Richard Schechner’s new book is a collection of nine essays most of which have been published before in various journals. It is a free ranging collection written over a period of ten years. The first essay, ‘A Letter from Calcutta’ is a series of musings about the city. The second is about The Performance Group’s tour of India in 1976. The third essay ‘Environmental Theatre: Space’ sets out Schechner’s ideas about dramaturgic space and the importance of consi¬dering its implications while performing. Three essays on performance theory follow, ‘Perfomers and Spectators Transported and Transformed’, ‘From Ritual to Theatre and Back’, ‘The Structure Process of the Efficacy Entertainment Dyad’ and ‘The Restoration of Behaviour’. There are two essays on performances, one on the Ramlila at Ramnagar, and one on Yaqui Easter, a Passion play from Arizona. The last essay ‘The Crash of Performative Circumstances: A Modernist Discourse on Postmodernism’ is, as the title suggests, on postmodernism.
May-June 1984, volume 8, No 6