Brechtian Theatre Research Articles

<i>Terra em Transe</i>. A Marxist Poetics and Aesthetics as a Critique of Capitalist Development

This article examines the film Terra em Transe (Glauber Rocha, 1967), framed in the Brazilian “Cinema Novo” movement. The analysis revolves around the constitution of a cinematographic poetics linked to a Marxist aesthetic. The principle of movie montage is the essential component of his cinematographic poetics. The Marxist aesthetic falls on what Alberto Híjar Serrano called rough communism, and some techniques of the Brechtian theory of distancing can also be appreciated. These elements constitute the cinematographic formula that is configured in a kind of critique of capitalist development, that industrializing meta-narrative that became hegemonic from the second half of the twentieth century.

Aboriginalizing Mother Courage: Brecht in Australia

ABSTRACT This article investigates the crucial role of Brechtian aesthetics in representing the voice of Aboriginal Australians. It examines the theatre of Wesley Enoch, an Aboriginal Australian director and playwright, and argues that Enoch’s 2013 adaptation of Bertolt Brecht’s Mother Courage and Her Children, performed at the Queensland Theatre Company, Brisbane, formed an instance of resistance against epistemic hegemony. The first part of the article examines the device of the heckler, central to the writings of Australian Aboriginals, by focusing on Kevin Gilbert’s The Cherry Pickers (1988) and shows how the device functions to articulate the peripheral voices of the Aboriginal Australians. The second part demonstrates how Enoch employed the heckler trope through his dramaturgy to protest against the Australian nation state. Broadly, it illustrates how Enoch’s production used Aboriginal aesthetics to voice Aborigines’ challenge to established norms, an act that remained independent of Brechtian theatre’s previous uses in the Australian context.

Edward Bond’s Dialectical Theatre from the Perspective of a Dialectical Understanding of Utopia and Dystopia

Edward Bond asserts that art is significant because it is made up of a constant dialectic of variation in which every idea is subject to criticism. Bond does not argue that a utopian work of art resolves actual conflicts in a fictitious setting; rather, he emphasises that it exposes these issues in a concrete way in its internal structure and reflects the need for a new and different existence. The aim of this paper is to demonstrate how Bond, one of the most prominent representatives of Marxist-dialectical theatre, creates a dramaturgy of utopia (individual)/dystopia (dividual) and hope/hopelessness in his plays The Bundle (1978) and Summer (1982). Bond believes that art, particularly theatre, should be employed to encourage the desire for a socialist utopia. Bond does not resolve the contradictions of life (within capitalism) in a utopian fiction; rather, he contends that the problems of capitalist exploitation that drive individuals to hopelessness should be made visible in his plays’ internal structure. He does this through a kind of Brechtian theatre where the contradictions of capitalism are foregrounded. Like Brecht, Bond attempts to use theatre to promote change in society - both represent the fundamental problems of society to convince spectators that social change is necessary and possible. Bond purposefully employs a mix of political propaganda and a utopian hope for a new and different existence. His plays exhibit a desire for a politically awake society, and a peaceful world that prioritises equality and freedom.

Lectio visceralis – embodied, online worship: praying, learning and liberation in the flesh at BIAPT 2022

ABSTRACT Lectio visceralis is form of prayer/reflection in which participants gently create sculptures with their own bodies, and then reflect on these sculptures to discern spiritual insight. While lectio visceralis originated during the COVID lockdown, its roots lie in Christian incarnationalism, and in the liberationist practice of Theatre of the Oppressed. This article describes an online lectio visceralis experience, ‘This Is My Body: An Interfaith Ritual of Embodied Reflection.’ (This was the public worship component at the 2022 annual conference of BIAPT, the British and Irish Association for Practical Theology.) The article explores the roots of lectio visceralis in Theatre of the Oppressed, which combines critical pedagogy, Brechtian theatre, and Stanislavskian emotional inquiry. It lays out the neuroscientific evidence for considering both prayer and reflection as thoroughly embodied. And it argues for the Christian bona fides of lectio visceralis, in light of a theology of ‘integral liberation’.

