Bertolt Brecht never developed a “system” for actor training. Nevertheless, even though one cannot point to a “Brechtian” system of acting training, others have been inspired by his theory and practice to develop alternatives to the Stanislavsky-based systems of acting training that dominate the curricula at US universities and acting studios. This chapter traces some of the key ways in which a Brechtian approach to acting has made inroads into American actor training by focusing on the two systems of training that are most fully fleshed out as methodologies and also most consciously indebted to Brecht both aesthetically and politically – Boal’s “Theatre of the Oppressed” (TO),and “Viewpoints” training.

From the later 1920s, Brecht developed a Marxist critique of the theater apparatus and began to experiment on the margins of, and outside, commercial theater. It was not until after World War II, when he founded the Berliner Ensemble, that he finally had the opportunity to control the means of theatrical production. The Berliner Ensemble’s entire approach was underpinned by a holistic understanding of political theater. This extended from actor training to outreach activities with audiences, going far beyond the argument or subject matter of any individual play.

This article examines the relevance of Brecht’s ideas about theater and pedagogy for the contemporary university, suggesting that a Brechtian approach has the potential to liberate the way that we think about university education and the role of teachers, students, and administrators.Rather than accepting the world as static and given, a Brechtian approach to pedagogy can encourage and develop an active, student-centered approach.It can help to encourage students to create and take charge of their own meaning-making activities.Just as Brechtian theater insists on revolutionary change and invites audience participation, so, too, a Brechtian approach to pedagogy invites student participation and activity, turning over much of the responsibility for meaning-making to those who are seeking an education.This would constitute a revolutionary new way of looking at university education.

Comparative cross-disciplinary study shows how East Asian thought, theater, and poetry, while situating cultural analogies, helpedshape Brecht’s work. The narrative clarity anddistancing techniques of Japanese theater undercut superficial naturalism, and comparison with sophisticated, graceful Chinese theater later relativized his own. In Chinese philosophy he encountered witty discrimination, an estranging critique of virtues, dialectical social interrelations, a stimulating flow of things, focus on practical engagement, warnings (apropos Confucius) of accommodation with power and, in his crucial Me-ti, what he intimated to Korsch as an “anti-systematic … epic science” realized through individual productivity, not by a top-down imposed social order. East Asian imagination stimulated an unconventional aesthetics. In ethics, the social paradox of self-love would avoid turning people into “the servants of priests.” Even another global politics once briefly seemed conceivable, when China appeared to confront European Stalinism, but in the end that revolution disappointed as well.

Gestus remains an important but elusive concept in the scholarship on Brecht’s writings and continues to inform contemporary theater practices as well as new theories of performance and performativity. This article provides a brief overview of Brecht’s evolving definitions of Gestus, including in, and through, key plays and productions, followed by an assessment of the larger literary, political, and theoretical debates associated with Weimar theater, communist agitprop, and Marxist theory. Throughout, the productivity of Gestus as a concept and practice is reconstructed through its dialogic qualities, heuristic functions, and intertextual effects.

Heiner Müller is considered to be not only the most important playwright to emerge from the German Democratic Republic but also the East German playwright most heavily influenced by Bertolt Brecht.Müller “began where Brecht left off,” pushing further along the path of Brecht’s theatrical projects and theories and even taking up projects that had been left unfinished by Brecht himself.In the 1970s, with his “farewell to the learning play,” Müller seemed for a time to be distancing himself from his mentor.And yet the accusation of “literary patricide” sometimes made against him runs counter to the fact that Müller continued his interest in Brecht right up until his death in 1995.Since then, avant-garde theater artists have continued to honor the legacy of both playwrights.

This article argues that Brecht’s unique musicality as a poet led to a rich and rarely paralleled collaboration with musical composers. While the young Brecht sketched out his own music for his early poetry and songs, he soon turned to professional composers as partners. The article focuses on Brecht’s three major musical collaborators, Kurt Weill, Hanns Eisler, and Paul Dessau. In addition to the innovative works that Brecht created with these composers, they also stimulated important theoretical writings that led to new forms of opera, as in Brecht/Weill’s Mahagonny and The Threepenny Opera, or a revolutionary aesthetics of film music, as in Eisler/Adorno’s Composing for the Films, which is strongly influenced by Brecht.

This article examines the development of German-language Brecht editions, beginning with the first series of Brecht works, Versuche (1930–1933), which emphasized the experimental nature of Brecht’s work.This was followed by the the Gesammelte Werke (Collected Works, 1938) with the Malik Publishing Company, which served as a protective shield against Nazi efforts to wipe Brecht out.After World War II Brecht initiated a new publication, organized by genres, with Suhrkamp in 1953 and Aufbau in 1955.This edition was edited by Brecht’s collaborator Elisabeth Hauptmann and grew to encompass forty volumes.The 1967 Suhrkamp edition became particularly significant for spreading Brecht’s work among West German student radicals of the 1960s and 1970s.Finally, the most current and only real critical edition is the Berlin-Frankfurt edition (BFA, 1988–2000), which for the first time gives readers insight into the entirety of Brecht’s work.The edition of Brecht’s Notizbücher (notebooks), begun in 2010, is ongoing.The article explores how these editions got their start, how they were conceived, what they achieved, and what limitations they had. The most important question is the extent to which any static print edition of Brecht’s work can illuminate the living, changing processes of Brecht’s interests, methods, and approaches.

