"Lara Stevens, 'Anti-War Theatre After Brecht' (2016) [review essay]" (original) (raw)
Journal of Contemporary Drama in English, 2018
In her compelling study, Lara Stevens combines two key strands of discussion in contemporary drama which have received increasing attention in theatre criticism lately: the question of how theatre and performance engage with and protest against the 'War on Terror' on the one hand and the relevance of Brechtian epic theatre for twenty-first-century political theatre on the other. Interested in particular in "how contemporary anti-war plays work to influence spectator responses to the violence of war after the terrorist attacks of 9/11" (1) and with a considerable personal investment in the topic, aiming "to understand how deeply I [as a Western subject from an allied nation] was implicated in these conflicts" (1), Stevens examines the role of theatre as a locus of resistance where alternative spaces and perspectives can be created "outside the normative and highly controlled frames of the mainstream media" (2). Integral to the book's investigations and to its understanding of political theatre is Bertolt Brecht, whose model of epic theatre is fruitfully brought into dialogue with the political and philosophical conditions of a post-Marxist, globalised and postmodern world in order to shed light on theas Stevens convincingly arguessignificant value of Brecht's ideas for the contemporary stage.
On the Need to Revisit the Anti-War Literature of Brecht and Owen Today
Youth Ki Awaaz, 2023
The 21st century, fundamentally speaking, is the age of the rise of the individual. It has been caused, to a certain extent, by the democratization and empowerment of social media that has led to our being conditioned, regularly, to the capitalist idea of brand value, which teaches us to worship person over work. It is, in part, because of this that we are now witnessing, globally, an ever-increasing amount of influence, dominance, and power arrogated in the hands of celebrity-like individuals rather than collectives.
Image Narrative, 2015
If there is a book that invites re-appropriation, it is Bertolt Brecht's relatively little known War Primer (1955), composed of photographs clipped from daily press accompanied by enigmatic epigrams. In a witty act of mimicry, the artist duo Adam Broomberg and Oliver Chanarin composed War Primer 2 (2011) by superimposing a heterogeneous selection of images pertaining to the so-called War on Terror onto the original pages of Brecht's book. By focusing on images in which the photographic act is made the explicit theme of the photograph, their book reflects on practices of making and disseminating images of violence. On the one hand, War Primer 2 aims to disrupt the firmly entrenched imaginative geographies of the War on Terror. On the other, it casts a different light on the performative character of photographic imagery. The confrontation of the two photographic collections seems to suggest that there is still much to be learned from the current traffic in images. Résumé: S'il y a bien un livre qui invite à la réappropriation, c'est le relativement méconnu War Primer (1955) de Bertolt Brecht, composé de photographies découpées dans des quotidiens et accompagnées d'épigrammes énigmatiques. Dans une démarche d'imitation pleine d'esprit, le duo d'artistes Adam Broomberg et Olivier Chanarin réalisèrent War Primer 2 (2011) en superposant aux pages originales du livre de Brecht une sélection hétérogène d'images se rapportant à la guerre contre le terrorisme. En se concentrant sur des images dans lesquelles l'acte photographique devient explicitement le thème de la photographie, leur livre réfléchit sur les pratiques de production et de propagation des images de la violence. D'une part, War Primer 2 a pour but de perturber nos géographies imaginaires de la guerre contre le terrorisme qui sont fermement enracinées. D'autre part, l'oeuvre jette un éclairage différent sur le caractère performatif de l'imagerie photographique. La rencontre des deux collections de photographies semble suggérer qu'il y a toujours plus à apprendre de la circulation actuelle des images.
The War Mentality and The Brechtian Legacy
Theatrical Colloquia
The present article aims to illustrate the way in which the two world wars and their socio-political effects have produced significant changes in the collective consciousness and in the means of perceiving and constructing the Brechtian aesthetics. Starting from the idea that the entire work of the German playwright can be interpreted as being under the influence of social crises, the stake of this article is to briefly present a few elements on which the cultural heritage, that we can encounter today in the area of the postdramatic theatre, was based on. Whether we are speaking about the new British, German, American or Romanian dramaturgy, or about documentary theatre artists, - who, along with their involvement in the stage process, also play an important social function -, this heritage has an essential part in the development of the spectators’ critical thinking; it also represents the essence of the direct communication between stage and audience.