An analytical insight into the structure of the Brechtian theatre based on the plays ‘Mother Courage and Her Children’ and‘ The Caucasian Chalk Circle’

Bertolt Brecht developed the form of the ‘epic theatre’ which can be defined as the foundation of the logical diversion of the direction of the conventional theatre. Brecht through this route of the epic theatre utilizes the theatre as a social and innovative logical instrument with the motive of initiating a social change which will have an impact on the existing social texture and the mentality of the social beings. The research focuses on analyzing how Brecht pursued a rationalistic route deviating from the core of the conventional theatrical structure, in instituting the form of the ‘epic theatre’ which can be defined as the foundation of the logical diversion of the direction of the conventional theatre. The foremost Brechtian plays, ‘Mother Courage and Her Children and ‘The Caucasian Chalk Circle’ were analyzed to examine to which extent Brecht portrays the inner conflicts which social beings undergo in identifying their survival in relation to the discipline of emotion and reason. The data collecting procedure was conducted by utilizing secondary data collection methods. Accordingly, content analysis (conceptual analysis, relational analysis), discourse analysis and structural analysis were used in collecting and analyzing the relevant data. The study focused on analyzing the two plays Mother Courage and Her Children and ‘The Caucasian Chalk Circle’ based on the Marxist ideological perspectives. The plays, ‘Mother Courage and Her Children, and ‘The Caucasian Chalk Circle, induce the spectator to contemplate and reflect on the Brechtian thematic perspectives such as ‘Victimization of the human being through the insatiable desire for material comfort, human incapability to confront the social evils, the dichotomy between emotion and reason etc. Thus, approaching the irrational social symptoms from a communist political point of view, Brecht within his plays portrays the inner conflicts which social beings undergo in identifying their survival in relation to the discipline of emotion and reason. ‘Grusha’ in ‘The Caucasian Chalk Circle and ‘Kattrin’ in ‘Mother Courage and Her Children’ pursue the route of the universal principle of humanity which functions as the instinctive element in contrast to the rationally moulded sphere of reason. Brecht can be identified as a rebel whose intention is to move the social structure towards a new sphere in persuading the people to perceive through the obscured social veil. Along with the ideologies such as Marxism and the influence of the political theatre of Erwin Piscator, Brecht made an effort to transform the theatre into a source of social revival, thought inspiration and a foundation for social discourse.

Bertolt Brecht’s Soul in the Body of Experimental Animation: Common Audiovisual Strategies between Epic Theatre and Robert Breer’s Short Animations

This essay examines Robert Carlton Breer’s specific audiovisual strategies for making experimental animations. Epic theatre or Brechtian theatre stays against the popular conventions and traditions of the Dramatic theatre (Aristotelian theatre) and prevents its audiences from drowning in the performance and inactiveness by its strategies like Distancing Effect. As a result of watching identical functions between Robert Breer’s filmmaking strategies in his short experimental animations and the strategies of the Epic theatre, three questions raise in mind. Can the strategies of making a Brechtian theatre be represented in animation? Can the strategies of the Brechtian theatre be considered as equivalents for Breer’s filmmaking strategies? If it can be possible, Can the results of the Brechtian theatre – audiences’ prevention from drowning in performance and inactiveness – be formed for the audiences of Breer’s animations so that they can speculate about the issues and characters of those films functionally? To answer these questions, the method of this essay is accounted based on finding equivalents between the strategies of Epic theatre and the strategies of Breer’s filmmaking. In this way, it is indispensable to be familiar with experimental animation, Breer’s films, Epic theatre and Brecht’s performing and executive ideas. This essay analyzes and presents the mentioned issues via a library-based and comparative analytical study so that the possibility of representing the strategies of the Epic theatre in animation media and the possibility of equivalence between Brecht’s strategies in theatre and Breer’s strategies in animation can be determined.

