy movement; self-wounding art, popular culture, and ritual; the Ramlila cycle play of India and the way imagination structures reality; the corporate world and conservative artists. Schechner asks artists to redeploy Nehru's Third World as a movement not of nations but of like-minded culture workers who must propose counter-performances to war, violence, and the globalized corporate empire.

With characteristic brio, Schechner urges us to play for keeps. Playing deeply is a way of finding and embodying new knowledge , he writes.

Performed Imaginaries ranges through some of the key moves within Schechners oeuvre, and challenges todays experimental artists, activists, and scholars to generate a new, third world of performance.

A (New) Third World of Performance

The Conservative Avantgarde

The 60s, TDR, and Performance Studies (interview)

9/11 as a Work of Art?

Performed Imaginaries

Points of Contact Revisited

Self-Inflicted Wounds