Reactuals: From Personal to Critical and Back

Abstract

The tracks of this chapter have been interestingly forth and back and forth again. When invited to contribute to this collection, I readily agreed – then balked. Richard Schechner has been, in some profound ways, my friend and mentor at the same time that “Richard Schechner” is the set of signatory letters attached to the books that line the shelves of those who profess some “relation” to performance studies. My process of thinking through Richard Schechner’s legacy, and therefore this writing, could not be straightforward. My engagement with Schechner’s thought, his teaching, his ideas, and his example has, for me, been deeply cross-routed, or chiasmatic: the so-called “life of the mind” has been profoundly interlaced with what we often still call “personal life” (as if these things were ever really fully distinguishable). Given that we read in the midst of living in relation, and given that reading and thinking bear relationality and structure modes of belonging beyond the pages (and wages) we “make” as scholars – given these things – thinking back over Schechner’s life work made it impossible for me to fully separate the rubrics: “life” and “work.” Indeed, Schechner’s work invited me, as so much of his writing against the grain of rigid epistemological ruts has done, to critically and creatively jump into the cracks in distinctions – or to weave between them – as “between” theatre and anthropology, or “from ritual to theatre and back” again.