Gestus and Taboo: A Study of Bertolt Brecht

The paper addresses Brecht’s concept of Gestus and proposes an original reading of it, parallel to Roland Barthes’s semiological theory. It proposes the view that a gesture becomes a Gestus when it is interpellated into myth. It follows that the Gestus also interpellates into relations, which is, at the same time, its connecting and disconnecting power. The author presents some insights from the theory of ritual and unpacks them to identify some of the ritual’s key characteristics that simultaneously correspond to Brecht’s epic theatre. He does this with an awareness of the ontological differences between ritual and theatre and without the intention of locating Brechtian theatre at any specific locus in the ritual-theatre relation. He intends to think about this relation so that it reveals further insights into the conceptual and practical nature of Brecht’s estrangement effect. Finally, the author recognises its experimental and pedagogical power in its persistent, repetitive intervention in social myths and taboos, which is not only a matter of method but also a matter of initiating in and practising a specific ontology.

Tracing The Brechtian Influence in Amiri Baraka’s Dutchman

Dutchman attracts the attention of the audience more than Amiri Baraka’s other playswhich exce ptionally consolidates the sturdy awareness and the theatrical development. Baraka has been influenced by the political and social attitudes of the Brechtian theatre which have influenced the theatre of the whole world. Brecht is a fundamental figure in recent times and the works of theatre return to his influence and his achievements. Many American playwrights follow his techniques in one way or other ways and appropriately Baraka’s Dutchman illustrates the Brechtian upshots on the Afro-American stage. The journey of Clay and Lula is pointed to be a lesson for the spectators and the readers in employing several Brechtian elements and techniques to expose the current issues of the 1960s of American life. It is paralleled to the past periods by reconditioning the traditional myth of The Flying Dutchman of the seventeenth century as a symbol of the notion of slavery and degradation of the blacks from that time till the recent days of Baraka. Critics have identified Baraka’s Dutchman as a political play that emphasises social injustice to arouse social change using the Brechtian way of evolving society.

Brechtian Theatre and the Glocal South The Case from South Africa

Brechtian Theatre and the Glocal South The Case from South Africa

An Age of Transition: Restaging Brecht’s Encounter with Beijing Opera

The scene is Moscow, 1935. A who’s who of the European avant-garde has gathered to see the work of their foremost Chinese colleague: the Beijing opera master Mei Lanfang. Among them is the German playwright Bertolt Brecht, who sees in Mei’s performances the aesthetic effect he aims to develop in his own work: an effect he will soon call the ‘alienation effect.’ In 1936, Brecht pens his famous essay “On Chinese Acting,” in which he argues—approvingly—that Chinese theatre alienates the actor and audience from a play’s narrative by smashing the fourth wall and championing symbolism over realism. But did Brecht get it right? In this essay, I examine this remarkable episode in global theatre history. I argue that Brecht misunderstood Beijing opera’s theatre aesthetics, yet nonetheless meaningfully engaged with Chinese culture. A renewed encounter between Brechtian theatre and Beijing opera, I suggest, opens up intriguing possibilities in dramatic performance and theatre aesthetics.

Theatre as an Exemption to the Economic Base

Despite living in a capitalist society, theatre is still able to maintain a level of autonomy in the creation of its work. In this essay, I explore how Marx’s idea of base and superstructure, being the social framework of society, although relevant when examining the socio-political structures of our society does not allow for a deep understanding of theatre and capitalism. This is relevant in how some aspects of Marx’s superstructure are able to seem untouched by the economic mode of production. Despite theatre's reflection in different aspects of its production, it has been able to separate itself from the economic base by creating an art form that does not necessarily fit into Marx’s idea of a commodity. Thus, not allowing for traditional labour relations and commodity fetishism that results. Althusser's understanding, on the other hand, allows for a more autonomous structure, where theatre both reflects the economic base but also critiques it. I use the example of Hamilton the musical to exemplify how features of this economic base can be present in a theatrical production. I also examine a local Edmonton retelling of Shakespeare's Titus Andronicus by Colleen Murphy called The Society for the Destitute Presents: Titus Bouffonius which uses techniques found in Brechtian style theatre. It is through these techniques that this theatre performance has been able to skirt the totality of economic production and provide a critique of the ideology present in society.

