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From Aesthetics to History: Brecht’s Encounter with Mei Lanfang and Gestural Theater
- Edited by Markus Wessendorf
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- Book:
- The Brecht Yearbook / Das Brecht-Jahrbuch 45
- Published by:
- Boydell & Brewer
- Published online:
- 09 February 2021
- Print publication:
- 20 November 2020, pp 116-131
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We can only recognize what we already know, but what we know must change in order to become recognizable. This insight from G. W. F. Hegel addresses the philosophical imperative to perceive reality truthfully instead of habitually. The familiar cannot be recognized because it is familiar and thus is perceived to be under the control of the subject—albeit that's a delusion. In the Phenomenology of Spirit Hegel asserts that subjective consciousness is guided by familiar views that manifest themselves in what he calls “festgewordene Bestimmungen,” hardened stipulations that produce false certainties which block doubt and lead one to ignore alternatives. At present, political cultures all over the globe seem to be affected by hardened stipulations and false certainties. The Brecht Symposium preceding the most recent one in Leipzig began in Oxford the day after the Brexit vote, and I vividly remember encountering students at St. Hugh's in a state of complete shock about the outcome. It took just a few months for the unexpected to arrive in the US with the election of Donald Trump as president. The unpredictability of these political shifts is rooted in what Matthew Goodwin and Eric Kaufmann call “immigration attitudes of individuals,” which have come to gradually dominate political decision making of growing parts of the electorate, but which are rarely communicated openly.
“Brecht Among Strangers” as the topic for the 2019 Leipzig Symposium sought to explore this problem in the context of Germany today as well as Brecht's situation between 1933 and 1945, when German National Socialism forced millions into exile. Brecht was one among those exiles, and living among strangers affected his theater work and philosophical outlook. Although Brecht had to abandon his experimental theater practice, such as the teaching plays, when leaving Germany, his encounter with the Chinese actor Mei Lanfang caused him to reflect in more complex ways on gesture as an essential element of his theater. Early on he established gestural acting as a key element for defamiliarization. However, Brecht used the term Verfremdung for the first time in 1936 in his essay “Verfremdung in der chinesischen Schauspielkunst” (“Verfremdung Effects in Chinese Acting”).
Milena Massalongo, Florian Vaßen Und Bernd Ruping (Hrsg.). Brecht Gebrauchen: Theater Und Lehrstück—Texte Und Methoden Lingener Beiträge Zur Theaterpädagogik, Band XV. Berlin: Schibri-Verlag, 2016. 436 Pages.
- Edited by Markus Wessendorf
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- Book:
- The Brecht Yearbook / Das Brecht-Jahrbuch 43
- Published by:
- Boydell & Brewer
- Published online:
- 28 October 2020
- Print publication:
- 15 October 2018, pp 326-330
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Brecht gebrauchen (To Use Brecht) is a hefty compilation of essays and conversations that comes out of a four-day conference on Brecht's Lehrstücke at the Villa Vigoni, a German-Italian center for European excellence, in March of 2015. The closely defined topic and the length of the conference allowed the nineteen participants to present their individual research and discuss the Lehrstücke with a rare attention to detail, doing justice to what the editors call “Vielfalt des Materials” (“diversity of materials”). The book is divided into longer essays and transcriptions of conversations and discussions, which create what the editors call a “dialogical structure.”
The diverse contributions begin with Florian Vaßen's theses on “Brecht's Lehrstückkonzeption” (“Brecht's concept of the learning play”) designed to introduce the conversations at the Villa Vigoni. One thesis states that the concept of the Lehrstück serves “zunehmend als Modell für sehr unterschiedliche Theaterformen” (“increasingly as a model for very different theater forms”) (3), something that numerous papers and discussions in this volume support. Thomas Martin contributes a portrait of the late Brecht and his fight for a different theater, a theater as a “kleine wendige Kampfform” (“small versatile method of struggle”) that can effectively tackle questions of everyday life. Vaßen's essay on “Lehrstück und Alterität” (“learning play and alterity”) reads the Lehrstücke as learning plays and concentrates on “Selbstverständigung, Fremdheitserfahrung und pluralisierte Identität” (“self-understanding, experience of foreignness, and pluralized identity”) (51). Milena Massalongo's first of two substantial essays analyze how Brecht's concept of the Lehrstück is directed against the abstract participation of a general audience and instead seeks an “Einbruch in den Lebenszusammenhang” (“incursion into the life context”), to destroy the “Schein von Emanzipation” (“appearance of emancipation”) (60), which works to overcome the separation of abstract thought and Life.
