The Performer

An exploration of public performance in everyday life, by the leading cultural and social thinker The Performer explores the relations between performing in art (particularly music), politics and everyday experience. It focuses on the bodily and physical dimensions of performing, rather than on words. Richard Sennett is particularly attuned to the ways in which the rituals of ordinary life are performances. The book draws on history and sociology, and more personally on the author's early career as a professional cellist, as well as on his later work as a city planner and social thinker. It traces the evolution of performing spaces in the city; the emergence of actors, musicians, and dancers as independent artists; the inequality between performer and spectator; the uneasy relations between artistic creation and social and religious ritual; the uses and abuses of acting by politicians. The Janus-faced art of performing is both destructive and civilizing. This is the first in a trilogy of books on the fundamental DNA of human expression: performing, narrating, and imaging.

An exploration of public performance in everyday life, by the leading cultural and social thinker The Performer explores the relations between performing in art (particularly music), politics and everyday experience. It focuses on the bodily and physical dimensions of performing, rather than on words. Richard Sennett is particularly attuned to the ways in which the rituals of ordinary life are performances. The book draws on history and sociology, and more personally on the author's early career as a professional cellist, as well as on his later work as a city planner and social thinker. It traces the evolution of performing spaces in the city; the emergence of actors, musicians, and dancers as independent artists; the inequality between performer and spectator; the uneasy relations between artistic creation and social and religious ritual; the uses and abuses of acting by politicians. The Janus-faced art of performing is both destructive and civilizing. This is the first in a trilogy of books on the fundamental DNA of human expression: performing, narrating, and imaging.

An exploration of public performance in everyday life, by the leading cultural and social thinker 'All the world's a stage' declares the melancholy Jacques in Shakespeare's As You Like It. Today that's an unhappy thought. A cluster of demagogues has recently dominated the public realm through their powers as actors; they are brilliant performers. More unsettling, the demagogue, the dancer, the musician all share the same non-verbal realm of bodily gestures, lighting and blocking, costuming, stage architecture. So too, the roles and rituals of everyday life and everyday acting can be malign or sublime, repressive or liberating. Performing constitutes one art - an ambiguous art. In this book, the acclaimed sociologist Richard Sennett explores uncomfortable connections between performances in life, art, and politics. He draws on his own early career as a professional cellist as well on histories both Western and non-Western. He is not a pessimist; at the end of his study, he shows how this ambiguous art might become more ethical.

An exploration of public performance in everyday life, by the leading cultural and social thinker 'All the world's a stage' declares the melancholy Jacques in Shakespeare's As You Like It. Today that's an unhappy thought. A cluster of demagogues has recently dominated the public realm through their powers as actors; they are brilliant performers. More unsettling, the demagogue, the dancer, the musician all share the same non-verbal realm of bodily gestures, lighting and blocking, costuming, stage architecture. So too, the roles and rituals of everyday life and everyday acting can be malign or sublime, repressive or liberating. Performing constitutes one art - an ambiguous art. In this book, the acclaimed sociologist Richard Sennett explores uncomfortable connections between performances in life, art, and politics. He draws on his own early career as a professional cellist as well on histories both Western and non-Western. He is not a pessimist; at the end of his study, he shows how this ambiguous art might become more ethical.