Brecht Continued

● Brecht
● As Hitler was rising in Germany there was a foil of
Comparing Dramatic vs. Epic Theatre
● This separation forms the basis of the technical innovations Brecht
● Dramatic Theatre is here defined as it was in Aristotle’s Poetics → this is the bourgeois
theatre Brecht rails against, the naturalist movement and realist genre, a theatre of
emotion and illusion
○ Genre → created by formal and content-related traits, realism is a genre w/
psychological complexity,
● Brecht saw this dramatic theatre of linearity with realism’s hypnotic dramatic form
● Because you can be so lulled/invested in it
● The apparatus discourages work that encourages you to be critical of it, it wants to pacify
and entertain
● The critique of the apparatus is that it teaches people what it is they should want
● Dramatic theatre is linked to late capitalism and corporatism, linked to a kind of
brainwashing
● Teaches you how to see and look at the social system you exist in by presenting a
foreign state/system for you to practice with
● Brecht is teaching you to look at your own social system by showing you an alternative
world
● Epic theatre techniques are used all the time now, they have been co-opted by the
capitalist system
● The epic theatre has the dramatic in it, they exist in dialectic, one cannot separate them
entirely
● Focus on Narrative over PLot → a plot unfolds in front of you while a narrator tells the
story to you → Brecht wants you to hear the tale instead of watching the story lived
through
● The actor does not fuse with the character → they stand next to each other
● Gestus → actor’s relationship to the character through a physical sign that points to what
direction to look at that character
● The slient scream, just a moment to make you think about her pain in relation to
everything else
● A Gestus can break the emotional identification of the actor and character → reminds
you actor is not the character and that you are watching commentary, draw attention to
their social position
● Restaged the ending so it was less emotional, didn’t want peo
● Not just the text but how the text is represented
● Doesn’t want you to have no emotion, rather some emotion that is disrupted
Alienation and the Epic Theatre
● Alienation/Distanciation/Estrangement/Verfremdungseffekt → doing something on stage
that makes something “off” and forces the viewer to see more closely its essence b
 ● “To make a stone stonier” → do it in such a way that it both looks like a stone and yet is
somehow off
● Like when you look in the mirror for a really long time and you start to look different to
yourself, or when you say a word over and over and over again
● The techniques of the Epic Theatre produce alienation
● Either making the strange familiar or the familiar strange
○ E.g. a piece that seems naturalist and
Chinese Opera and Brecht
● Actors are very presentational and learn gestures → symbolic of a feeling
● It’s totally emotion when it’s your vocabulary… but Brecht is a German in Russia
watching Chinese Opera
● Note the moments in the text when you are surprised
● Phase of rehearsal like naturalism, playing the character psychologically
● Really hard to explain if you can’t see… but the actor is