Description

Book Synopsis

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.

The Performer

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    A Hardback by Richard Sennett

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      Book details

      Publisher Allen Lane
      Published 1 February 2024
      ISBN-13 9780241637647
      978-0241637647
      ISBN-10 0241637643
      Also in:
      Philosophy: aesthetics Social and cultural anthropology

      Description

      Book Synopsis

      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.

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