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The Performer

Art, Life, Politics

Richard Sennett

$55

Hardback

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English
Allen Lane
07 May 2024
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.
By:  
Imprint:   Allen Lane
Country of Publication:   United Kingdom
Dimensions:   Height: 238mm,  Width: 158mm,  Spine: 28mm
Weight:   440g
ISBN:   9780241637647
ISBN 10:   0241637643
Pages:   256
Publication Date:  
Audience:   Professional and scholarly ,  College/higher education ,  General/trade ,  Undergraduate ,  Primary
Format:   Hardback
Publisher's Status:   Active

Richard Sennett grew up in the Cabrini Green housing project in Chicago, attended the Julliard School in New York and then studied social relations at Harvard. Over the last five decades, he has written about social life in cities, changes in labour and social theory. His books include The Hidden Injuries of Class, The Fall of Public Man, The Corrosion of Character, The Culture of the New Capitalism, The Craftsman and Building and Dwelling. Sennett has advised the United Nations on urban issues for the past thirty years and currently serves as member of the UN Committee on Urban Initiatives. He is Visiting Professor of Urban Studies at Harvard. Among other awards, he has received the Hegel Prize, the Spinoza Prize and the Centennial Medal from Harvard University.

Reviews for The Performer: Art, Life, Politics

Urgent, penetrating, moving. Another masterwork from a master thinker -- Ian Bostridge, author of Song and Self: A Singer’s Reflections on Music and Performance A masterpiece from one of the most important cultural theorists of our time. The Performer is, at once, a memoir, an investigation, a sociological treatise, and a manifesto for rethinking humanity's next act -- Eric Klinenberg, Helen Gould Shepard Professor in the Social Sciences, New York University Richard Sennett calls on his vast knowledge of theater and performance to argue for the social uses of civility—and against the degradation of public social space brought by demagogues such as Donald Trump. This is a book that ranges widely while speaking forcefully to our current needs. -- Peter Brooks, Yale University


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