The Performer

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.

Reviews:

'Urgent, penetrating, moving. A masterwork from a master thinker.' - Ian Bostridge, author of Schubert's Winter Journey: Anatomy of an Obsession

'Richard Sennett calls on his vast knowledge of theater and performance to argue for the social uses of civility-and against the degradation of public social space brought by demagogues. This is a book that ranges widely while speaking forcefully to our current needs.' - Peter Brooks, Yale University

'[A] timely study of the place of performance in society... Sennett combines erudition with personal experience... Performance, he believes, and the emotions it arouses, are fundamental to being human... colourful stories... unique insight and intelligence.' - Rowan Moore, Observer

'He looks at every aspect of performing - where it is done, stage or street; the performances of demagogues; the audience who takes it all in; the masks, clothing and appurtenances of acting in public. Sennett uses a wide frame of reference to bolster his analysis.' - Michael Prodger, New Statesman

'Sennett has the confidence to present a grand international cultural narrative... revealing... enjoyable.' - Emma Smith, Times Literary Supplement