Rebecca Schneider
Associate Professor of Theatre Arts and Performance Studies
Theatre, Speech & Dance
Phone: +1 401 863 9223
E-mail: Rebecca_Schneider@Brown.EDU
Rebecca Schneider has written extensively on theatre and performance practices that stretch accepted borders around media. She has written on performance art, photography, architecture, and everyday life as "performative." She teaches in theatre history as well as on performance art, gender- and race-critical performance, and visual culture and performance. She is currently completing a book on "Reenactment" that engages historical reenactment in popular culture, theatre, and visual art.
Biography
Rebecca Schneider, Chair of the Department of Theatre, Speech, and Dance, teaches performance studies, theater studies, and theories of intermedia. She is the author of The Explicit Body in Performance (Routledge, 1997) and working on a second book titled Reenactment: Essays on Performance Remains in Visual Culture . She has coedited the anthology Re:Direction: A Theoretical and Practical Guide to 20th-Century Directing. She is a contributing editor to TDR: The Drama Review and coeditor with David Krasner of the book series "Theatre: Theory/Text/Performance" with University of Michigan Press. Schneider has published essays in several anthologies, including Psychoanalysis and Performance, Acting Out: Feminist Performance, Performance and Cultural Politics, and the essay "Solo Solo Solo" in After Criticism. As a "performing theorist," she has collaborated with artists at such sites as the British Museum in London and the Mobile Academy in Berlin.
I have written extensively on theatre and performance practices that stretch accepted borders around media. My first book engaged with artists who use their own bodies as the stage for their performances, situating them within theatre and art historical traditions of the "avant-garde" and reading their work relative to feminist and race critical thoery. Since that book, I have written on performance art, photography, architecture, and everyday life as "performative."
I am currently working on practices in visual and performance art that labor under the rubric "reenactment." I am interested in exploring the wide range of both live and mediated performance — mostly in performance art, digital art, theatre, and photography — that attempts to "step into time" and duplicate or even "touch" prior historical acts and events. For some time I have studied Civil War reenactments and the passionate investments of those who engage in reenactment. I am interested in comparing the activities of "living history" with related practices of temporal travel in the frames of visual art and theatre (and their intermedial cousins). I contend that in much museal and pedagocial practice, the site of authenticity has shifted off of the historical object and onto the very vexed category of "experience" in relationship to historical knowledge. So, too, has the site in experimental art been shifting for many years off of the art object understood as discrete, and onto engagement with its display and its cirulation vis a vis the "experience" of the art participant. It is these shifts, their problems and promises, that my work attempts to explore.
Curriculum Vitae
