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About the Schechner Plays Festival
Few have had such a far-reaching career as an author, theatre director, workshop leader, professor, and editor as Richard Schechner. The Schechner Plays Festival, a performance festival taking place internationally and in New York, will celebrate Schechner’s legacy of performance experiments, academic boundary-breaking, and global exchange.
The Schechner Plays Festival is a performed retrospective of Schechner’s creative and academic legacy that includes innovative stagings and staged readings of and from, Schechner’s creative work developed by a diverse group of artists many of whom have worked with Schechner during his long career.
In addition to the performances will be workshops, panels, film screenings, and archival exhibitions. Yassi Jahanmir, an international theatre director, scholar, co-founder of the Tucson Fringe Festival, and former student of Schechner’s, is the festival’s co-Artistic Director.
Richard Schechner
is a pioneering experimental theatre director, performance theorist, and playwright. He was a producing director of the Free Southern Theater, founder of The Performance Group and East Coast Artists.
He is a founder of the scholarly discipline performance studies. He is editor of TDR. His books include Environmental Theater, Performance Theory, Between Theater and Anthropology, The End of Humanism, The Future of Ritual, Performed Imaginaries, Performance Studies: An Introduction, and Schechner Plays.
He has directed theatre, led workshops, taught, and lectured in the Americas, the Caribbean, Europe, Asia, Africa, and Australia.
Yassi Jahanmir
is an international theatre director and scholar whose work sits at the intersection of historical reinterpretation, sport as performance, and cultural exchange. She was the co-founder of the Tucson Fringe Festival and has developed work in the U.S., Europe, and the Middle East. She holds a PhD in Theatre and Performance Studies and has worked in academic and professional theatre contexts.
She is Artistic Director of Arête Theatre and Co-Artistic Director of the Schechner Plays Festival (NYC) 2027.
Her scholarly work has been published by TDR: The Drama Review, Theatre Topics, Women & Performance, Space and Culture, and Routledge.
Be Part of the Festival
Join a growing community of artists, scholars, and audiences passionate about the future of performance.
