East Coast Artists

What is East Coast Artists?

Founded by Richard Schechner in 1991, ECA’s mission is fourfold:
1. To develop theatrical productions and performance events that radically reconfigure the classics, that generate original theatrical works, and that call attention to specific aspects of life as performance, and thus available to intervention and change.
2. To educate, mentor, and train theatre artists and others in ECA’s theories and practices of performance and ECA’s transcultural techniques of performer training.
3. To conduct and collaborate on interdisciplinary research on emotion and other performance-related topics.
4. To facilitate intercultural and international exchange in all aspects of ECA’s activities in productions, training, outreach, and research.

Schechner’s Artistic Career

Richard Schechner began directing theater professionally in the 1950s. He was one of the founders of the East End Players of Provincetown Massachusetts. He directed plays while he was in the US Army from 1968-60. After the army, Schechner enrolled at Tulane University to study for his PhD in Theatre. In 1963, he became one of the three producing directors of The Free Southern Theater – a group active in the deep south during the most intense years of the Freedom Movement. During the period of the Vietnam War, Schechner staged protest and guerrilla theatre in opposition to the war. In 1965, he was one of three founding directors of the New Orleans Group – with whom he staged not only Happenings but the first fully environmental theatre production. When he moved to New York in 1967 he formed the Performance Group. After he left TPG in 1980, his former colleagues renamed it The Wooster Group. With TPG, Schechner directed many plays including Dionysus in 69 (based on Euripides’ The Bacchae), Sam Shepard’s The Tooth of Crime, Bertolt Brecht’s Mother Courage and Her Children, Seneca’s Oedipus, and Jean Genet’s The Balcony. In 1991, after a decade of directing and leading workshops in the United States, India, China, Latin America, and South Africa, Schechner founded East Coast Artists in 1991. With ECA, Schechner has directed Faust/gastronome, Chekhov’s Three Sisters, Hamlet, Yokastas Redux (co-authored by Schechner and Saviana Stanescu). Schechner’s ECA colleague Benjamin Mosse has directed Stanescu’s Waxing West and Manjula Padmanabhan’s Harvest. At the same time, Minnick and more especially Paula Murray Cole have continued to teach and further develop rasaboxes. Cole not only offers rasaboxes at various universities and other venues, she leads in the training and certifying of new rasaboxes instructors.

East Coast Artists’ Biographies

Richard Schechner, ECA Artistic Director

Schechner is University Professor and Professor of Performance Studies, Tisch School of the Arts, New York University. Schechner has been at NYU since 1967. Previously, he taught at Tulane University from 1962 to 1967. Schechner holds a BA in English from Cornell 1956; MA in English from the University of Iowa, 1958; a PhD in Theatre from Tulane University 1962. He is editor of TDR: The Journal of Performance Studies. He is the founding artistic director of East Coast Artists.

His major interests are performance theory, intercultural performance, experimental performance, and theatre directing. In March 2005 the Richard Schechner Center for Performance Studies was inaugurated as part of the Shanghai Theatre Academy, where Schechner is an Honorary Professor.

Schechner is the author of a number of books, including Public Domain, Environmental Theater, The End of Humanism, Performance Theory, Between Theater and Anthropology, The Future of Ritual, Performance Studies—An Introduction, and Over, Under, and Around. His books have been translated into Spanish, Korean, Chinese, Japanese, French, Slovak, Polish, Serbo-Croatian, German, Italian, Hungarian, Dutch, Parsi, and Bulgarian.

Overseas, Schechner has directed The Cherry Orchard with the Repertory Theatre of the National School of Drama in New Delhi (in Hindi), August Wilson’s Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom for the Grahamstown Festival in South Africa, Sun Huizhu’s Tomorrow He’ll Be Out of the Mountains at Shanghai’ Peoples’ Art Theatre, The Oresteia (in his own adaptation) with the Contemporary Legend Theatre of Taiwan, and Hamlet: That Is the Question – an experimental version of Shakespeare’s play (all in Chinese).

Schechner’s fellowships, awards, and visiting professorships include a Lifetime Achievement Award from Performance Studies International, a Career Achievement Award from the Association for Theatre in Higher Education (ATHE), a Guggenheim, two Fulbrights, an American Council of Learned Societies Senior Fellowship, an NEH Senior Research Fellow, the Mondello Prize, two Asian Cultural Council grants, and an American Institute of Indian Studies Senior Research Fellowship, a Humanities and Old Dominion Fellow at Princeton University, a Hoffman Eminent Scholar at Florida State University, an Emmens Visiting Professor at Ball State University, a Whitney Halstead Scholar at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, a Montgomery Fellow at Dartmouth College, a Fellow of the Center for Cultural Sociology at Yale University, and an Andrew H. White Professor-at-Large at Cornell University. He is an honorary professor of the Institute for the Fine Arts, Havana, Cuba.

