Skip to content
Small FontMedium FontLarge Font
home > Performance Studies
SEARCH

The Schechner Center at the Shanghai Theatre Academy

The Schechner Center at the Shanghai Theatre Academy is an umbrella institution designed to foster various international and intercultural research and development activities nurturing three branches of performance studies:

  1. Experimental theatre, dance, and performance art 
  2. Ritual and folk performance studies emphasizing both fieldwork and theory;
  3. Social performance studies focusing on legal, political, professional, and commercial performance in the era of market economy, democratization, and the media.

Univeresity Professor and Professor of Performance Studies, Tisch School of the Arts, Richard Schechner and Drama Associate Professor Carol Martin, NYU-TSOA, will play key roles in the planning, development, and work of the Center. They will collaborate with a group of resident Chinese  scholars and graduate students from both China and other nations. This core team will undertake research projects that will be based in Shanghai but reach out to other locations. 

Specifically, the 2007 Special Olympic Games and 2010 World Expo, both scheduled in Shanghai, are two major events which will generate numerous projects, scholarly as well as practical, for the Center.

Currently three specific activities are on the schedule:

  1. The opening of theSchechnerCenter onMarch, 21, 2005. Professors Schechner and Martin will participate with leading scholars from acrossChina in a one-day symposium on Performance Studies.
  2. The publication in Chinese of Schechner's selected essays on performance studies. This book should be ready in 2006 or 2007.
  3. Schechner's 2006 production of Hamlet. This production will be unique in that it will draw on participating artists from mainlandChina,Hong Kong, andTaiwan.

In regard to the Hamlet production, theShanghai Theatre Academy is making plans to collaborate in the project with the Hong Kong Academy of Performing Arts and theTaipei National University of the Arts. Former students and graduates of NYU’s Department of Performance Studies are key figures in those institutions, including Dean David Jiang at Hong Kong and Dean Chung Mingder inTaipei. Both deans studied with Schechner at NYU. 

Schechner himself said, “I am very glad to be working with my colleagues in China on the Center. It certainly is a culminating project in my career. I have long worked to bring together performance scholars and artists in a number of cultures. The Center is, in this regard, a great opportunity to further and deepen knowledge and art between the USA and China. I hope that in the future other nations and their cultures will also be involved.”