Skip to main content

Richard Schechner: An Interview

Video Data Bank

1989 00:38:00 United StatesEnglishColorMono4:3Video
Tags:
Interview, Performance, VDB Interviews

Description

Richard Schechner is Professor of Performance Studies at New York University, author of numerous books including Performance Theory (1988) and The Future of Ritual (1993), and editor of The Drama Review. This interview with Nancy Forest Brown was conducted during an event at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

“Performers are very shrewd... The closer you get to them, the more you realize that as soon as you have a spectator situation, artifice is involved. Because, if you’re skilled at it, you become aware that there’s a manipulative struggle going on between the eye looking, and the creative self trying to control the eye that’s trying to contain you.”

A historical interview originally recorded in 1990.

The Video Data Bank is the leading resource in the United States for videotapes by and about contemporary artists. The VDB collection features innovative video work made by artists from an aesthetic, political or personal point of view. The collection includes seminal works that, seen as a whole, describe the development of video as an art form originating in the late 1960's and continuing to the present. Works in the collection employ innovative uses of form and technology, mixed with original visual style to address contemporary art and cultural themes.

Founded in 1976 at the inception of the media arts movement in the United States, the Video Data Bank is one of the nation's largest providers of alternative and art-based video. Through a successful national and international distribution service, the VDB distributes video art, documentaries made by artists, and recorded interviews with visual artists, photographers and critics.