Inherent Estrangement: Brecht’s Reading of Shakespeare’s Tragedies
- Edited by Tom Kuhn, David Barnett, Theodore F. Rippey
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- Book:
- The Brecht Yearbook / Das Brecht-Jahrbuch 42
- Published by:
- Boydell & Brewer
- Published online:
- 09 April 2021
- Print publication:
- 15 March 2018, pp 21-34
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Some see Shakespeare's tragedies as an aesthetic response to bad politics. This might have been part of what attracted Brecht to Shakespeare and to tragedy. Brecht turned to Shakespeare on and off during his career, as numerous and mostly short notes attest. But there were times when Brecht's studies of Shakespeare intensified, and these were times when Brecht struggled with how his own theater could respond to extreme changes in German politics. Shakespeare's approach to theater disrupts the tragic representation of historical narratives. Brecht detected elements of Verfremdung in this aspect of Shakespeare's tragedies and sought to recycle these components in his most experimental theater and in his own staging of Greek tragedy.
To illustrate this I will concentrate on two examples of Brecht's reception of Shakespeare: his notes on Macbeth in 1927 and his reading of Hamlet in 1948. In 1927 Brecht was writing the second phase of his Fatzer fragment, a play about four World War I soldiers who, under the guidance of Johann Fatzer, desert from the German army and attempt to live collectively in hiding while waiting for a revolution that they expect to end the war. In 1948 Brecht turned to Hamlet when he was directing his Antigone des Sophokles, to which he added a new prelude about two sisters who find out that their only brother has deserted from the German army and is about to be hanged by the SS. During the Weimar Republic, while working on Fatzer and again after World War II, while working on Antigone, Brecht turned to Shakespeare's tragedies to work through the political situations he found himself in. He studied and used tragedy to engage with contemporary history in ways that allowed him to hold onto the critical distance of epic theater, but still engage with violent aspects of history.
It was less Brecht, however, than Heiner Müller who turned to Shakespeare's tragedies in order to come to terms with irrational implications of historical events. Müller turned to Shakespeare in order to counter what he calls “Vereinfachung in Brecht” (simplification in Brecht). Like Brecht, Müller worked with Macbeth and with Hamlet. He also created a stage version out of Brecht's Fatzer fragment, and he wrote his own version of Macbeth.
Tragedy Out of Joint: Bertolt Brecht's and Heiner Müller's Interactions with a Genre
- from New Brecht Research
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- By Astrid Oesmann, Modern theater and performance studies
- Edited by Theodore F. Rippey
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- Book:
- The Brecht Yearbook / Das Brecht-Jahrbuch 39
- Published by:
- Boydell & Brewer
- Published online:
- 24 October 2017
- Print publication:
- 15 March 2016, pp 168-186
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In his book Sweet Violence, Terry Eagleton examines the discomfort exhibited by the Left when it comes to tragedy as a theatrical genre and worldview. Conventional Aristotelian poetics presents tragedy as an elevated art form that focuses on individual heroism and despair and as such offers little to a view of history as class struggle or to a vision of theatrical art that highlights rational, or in Marxian terms, scientific understandings of the human condition. In keeping with that argument, Patrice Pavis maintains that historical perspective and tragedy are mutually exclusive: “When a historical backdrop is glimpsed behind the destiny of the tragic hero, the play ceases to be a tragedy of the individual and takes on the objectivity of historical analysis.” In other words, conflict, or history, is negotiable, but catastrophe, or tragedy, is not. Brecht is often seen to represent this view of tragedy, advocating a theater of critical distance, disruption, and retrospection. This is certainly what critics have in mind when they consider Epic Theater as the end of tragedy in which the historical parable creates distance, insight, and critique instead of catharsis. However, this misses an important point in Brecht's theater and theoretical approach, because rather than dismissing tragedy, he seeks to reach an unconventional interaction with the genre based on critical distance.
In this way Brecht seems to have anticipated Eagleton's invocation of a tragic component in critical thought. Eagleton observes that tragedy's elements have migrated from literary text into literary theory, where they are used as a “cultural signifier…a fertile source of ultimate value or form of counter-Enlightenment.” Both Nietzsche's and Freud's critiques of Enlightenment, to name just two examples, insist on the presence of carnal drives that determine and disrupt rational projects, drives that they explicitly link to their readings of ancient tragedy. Freud sees the entire project of civilization as tragedy. In George Steiner's words: “More pliant divorce laws could not alter the fate of Agamemnon; social psychiatry is no answer to Oedipus.” Tragedy confronts us with the futility of human attempts to produce progress in accordance with moral principles and rational insights, a position that can be found with equal emphasis in critical theory.