Brechtian

A video file containing the instances discussed in this paper can be found at this URL:
https://mega.nz/file/RL4UyIAa#3oCV3REMrIqioqrRu5zWxmIuvXwjQAZ8bEUryg-43zY

With reference to a compilation of clips (see above and in 'Files') from a live Berliner Ensemble performance in 1957, this paper considers the variety of movement and locomotion in Helene Weigel's assumption of Mother Courage, and its role in embodying and articulating the ethical contradictions essential to our experience of the play.

From the back cover:

‘Breaking the Fourth Wall is a probing study of the ways in which an actor or a character in a movie sometimes looks at the camera and addresses us in the audience. This is often taken simply to dispel the illusion, but in his book Tom Brown sensitively examines different forms of direct address and explicates how various and complex its effect can be.’
Gilberto Perez, Sarah Lawrence College

Film characters are not supposed to look at the camera, so what happens when they do acknowledge our ‘presence’ as spectators? It is often assumed that this is incompatible with the ‘voyeurism’ and the ‘presence-absence’ that defines the cinema experience and disrupts our involvement in the fiction. This book revaluates these and other fundamental assumptions about the medium by demonstrating that direct address is compatible with – and is in some cases a convention of – various traditions of filmmaking.

Breaking the Fourth Wall is the first book to provide a broad understanding of the role of direct address within fiction cinema. Chapters on the role of direct address in Hollywood comedies and musicals, as well as in some ‘alternative’ film practices, are accompanied by extended readings of individual films in which the illusion of eye contact between spectator and character offers a rich metaphor for the problems of vision (insight, foresight, other kinds of perceptiveness) that are so often the currency of movie narratives. In examining direct address, it returns the reader to fundamental and foundational debates concerning how cinema has been defined since the early part of the twentieth century, making it an invaluable resource for students and researchers in Film Studies.

David Henry Hwang’s M. Butterfly is a play about “passing”. Song’s ability to “pass” highlights the performativity of gender and race. The gap between Song’s “passing” and the audience’s privileged position of knowledge facilitates Hwang’s deconstruction of the fixed perceptions about gender, race and sexuality. Firstly, this paper uses Judith Butler’s theory of “gender performativity” to discuss Song’s gender performance. This paper aims to show that Hwang complicates the notion of gender performativity by highlighting the dynamics between Orientalism, othering and stereotyping. Using Brechtian theatrical devices, Hwang deconstructs the binary between the West and East and critiques Western assumptions of Asian identity. This paper also explores the interaction between “passing” and “failing” and its implications on gender and race politics. “Passing” is intimately linked with failing to “pass” within the society that is dominated by race and gender stereotypes. Finally, this paper argues that Song’s ability to “pass” reveals the West’s preoccupation with Orientalism and her failed performance reflects the West and East’s complicity in creating essentialist stereotypes which ultimately restrict both parties.

In Bakhtin's opinion, "the relation to meaning is always dialogic. Even understanding itself is dialogic." Particularly, the art of acting is such a dialogic relationship that fuses character and interpreter (performer) in the same unity of the presence before the audience. In other words, acting is a "dialectic" relationship, a dialogue on a higher level (a dialogue of personalities), as Bakhtin said. Dialogic acting manifests itself between two extreme aspects (identification and "distanciation") and as a merging of them. Putting the concrete manifestation of acting and staging into a formal model, we can affirm that the function of (theatrical) representation has a multitude of fuzzy values, situated between a theoretically absolute embodiment and a theoretically complete "distanciation." For instance, the former tends to be manifested in the "mimetic" rites (Durkheim) and in Stanislavski’s poetics. The latter is known as Brecht Verfremdungseffekt, or "alienantion effect," also to be found in traditional drama of the Extreme Orient, which inspired Brecht. (Today in the United States, Stanislavsks’s theories are a very important source of study for many actors. In contrast to Stanislavski, Brecht theorizes Verfremdungseffekt, endowing it with ideological connotations.) In mimetic rites, it is compulsory for the interpreter to identify itself with the archetypal character; this is a primary condition for the social, magical or religious efficiency of the ritualistic act(ing). More than (theatrical) performance, ritualistic act(ing) is a performative (re)presentation, i.e., the very archetypal event, in its immediate unfolding: drômenon as "lived transcendence" (Gusdorf), and Gadamerian metamorphosis. Alternatively, for both identification and distanciation as manners of acting, the concept of dialogism (Bakhtin) highlights one and the same discursive mechanism. The advantage is that the analysis of such a heterogeneous corpu—from modern theatre poetics to the ancient ritualistic performance—may operate in a relatively homogeneous way, with the same descriptive categories, borrowed from dialogic theory, and from theory of speech and fictional acts. Situated on the same axis of interpretation/ (re)presentation, "identification" and "distanciation" are fuzzy categories, with differences between them difficult to establish. This evokes Diderot's famous paradox, as reformulated by Lee Strasberg: "to move the audience, the actor must himself remain un moved.”
Keywords: (Theatrical) Performance, Identification, Distanciation, Artaud, Brecht, Gadamer, Stanislavski

