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ECA was founded in 1992 by Richard Schechner. He remains ECA’s artistic director. Sarah Lucie is ECA’s managing director. Yassi Jahanmir is the Schechner Plays Festival producer. Paula Murray Cole, Michele Minnick, and Rachel Bowditch are the directors of The Performance Workshop 2027 meeting.
ECA’s first production was Faust/gastronome, a radical re-telling of the Faust story. Since then, ECA has produced numerous works directed by Schechner and other ECA members. These works include Amerika (based on Kafka’s America), Chekhov’s The Three Sisters, Shakespeare’s Hamlet, Hamlet: That is the Question (in Chinese), Aeschylus’s The Oresetia (in Chinese), August Wilson’s Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom (first African American play done in South Africa), Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot, Saviana Stanescu’s-Richard Schechner’s YokastaS, Saviana Stanescu’s Waxing West, Manjula Padmanabhan’s Harvest, Lian Amaris’ Swimming to Spalding, and the group devised Imagining O.
ECA is committed to intercultural dialogue and collaboration exploring the diversities of cultures and individuals. Our aim is nothing less than to better understand the complexities of the human condition.
ECA has collaborated with artists from Belgium, Colombia, China, Finland, France, India, Japan, Germany, Mexico, Romania, Serbia, Taiwan, Turkey, the United Kingdom, and the USA.
ECA has produced process-driven work in the USA, China, Poland, Romania), Sweden, India), and the UK.
East Coast Artists
ECA explores new ways of performer training, including “Rasaboxes.” The Performance Workshop, as described in Inside the Performance Workshop (2023) delivers new ways to train performers and others. The Performance Workshop integrates Schechner’s wide mutli-cultural knowledge with that of his colleagues. Rasaboxes is used not only in the performing arts but by K-12 educators, doctors, and scientists.
ECA has been lauded by critics and scholars from such diverse publications as The New York Times, The Village Voice, The Hindu, The Svenska Dagbladet, Glasgow Herald, Performing Arts Journal, National Geographic, The Chronicle of Higher Education, and American Theatre.
ECA’s work resonates politically socially, and individually.
Our most recent piece, the “exhilarating and erotic” Imagining O, opened the 2014-2015 Peak Performances season at Montclair. The show, which began at the Jarman Center for the Performing Arts in Canterbury and the Kerala International Theater Festival in India, received glowing reviews and was lauded as a New York Times Stage Memory at the end of the year.”