Howard Brenton’ın Arabistan Ardından Lawrence Oyununa Althusserci Bir Yaklaşım

Howard Brenton is a British dramatist who mostly brings historical and political facts to his stage. He is one of the playwrights nurtured by British History after World War II. In his plays, he reveals Britain's unsuccessful domestic and foreign policy are the causes of its historical and political problems. “A tragicomedy of a hero” (Brenton, 2016b), Lawrence After Arabia, in which the playwright criticizes British policy is no exception. The elements which make the play more interesting are that the play takes place in the last period of the Ottoman Empire and has the traces of Turkish history, and its geographical scene is the land in the Middle East that the Ottoman Empire lost in the Great World War. Lawrence After Arabia was first staged at the Hampstead Theater on April 28, 2016. This date should not be disregarded as it is the centenary of the Arab revolt and the Sykes-Picot Treaty. The negative effects of the conflicts in the Middle East, the Arab spring riots and the events in Syria in the new century make the play even more interesting. It must be said that the playwright claims in the play that Britain should realize its former mistakes in order to resolve its current terrorism-related problems. However, this work handles Lawrence After Arabia from another perspective; it examines Lawrence, the protagonist of the play, through the concept of ideology. In this context, it notably benefits from the works of the French philosopher Louis Althusser; For Marx, Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses and Ecrits Philosophiques Et Politiques, Tome 1. The confusion of the protagonist of the play is examined by taking advantage of Althusser's views on art and theatre in the light of Brechtian Theater. This work clarifies how Howard Brenton benefits from ideology as a raw theatrical material while forming his protagonist and how Lawrence is negatively affected by the ideology that he was born into due to the political mistakes of Britain with the help of the Althusserian approach.

What makes theatre modern?: an interview with Kuo Pao Kun by Quah Sy Ren

ABSTRACT Kuo Pao Kun (1939–2002) was often regarded as the doyen of Singapore theatre. The interview reveals how his theatre practice in the 1960s–1970s worked through Chinese theatre (in both its spoken and more traditional sung forms), Brechtian theatre (with its alienation effect) and modern Russian theatre (in its naturalistic form) in the attempt to form a flexible modern Chinese-language theatre in Singapore that could intellectually engage with the city-state’s economic-development imperatives during the height of the Cold War. This interview is an extract from a longer interview conducted by Quah Sy Ren in 2002.

Dispassionate Eroticism in “Either/or” by Søren Kierkegaard and Tiger Lillies

The main focus of the present article is to research the specific reading of Søren Kierkegaard’s (1813–1855) philosophy by the British musical trio “Tiger Lillies” in their studio album “Either/or”. The questions to be answered are the following: (1) Was the choice of the Kierkegaard’s text of the accidental or rather conscious nature? (2) Does this interpretation shed new light upon Kierkegaard’s conception of the sensual-erotic phenomenon, in particular, and his strategy of existential communication, in general? The answer to the first question is that the choice if fully conscious and rational. The album works two-fold: first, it explores the themes and musings from the Danish thinker, second, it creates a backdrop for disclosure of the dark side of the human self, the despair, the impossibility of the existential choice that comes about in the result of the pursuit of instant gratification and boredom. Answer to the second research question is to be found when exploring principles of the Brechtian epic theatre in the music album “Either/or” and then applying them to Kierkegaard’s texts.