Examining the relationship between theatre and photography, this book shows how the two intertwine and provide vantage points for understanding each other. Joel Anderson explores the theory and practice of photographing theatre and performance, as well as theatre and photography's mutual preoccupation with posing, staging, framing, and stillness.

This essay will explore two approaches to acting, namely Bertolt Brecht’s Epic performance and the American Method, and evaluate the ways in which they have been informed by 'implicit theories of the self'. This exploration will make use of an array of theoretical concepts, belonging to Auslander, Appadurai, Derrida, Roach and Zarrilli, among others, to discern what is truly at stake (be it on a theoretical or a practical level) when approaches to acting are intricately and inextricably tied to a particular theory or topography of the self.

The contradiction between restorative justice and poetic justice has led to a repeated critical self-reflection of the theatre as a medium, and was finally overcome in 20th century post-dramatic theatre, starting with Bertolt Brecht. Brecht‘s departure from Aristotelian theatre is directed from the outset against the principles of reward and punishment, which were crucial to poetic justice. Following on from naturalism, Brecht opposed these two fundamental principles with the idea of an “open-ended play”, whose end remains open and whose moral is developed only in a dialogue with the audience that is comparable with the conferencing of restorative justice.
The paper investigates the influence of Brecht‘s model of epic theatre and his theory of didactic theatre on the political film in the Brechtian tradition that emerged in certain strands of film theory and cinematic practice since the early 1960s. This influence can be detected in the films of Alexander Kluge and Jean-Luc Godard.

Resumo: “O círculo de giz caucasiano”, peça do dramaturgo alemão Bertolt Brecht (1898-1956), é aqui analisada sob a ótica do conflito entre ética e política no que diz respeito à justiça. Trabalha-se a ambiguidade conceitual e objetiva da justiça a partir da antinomia grega fundamental entre Têmis e Díke, que se desdobra – sem se reduzir – nas oposições: legal-igual, formal-material, humano-divino, etc. Para resolver a aporia da justiça injusta, não-equidade, recorre-se ao conceito de Ethos como realidade geradora, integradora e avaliadora de todo o agir humano, numa perspectiva abstrata, e à visão dialética da histórica, de cunho marxista, como processo onde se dá a conquista e a efetividade do justo. Por fim, discorre-se acerca do papel da hermenêutica em Azdak, personagem da obra, ambíguo e contraditório, que, por sua antítese ao direito positivo, possibilita a síntese histórica da transformação social. Assim, a hermenêutica em Brecht é uma via de luta, de concretização da conquista histórica do justo. Delineiam-se, assim, as bases de uma Teoria Brechtiana do Direito.
Palavras-chaves: Ética, Justiça, Mitologia Grega, Marx.

