Performing Baal

Abstract

In 2012, a team from the University of South Australia that included third-year students, theatre director/lecturer [author] and two music practitioners/lecturers: pianist Richard Chew and guitarist Rob Pippan combined to create a production of Bertolt Brecht’s Baal. The approach was to produce a rock music version where the team composed new song chord structures and melodies for the existing Brecht text. The staging foregrounded the performativity of a presentational style of acting, heavy metal-inspired music and use of aural and visual digital technologies – an intermedial dramaturgy. This, we suggest, constituted a post-Brechtian approach: taking Brecht’s foundational ideas of Epic theatre (Episches Theater) and freely playing with them within a ‘fun’ rock context. The fun or Spass as Brecht referred to it, contrasted with the dark fable of the play and resulted in an extension of Brecht’s strategies of defamiliarisation (Verfremdung).