A comparative study: The principles of the distancing effect in Brechtian theater and Ta’ziyeh

This article studies the relationship between actors and audiences participation in theater, using the oft-compared Brechtian theater style, and the religious and ritualistic Passion play Ta’ziyeh. To investigate the similarities and differences between these two forms, the distancing or “V”- effect of Brechtian theater is compared to the dramatic value of distancing in conveying the strong moral principles associated with the traditional performance of Ta’ziyeh. To disprove the argued association between the two forms, to inform how modern theater-goers appreciate the influence of each form the objective of this paper is to provide a deeper and more culturally specific understanding of Ta’ziyeh’s engagement with reality and the symbolic, particularly with regard to the position of actors and audiences towards each other. To this end, the critical elements in both Ta’ziyeh and the Brechtian V-effect are comprehensively discussed.

Pressurizing the Politics of The Crucible: a Brechtian Production of Arthur Miller’s Modern Classic

In this article David Barnett documents a practice-as-research project that employed Brechtian approaches to stage dramatic material. The Crucible by Arthur Miller is a realist text in which the protagonist, John Proctor, redeems himself for the sin of adultery by taking a heroic stand against the Salem witch-hunts. Existing scholarship has revealed a series of gendered biases in the form and content of the play, yet these findings have never been systematically realized in performance. While appearing to defend democratic values, the play’s dramaturgical strategies coerce agreement, and this represents a fundamental contradiction. Brecht offers a method that preserves the written dialogue, but interprets it critically onstage, deploying a range of devices derived from a materialist and dialectical interpretation. The aim of the production was to re-present a play with a familiar production history and problematize the political bases on which it conventionally rested. The article discusses the rationale for the theory and practice of contemporary Brechtian theatre and offers the production as a model for future critical realizations of other realist plays. David Barnett is Professor of Theatre at the University of York. His publications include A History of the Berliner Ensemble (CUP, 2015), Brecht in Practice: Theatre, Theory and Performance (Bloomsbury, 2014), amd Rainer Werner Fassbinder and the German Theatre (CUP, 2005).

Empathy in Modern Drama: Bertolt Brecht’s Threepenny Opera

Summary The aim of this paper is to compare Brechtian theory concerning empathy in theatre and recent studies showing the biological basis of empathy. First of all, a brief summary about the concept of empathy is provided, with particular attention to empathy in Brechtian theatre. Then, a paragraph is dedicated to explain how empathy and emotional involvement are linked to neurobiological mechanisms and body state. In the end, an analysis of the Verfremdungseffekte in the Threepenny Opera is traced to understand how recent studies contradict Brechtian theory as far as empathy is concerned.