In theatre, plays written in Brechtian, non-Aristotelian structure differ from those of classical dramatic structures in several aspects. One of the aspects they are different is the aesthetical relationship that is built between the audience and performance. While in Aristotelian drama, emotional identification is aimed, non-Aristotelian performances aim at that the audience integrates with the meaning intellectually and critically, rather than emotionally. Likewise in drama in education, modern approaches such as process drama of Cecily O'Neill provides the participants with the opportunity that they can observe, handle and analyse the human life situations that are dealt with in a class critically. It can be suggested that process drama activities are parallel to non-Aristotelian structure of Brecht's epic theatre in some ways. Techniques and structure as the elements of these two notions (O'Neill's process drama and Brecht's epic theatre) resemble to each other not only by the usage and also by the relationship between the process and the participants as well. Some elements from Brechtian plays can also be seen in process drama activities in a way that participants are no longer passive objects of artificial pure-didactic processes but they are active and critical subjects of an interactive learning process and acquire opportunity to obtain a special aesthetical experience that is unique to the performing arts. This paper intends to build a direct link between drama in education and theatre fields and to explain this link from a structural point of view by comparing examples from plays of Brecht and process drama sessions of O'Neill. This comparison may be contributing to a well-known dispute: whether drama in education can lead to any aesthetical experience or not.

Some of Berthold Brecht theatre plays show aspects that could be related to some concepts proposed by Carl Marx. One play of that is "A Man is a Man" in which the story tells the dilemmas and identity conflicts that a person could face when do not have a critic viewpoint of oneself in society and the importance of each citizen for its development and functions. This article discusses this play proposing some reflexions related to concepts made by Marx.

Berthold Brecht rompeu com muitos dos paradigmas até então firmados no teatro no início do século XX. Muitas das propostas dele se devem à forte influência sofrida pelas ideias de Carl Marx, de sua vontade em contrapor e criticar as ideologias políticas e econômicas de seu tempo. O objetivo desse artigo será o de apresentar a história do texto de teatro Um Homem é Um Homem, escrito por Bertold Brecht e relacioná-lo com algumas questões presentes nas propostas de Carl Marx. Nessa peça, o dramaturgo consegue trazer questionamentos sobre conceitos outros, de maneira a fomentar reflexões nos espectadores sobre o processo de trabalho, alienação, mais valia e a importância da conscientização social para não conduzir a população ao caos bélico. Com a leitura do texto desta peça de teatro, podemos perceber que o autor levava suas transgressões estilísticas para além da estética, propondo que o teatro seria um importante meio para se atingir à significação da conscientização dos papeis e funções sociais dos indivíduos em sociedade.

Reflexiones sobre Hécuba o el gineceo canino (2011), obra de Emilio García Wehbi basada en textos de Eurípides. Intérpretes: Maricel Álvarez, Emilio García Wehbi, Horacio Marassi y Nicolás Prividera. Video e imágenes: Santiago Brunati. Música y sonorización: Marcelo Martínez. Iluminación: Alejandro Leroux. Centro cultural Ricardo Rojas, Sala Batato Barea, Ciudad Autónoma de Buenos Aires, del 10 de septiembre al 5 de octubre de 2011.

The anthology unites scholars from varied backgrounds with the notion that the theories and artistic productions of Bertolt Brecht are key missing links in bridging diverse discourses in social philosophy, theatre, consciousness studies, and aesthetics. It offers readers interdisciplinary perspectives that create unique dialogues between Brecht and important thinkers such as Althusser, Anders, Bakhtin, Benjamin, Godard, Marx, and Plato. While exploring salient topics such as consciousness, courage, ethics, political aesthetics, and representations of race and the body, it penetrates the philosophical Brecht seeing in him the never-ending dialectic-the idea, the theory, the narrative, the character that is never foreclosed. This book is an essential read for all those interested in Brecht as a socio-cultural theorist and for theatre practitioners.

The anthology unites scholars from varied backgrounds with the notion that the theories and artistic productions of Bertolt Brecht are key missing links in bridging diverse discourses in social philosophy, theatre, consciousness studies, and aesthetics. It offers readers interdisciplinary perspectives that create unique dialogues between Brecht and important thinkers such as Althusser, Anders, Bakhtin, Benjamin, Godard, Marx, and Plato. While exploring salient topics such as consciousness, courage, ethics, political aesthetics, and representations of race and the body, it penetrates the philosophical Brecht seeing in him the never-ending dialectic-the idea, the theory, the narrative, the character that is never foreclosed. This book is an essential read for all those interested in Brecht as a socio-cultural theorist and for theatre practitioners.