The Performer

A compelling 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.

This is the first in a trilogy of books on the fundamental DNA of human expression- performing, narrating, and imaging.

About the Author

Richard Sennett grew up in the Cabrini Green housing project in Chicago, attended the Julliard School in New York and then studied social relations at Harvard. Over the last five decades, he has written about social life in cities, changes in labour and social theory. His books include The Hidden Injuries of Class, The Fall of Public Man, The Corrosion of Character, The Culture of the New Capitalism, The Craftsman and Building and Dwelling. Sennett has advised the United Nations on urban issues for the past thirty years and currently serves as member of the UN Committee on Urban Initiatives. He is Visiting Professor of Urban Studies at Harvard. Among other awards, he has received the Hegel Prize, the Spinoza Prize and the Centennial Medal from Harvard University.