U2's Innocence and Experience as Brechtian Theater

U2's Innocence and Experience as Brechtian Theater Clare Chiappetta Artists have often used performance to to advocate social change. Many are planned to make audiences feel something; the local news, for example, often concludes with a "feel good" story. But performance can also be designed to unsettle and to shake the spectators, causing them not only to question but also to change the status quo. Among the most influential advocates of using performed narratives as a tool of change was the German playwright Bertolt Brecht (1898–1956), whose groundbreaking ideas on epic theater and the theater of alienation revolutionized the communication of social and political ideas on the stage. Walter Benjamin said that performance "does not reproduce situations, rather it discovers them."1 Brecht channels this discovery first into education, and finally into action. This process is precisely what U2 staged in the first leg of their Innocence + Experience tour (I+E). Through their lyrics, and by dramatizing—and then disrupting—their own individual stories as members of the band and citizens of Ireland during the Troubles, U2 articulates social values that they invite the audience to share. For decades, U2 has sought to use its music and fame to influence politicians and effect change on local and global levels. During their I+E tour, U2 took a politically charged stance on immigration reform in an effort to create a global community seeking to protect and empower the vulnerable. In performance, U2's members compare their own individual stories of growing up during the time of the Troubles to the refugee crisis in the Middle East. The jarring history of the Irish conflict is introduced, and then interrupted, by stories from the refugee crisis in contemporary Syria. All four band members spent their adolescent years in 1970s Dublin, and although their relatively privileged suburban neighborhood did not afford a direct experience of the violence in Northern Ireland, Dubliners—even suburban Dubliners in Malahide—were well aware of the riots, warfare, and bombs that [End Page 67] had become commonplace in the North; images of the violence were broadcast into their homes every day, and virtually everyone had friends or family in the province. It was during these tense circumstances, the worst years of the Troubles, that the members of U2 set out to create their own narrative. Nearly forty years after the band's founding, the 2015–2016 portion of the Innocence and Experience tour can be viewed as a form of theater of alienation, or what Brecht called verfrumdung, a moment when spectators are simultaneously engaged in the performance as well as estranged from it. The object of classic Greek theater was for its audience to achieve a moment of catharsis; the alienation effect (or "a-effect") seeks to achieve the opposite. The audience's enjoyment is broken, or disrupted, by an action or stage device that interrupts the context of the performance. The audience must be first enmeshed in the performance, and then shocked out of it; the interruption requires the viewer to recontextualize the action to discover its new meaning. One critic describes the a-effect as "a double perspective on events and actions so as at once to show their present contradictory nature and their historical cause or social motivation." 2 The conventions of "story" melt away to reveal the social implications of its creation. U2's performance during the tour focuses a great deal on creating a sense of story. They not only perform their own history of the Troubles, but they also educate by inviting their audience to share in and reach a more personal understanding. This internal perspective draws the audience into the performance, which will be disrupted by sound effects, changes in lyrics, and dramatic actions. Manfred Wekwerth, a critic of Brechtian theater, describes Brecht's goal in the theater of alienation as nothing less than "changing the world."3 Wekwerth points out that theater and other performative acts have the power to introduce the desire to make a difference in the world. Brechtian thought inherently assumes communal action: "A theater that seeks to change the world must above all . . . awaken people's courage and capacity for collectivism."4 The I...

Stanislavski in Dialogical Acting with the Inner Partner – In the Neighbourhood with Brecht

The study introduces a discipline, Dialogical Acting with the Inner Partner, which explores a double existence of an actor in the role and the ability of identifying with the role or distancing from it. The principle of identifying corresponds with Stanislavski’s concept of acting of experiencing and the truthful presence on the stage. The principle of distancing is based on anti-illusionist principles of Brechtian and Russian avant-garde theatre. The integration of these antithetic principles is enabled by the actor’s inner partner (inner spectator) which is understood as an integral component of a triadic concept, author–actor–spectator. The discipline was founded by Czech alternative actor, writer and pedagogue Ivan Vyskočil.

Post epic in the Max Frisch’s play “The Fire Raisers”

The article explores the features of Max Frish's play “Тhe Fire Raisers”. The research has been conducted in the context of the covering of the processive aspect of the play as an example of a dramatic parable. The main points of the drama theorist and practice of the epic theater Bertolt Brecht and Max Frish as a representative of the dramatic art that arose after Brecht have been highlighted. The work analyzes the plot and meaning of the play, its philosophical value, thus demonstrating a new author’s vision of the principles of the epic Brechtian theater, the features of the drama-parable and “absurdism of the work” in terms of creating a special “model” of the play, a counterpoint to the В. Brecht “moralizing” motive, author's provocation, which induces research, analysis, process-game, discussion. The article emphasizes the statement of the so-called “edification” in drama. The “effect of edification” is weakened due to the absurdization of the plot. The reinforcement of the absurdity of the situation is facilitated by the simultaneous display of two places of action with elements of absurdization. To express the latter, the parody of the plot, choir and assembling acquires a new semantic meaning. The article analyzes the presence of choirs commenting on the action, as well as the misbehavior of the character in order to arouse recipient’s mind (studying through the wrong, “asocial sample”, which needs correction). There has been considered a new, rational for the modern world gradual form of presentation, which awakens the reader's mind, stimulating to the independent problem-solving.