Brecht the theater theoretician is better described as the theater practitioner. His innovative concepts that have come to mark the modern theater were the product of his reflections on the experiments and lessons he learned from his collaborative work in the theater and on the stage. In short, Brecht’s staging practices ground the “Brechtian” approach to theater, even though he never articulated a formal acting method, sometimes contradicted himself, and rarely recommended that actors or theater practitioners with whom he worked read his theoretical writings. This essay traces the development of key concepts around notions of nonmimetic realism and anti-illusionary theater that fed into the epic theater as well as his views of anti-consumerist spectatorship, produced in the theater through episodic structure, distancing or Verfremdung, historicization, and the social Gestus. The centrality of contradiction and dialectical thinking became for Brecht the basis of negation and imagining innovative forms in the theater for his political agenda of changing society, most clearly accomplished in his model of the Lehrstück or learning play aimed at the collective learning process of the actors.

This chapter examines Brecht’s approach to film not as a mimetic means of reproducing reality but as an indexical means of producing reality. It considers key passages of “The Threepenny Trial” and several interwar fragments in order to elucidate Brecht’s distinction between actual and functional reality and to elaborate the concept of the cognitively capable masses, whose collective perception made recognition of actual reality possible. It then offers brief analyses of the key films Brecht worked on, Kuhle Wampe and Hangmen Also Die!, which provide examples of the strategies Brecht employed to bend film to his aims of modeling mass-based cognition and reality production. These attempts opposed industrial norms, cultural convention, and the regulatory force of the state. They succeeded infrequently if at all, as Brecht himself acutely realized. Assessing the success and failure of these experiments allows greater insight into the potential of the medium of film in the second quarter of the twentieth century and creates potentially useful points of comparison to the complex relationship between representational media and the networked production of reality in our own times.

This essay provides an overview of Brecht’s engagement with photography. His early fascination with the medium developed, in the context of the burgeoning illustrated media landscape and the German “New Photography,” into theoretical reflections in dialogue with Walter Benjamin and Siegfried Kracauer. He also began to use photography, especially press photography, in his own work: as a source for the analysis of social behavior and a way of fixing Gestus. In due course he became more and more sensitive to the politics of representation and employed photography directly and innovatively in his own works, the Journal and the “photoepigrams” of War Primer.

This article sets out to address some of the questions relating to translation/adaptation/“versions of versions of versions” (Simon Stephens), as exemplified in three recent productions of Brecht plays. Particular attention is paid to Stephens's “version” of The Threepenny Opera staged at the National Theatre in 2016. A similar approach to the translating of a major play text is also noticeable in two Australian productions of Brecht plays, where the “translator” also presumes to “improve” on the original author's staging, textual and characterization choices.

This article develops Brecht’s anti-metaphysical and materialist ethics through a close reading of “The Great Method,” a short text from his Me-ti that, in just three sentences, articulates a code of conduct for the revolutionary struggle. This article tries to show that even though “The Great Method” is based on the dialectics of Hegel, Marx, and Lenin, it also reflects Brecht’s interest in classical Chinese thought, in particular the Taoist notion of a subject’s full immersion in the situation requiring an ethical decision (Zhuangzi) and the assumption of an “efficacy that stems from disposition” (François Jullien), which, for example, underpins Brecht’s insistence on linguistic precision and use of modelbooks. This article also emphasizes the central role of production for Brecht’s ethics: “The Great Method” aims to unleash the human potential for productivity in all its forms, beyond capitalism, but is less interested in the production of things than in the production of change in things.

This essay outlines the semantic breadth and formal contours of Brecht’s early poetic experiments. For his Hauspostille (Domestic Breviary) collection (1927) Brecht pulled together those poems that he wrote between 1913 and 1925 as sharp protest against social tensions and frictions in the Weimar period. The title of his collection refers to Martin Luther’s “Postille” writings and their ritualized religious instructions. Brecht secularizes Luther’s religious agenda and poetic agitation when he categorizes his poems as Gebrauchslyrik (functional or everyday poetry). Their cynicism not only activates the reevaluation of classical literature and aesthetics, but more poignantly also the social norms, gender concepts, moral judgments and legal processes of bourgeois society. The essay argues that Brecht’s early poetic experiments model a cynical mindset that not only informs his anti-fascist satires in exile but also his later work as it set a standard for the twentieth-century modes of poetic and theatrical reflection in general.

This chapter argues that Brecht’s theories remain relevant for those who produce opera as well as those who study it, in both the Global North and South.Director Yuval Sharon’s stagings of canonical repertoire are instances of minor pedagogy, while the new operas he produces with his Los Angeles-based company The Industry are post-Brechtian. American Naomi André and South African Innocentia Jabulisile Mhlambi study the emergence of black South African opera. Mhlambi interprets Bongani Ndodani-Breen’s Winnie: The Opera (2011) through the lenses of Gestus and estrangement, which, I argue, positions Winnie: The Opera as major pedagogy.

This chapter examines Brecht’s complicated relationship with the German Democratic Republic and its leaders.In 1948, after the end of World War II, Brecht returned to Germany and ultimately settled in East Berlin in the GDR, where he became the artistic leader of the famous Berliner Ensemble, the most influential postwar theater group in the world. However, because of his revolutionary approach to drama and aesthetics, Brecht quickly ran into conflict with East German leaders and had to endure a series of criticisms and accusations against himself and his artistic collaborators. Brecht also sought to democratize and liberalize the artistic and cultural sphere of the GDR. Ultimately, Brecht’s relationship with socialist leaders in the GDR represented a push-pull and give-and-take. Each side had to compromise, and each side received something in return. Brecht received his own theater and the ability to perform plays as he wished, while the leaders of the GDR were able to bathe in the glory of Brecht’s international artistic success.