About ECA
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ECA was founded in 1992 by Richard Schechner
ECA engages audiences with new work created collaboratively by teams of directors, writers, performers, and designers. ECA develops new ways to train performers. ECA promotes intercultural exchange and artistic experimentation as a model of global collaboration.
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ECA Mission Statement
ECA engages audiences with new work created collaboratively by teams of directors, writers, performers, and designers.
ECA develops new ways to train performers. ECA promotes intercultural exchange and artistic experimentation as a model of global collaboration.
About ECA:
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.
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.”
About Richard:
Richard Schechner is a pioneering experimental theatre director, performance theorist, and playwright. He was a producing director of the Free Southern Theater, founder of The Performance Group and East Coast Artists.
He is a founder of the scholarly discipline performance studies. He is editor of TDR. His books include Environmental Theater, Performance Theory, Between Theater and Anthropology, The End of Humanism, The Future of Ritual, Performed Imaginaries, Performance Studies: An Introduction, and Schechner Plays.
He has directed theatre, led workshops, taught, and lectured in the Americas, the Caribbean, Europe, Asia, Africa, and Australia
Sarah Lucie
(General Manager)
Sarah Lucie is a researcher, editor, and dramaturg. Her research examines nonhuman actors in contemporary performance. Her writing has appeared in Theatre Journal, Performance Research, and Theatre Topics, as well as Climate Theatre (2026) and Performance Pedagogy (2026).
Her co-edited collection, Revealing Posthuman Encounters in Performance, is forthcoming, and she contributes to the Performing Ends network, which published Mourning the Ends: Collaborative Writing and Performance (2026).
Creative work includes collaborating on a new adaptation of A Midsummer Night’s Dream and a devised adaptation of Antigone. She is assistant editor of TDR and Assistant Teaching Professor of Theatre at Worcester Polytechnic Institute.
Paula Murray Cole
(Rasaboxes Core Teacher)
Paula Murray Cole is a Professor at the School of Music, Theatre, and Dance at Ithaca College. As an ATI certified teacher of the Alexander Technique and a licensed massage therapist, Cole has performed in Schechner’s productions of Three Sisters and Hamlet with East Coast Artists.
Her professional focus is on the development and dissemination of Rasaboxes and The Performance Workshop (TPW).
Since 1999, she has taught and presented this innovative work at colleges, universities, conferences, and independent arts organizations both nationally and internationally. Notably, in 2009, Cole produced the only documentary video recording of Schechner teaching the entire TPW, titled Crossing the Line: Inside Richard Schechner’s Performance Workshop.
Rachel Bowditch
(Rasaboxes Core Teacher)
Rachel Bowditch, PhD (NYU Performance Studies), is a distinguished theatre director and Professor of Theatre in the School of Music, Dance, and Theatre at the Herberger Institute for Design and the Arts, Arizona State University.
She pursued her training at Ecole de Jacques Lecoq in Paris in 1998 and serves as a core teacher of TPW and Rasaboxes. Bowditch has performed in Schechner’s productions of YokastaS (2005 and 2007) with East Coast Artists. Since 2003, she has been actively teaching and developing Rasaboxes and The Performance Workshop (TPW).
Her published works include On the Edge of Utopia: Performance and Ritual at Burning Man (2010), Performing Utopia (University of Chicago Press/Seagull Books, 2018), and Physical Dramaturgy: Perspectives from the Field (Routledge, 2018).
For further insights into her artistic endeavors, visit https://vesselproject.org/ and https://rachelbowditch.com/
Michele Minnick
(Rasaboxes Core Teacher)
Michele Minnick, PhD, CMA, SMT/E, is a performance maker and producer, somatic movement educator, independent scholar, and teaching artist. Since 1998, she has taught, presented, and applied TPW and Rasaboxes internationally, utilizing these methods to create performance in both professional and educational settings across the US and Brazil.
From 1994 to 2005, Minnick was a member of East Coast Artists, where she translated and performed in Schechner’s production of Three Sisters (1995–1997) and took part in Hamlet (1999).
In 2021, she launched Vital Matters, an interdisciplinary arts-based laboratory for change, driven by the climate crisis and social injustice. Currently, Minnick serves as a Core Creator with Submersive Productions in Baltimore, where she incorporates Rasaboxes as a key pedagogy with K-12 students through the Arts for Learning Maryland program.
Yassi Jahanmir
(Schechner Plays Festival Producer)
Yassi Jahanmir is an international theatre director and scholar whose work sits at the intersection of historical reinterpretation, sport as performance, and cultural exchange.
She was the co-founder of the Tucson Fringe Festival and has developed work in the U.S., Europe, and the Middle East.
She holds a PhD in Theatre and Performance Studies and has worked in academic and professional theatre contexts.
She is Artistic Director of Arêté Theatre and Co- Artistic Director of the Schechner Plays Festival (NYC) 2027.
Her scholarly work has been published by TDR: The Drama Review, Theatre Topics, Women & Performance, Space and Culture, and Routledge.