Archives of Peking University News - PKU English - 北京大学

北京大学英语新闻网/Peking University News
Master of Drama Richard Schechner
lectured at PKU
By Wang Yi
PKU NEWS Friday 2005—03—25
http://ennews.pku.edu.cn/news.php?s=112062376
Peking University, March 25, 2005: Master of Drama, Professor of Performance
Studies at New York University Richard Schechner held a lecture at PKU this
afternoon.
This is a lecture with no titles, for professor Schechner pointed out at the beginning
of his lecture that he wouldn‘t like to make his lecture contents fixed beforehand.
Instead, he started his lecture with the question ―What do you like to know?‖ to the
audience. The audience showed a great interest in performance theory and drama
performance, both of which are Schechner‘s major interests.
To begin with, professor Schechner draw a big infinity mark on the blackboard, and
added a few stokes to make this sign into a human face, with the infinity mark as the
eyes of a man. Referring to the dramatic face, Schechner implied that a man‘s eyes
should see the infinity through his life, especially the life of performance practice. In
this infinity system, four approaches------social events, social drama, aesthetic
drama, aesthetic are moving in endless circles------with social events and aesthetic
drama as the visible part of this system, while social drama and the aesthetic lies
under the surface.
Schechner went on with his conception of the performance field, which he pointed
out actually involves a series of performances including aesthetic performance,
social performance, popular performance, ritual performance and play, to which he
then gave some explanations one by one.
First, aesthetic performance includes classical, traditional, modern and post-modern
ones. The former two last a long time, but are out of time, while the latter two are
historical but in time. These two kinds of art are often mentioned as popular culture
and high art. Schechner said that popular culture is often repressed by high art,
which he himself can‘t totally agree with. What he and some other pioneers are
intending to do is to deconstruct------make deconstruction to the traditional notion of
cultural approaches. Secondly, the social performance is, the interpretation of the
self in everyday life. He compared our everyday roles to the theatre roles, saying that
every one of us is following automatically an actual script that we memorized
unconsciously in everyday life, and the sequences of behaviors is our performances.
1049