An exploration of public performance in everyday life, by the leading cultural and social thinker. "The Performer" examines the relationships between performance in art (especially in music), politics, and everyday experience. It focuses on the bodily and physical dimensions of performance, rather than language.

Richard Sennett is particularly attuned to the ways in which the rituals of daily life are performances. The book draws from history and sociology, as well as from the author's personal career as a professional violinist, and his later work as an urbanist and social thinker.

It records the evolution of performance spaces in the city, the emergence of actors, musicians, and dancers as independent artists, the inequality between performer and audience, the insecure relationships between artistic creation and social and religious ceremony, and the uses and abuses of acting by politicians. The dual art of performance is both destructive and cultural.

This is the first in a trilogy of books on the fundamental DNA of human expression: performance, narration, and imagery.

Pages: 256, Dimensions: 13x13cm