Richard Schechner Wins 2010 Thalia Award

New York University professor and professor of performance studies in the department of Performance Studies at the Tisch School of the Arts Richard Schechner has been awarded the 2010 Thalia Award. The award is presented annually by the International Association of Theatre Critics and will be given to Schechner at a ceremony in Yerevan, Armenia June 16th to 20th.

The Thalia Award was presented to Schechner for his work as editor of The Drama Review, one of the world's leading theatre related publications and his work on a number of published books that contributed to the theatre. Schechner has been editor of the journal since 1986.

Richard Schechner directs both new and classical plays around the world. In New York, he founded The Performance Group and East Coast Artists. With TPG, Schechner directed Spalding Gray in six productions from 1970 to 1979: Makbeth (after Shakespeare), Commune (group devised), Sam Shepard's The Tooth of Crime, Bertolt Brecht's Mother Courage, Terry Curtis Fox's Cops, and Jean Genet's The Balcony. With ECA and in India, China, and South Africa, Schechner directed Chekhov's Three Sisters and The Cherry Orchard, Aeschylus's Oresteia, Seneca's Oedipus, Shakespeare's Hamlet, August Wilson's Ma Rainey's Black Bottom, and Saviana Stanescu's and Schechner's Yokastas Redux. In addition to his directing, Schechner is University Professor of Performance Studies at the Tisch School of the Arts, NYU and editor of TDR: The Journal of Performance Studies. He is the author of many books including Environmental Theater, Between Theater and Anthropology, The End of Humanism, Performance Theory, The Future of Ritual, and Performance Studies-An Introduction.

The IATC draws together more than two thousand theatre critics, through some fifty National Sections. Founded in Paris in 1956, the IATC is a non-profit, Non-Governmental Organization benefitting under statute B of UNESCO.

The purpose of the IATC is to bring together theatre critics in order to promote internationAl Cooperation. Its principal aims are to foster theatre criticism as a discipline and to contribute to the development of its methodological bases; to protect the ethical and professional interests of theatre critics and to promote The Common rights of all its members; and to contribute to reciprocal awareness and understanding between cultures by encouraging international meetings and exchanges in the field of theatre in general.

The IATC holds a world congress every two years, seminars for young critics twice a year, as well as symposiums, and contributes to jurys. English and French are the association's two official languages, and its place of incorporation is Paris.

Photo Credit: Humanities Institute

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