Benjamin Mosse, ECA Associate Artistic Director

has directed over 40 plays internationally, most recently the New York premiere at La MaMa of Saviana Stanescu’s WAXING WEST, which subsequently performed at the Sibiu International Theater Festival and Teatrul ACT in Bucharest, and will next premiere in Stockholm. He has served as artistic director of Yale Cabaret, producing 21 shows during his tenure, and was founding artistic director of the noted Cincinnati ensemble troupe IF Theatre Collective whose BURN THIS was honored Outstanding Production/Direction 2001. In New York, he works with Richard Schechner as associate artistic director of East Coast Artists developing international new work; they recently collaborated in Shanghai on HAMLET for the Shanghai Experimental Theatre Festival. He has assisted David Esbjornson, Mark Lamos, Doug Hughes, Michael Wilson, Richard Schechner and John Tillinger at such theatres as The Public Theatre/ Shakespeare in Central Park, New York Theatre Workshop, Yale Repertory, Hartford Stage, the Guthrie Theater and Williamstown Theatre Festival. He was a member of the Lincoln Center Directors Lab, and has attended workshops by Tadashi Suzuki, Robert Lepage, Double Edge, Gardzienice, Elizabeth LeCompte, among others. He received his BS from Northwestern University, MA in Performance Studies from NYU and MFA in Directing from Yale School of Drama.

Saviana Stanescu, ECA Writer-in-Residence

was born in Bucharest, Romania, on a cold February morning during Ceausescu’s dictatorship, and “reborn” in New York in the hot days of 2001. Her plays have been widely presented internationally and in the US. Recent New York productions include “Waxing West” (2007 New York Innovative Theatre Award for Outstanding Full-length Script) and “YokastaS Redux’’ at La MaMa Theatre, “Flagstories” at TBG Theatre (part of Myth America Project co-written with Arthur Kopit, Theresa Rebeck, Israel Horowitz, Jason Grote, Matt Olmos, Loyd Suh), “Suspendida” at the Ontological Theatre, “Balkan Blues” at the NYC Fringe Festival and Manhattan Theatre Source, and the site-specific “I want what you have” at the World Financial Center. Saviana won the 2007 Marulic Prize for Best European Radio-drama for “Bucharest Underground”. Her short play “Aurolac Blues,” performed at HERE Arts Center, was published in the anthology “Plays and Playwrights 2006”. Two monologues have been published in the Playwrights’ Center’s “Monologues for Women” and “Final Countdown” was translated, produced and published in France. She has also published six books of poetry and drama including “Google me!” (poetry), “Black Milk” (four plays) and “The Inflatable Apocalypse” (Best Romanian Play of the Year UNITER Award in 2000). Her plays have received readings and workshops at Voice&Vision, Lark, New York Theatre Workshop, New York Stage & Film, Playwrights’ Foundation, Traveling Jewish Theatre, Immigrants Theatre Project, Martin Segal Theatre Center, LaGuardia Performing Arts Center, Odeon Theatre, Act Theatre, Theatre Gerard Philipe de Saint-Denis, Gare Au Theatre, etc. She was a 2005-2007 TCG fellow with the Lark Play Development Center, where her plays “Waxing West” and “Lenin’s Shoe” had barebones productions. Currently Saviana is a NYSCA playwright-in-residence with Women’s Project and writer-in-residence for East Coast Artists.

Saviana holds an MA in Performance Studies (Fulbright fellow) and an MFA in Dramatic Writing (John Golden Award for excellence in playwriting) from New York University, Tisch School of the Arts, where she now teaches in the Drama Department.

Saviana has been a visiting lecturer, teacher or panelist at many universities and institutions including: Lee Strasberg Institute for Theatre&Film, CUNY Grad Center, Fordham, Rutgers, Brown, Smith College, Penn State, Chattanooga, University College of London, etc. She co-edited the anthologies of plays “Global Foreigners” (with NYU professor Carol Martin) and “roMANIA after 2000” (with CUNY professor Daniel Gerould).