The Performer

The Performer

by Richard Sennett
Epub (Kobo), Epub (Adobe)
Publication Date: 01/02/2024

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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.

ISBN:
9781802062809
9781802062809
Category:
Philosophy: aesthetics
Format:
Epub (Kobo), Epub (Adobe)
Publication Date:
01-02-2024
Language:
English
Publisher:
Penguin Books Ltd
Richard Sennett

Richard Sennett's first book was The Uses of Disorder, in 1970. His previous books include The Fall of Public Man, Flesh and Stone and Respect, as well as the recent Homo Faber trilogy, The Craftsman, Together, Building and Dwelling.

For decades he has advised urban programmes for the United Nations, and has also worked as a planner for poor communities. He now teaches urban studies at the London School of Economics and at Harvard University. He has been awarded the Hegel and Spinoza prizes, as well as an honorary doctorate by Cambridge University.

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