BRECHT'S "MOTHER COURAGE" AS A CRITIQUE OF WAR AND RELIGION.
This paper examines Brecht's Mother Courage and her Children as a critique of the twin concepts of War and Religion as he artistically portrayed them in the play. In doing so, I draw from Brecht's social background, especially from the fact that he was a self-confessed Marxist. His readings of the works of Karl Marx have greatly influenced his ideological as well as political beliefs. The paper also examines how he employed his theoretical concept of alienation to critique the phenomenon of war and its relationship with religion. The paper concludes with a summation of Brecht's attitude towards both war and religion and its implication to the new millennium.
Brecht's antitheatricality? Reflections on Brecht's place in Michael Fried's conceptual framework
'50 Years of Art and Objecthood: Traces, Impact, Critique', Special issue of Journal of Visual Culture, ed. by Alison Green and Joane Morra , 2017
In ‘Art and Objecthood’ (1967), Michael Fried articulates an uncompromising rejection of the theatre. His critique reaches as far as to expel the theatre from the realm of the arts and excludes it from the Modernist project. However, he exempts two theatre vanguardists from his argument, Bertolt Brecht and Antonin Artaud, who in his view developed anti-theatrical strategies as part of their aspirations to reform the theatre. This article examines whether Fried’s inclusion of Brecht into his anti-theatrical paradigm was justified or whether it was mere appropriation. It furthermore probes into Fried’s category of anti-theatricality within the conceptual framework of Brecht’s dramaturgical reflections and its validity as a key marker of Modernism.
Philosophizing Brecht: An Introduction for Dark Times
Philosophizing Brecht: Critical Readings on Art, Consciousness, Social Theory and Performance
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 Social and Political Philosophy of Bertolt Brecht
Bertolt Brecht is widely considered to be one of the most important figures in Twentieth Century literature. An acclaimed poet, he is best known as a playwright and director. His 'epic theatre' revolutionized the theatre by creating radical breaks from traditional literary and theatrical form. These radical breaks were done in an effort to facilitate radical social change. Specifically, Brecht designed his epic theatre as a revolutionary aesthetic which would help bring about the advent of a Marxist revolution. There is a broad corpus of academic work which analyzes the formalistic elements of his work. However, this body of work has been severely limited by a formalistic understanding of Brecht's thought and work and neglects his unique philosophical contributions to Marxism. This dissertation serves to remedy this by reconstructing Brecht's social and political philosophy into a single theoretical framework. In doing this, the dissertation presents Brecht's thought in context of a revolutionary Marxist aesthetic and explores his vision of historical materialism, dialectic of enlightenment, social ontology, epistemological foundations and ethics, in an effort to reveal his relevance today. This is accomplished by meticulous readings of his theoretical writings and deep analysis of three of his plays, the Good Woman of Setzuan, Life of Galileo, and his adaption of Coriolanus.
After Brecht: the Impact (Effects, Affects) of Intermedial Theatre
Mettre en scène, 2008
This article addresses claims made about the impact of intermedial theatre with reference to examples of contemporary practice. In particular it makes references to Brecht in this context and differentiates between Brechtian politics and aesthetics. The professed aim of intermedial practitioners to dislocate the bearings of experiencers of their work and to afford new perceptions by means of a radical play between mediums appears to resonate, at the level of principles of composition, with Brecht’s “radical separation of the elements.” However, at the level of politics, Brecht’s drama sought a broader understanding of isolated individuals by inviting audiences to see their experience in connection with a total historical process. But, regarding the Marxist trajectory in which Brecht’s practice was located, the context changed markedly post-1968, and beyond recognition post-1989. The article thus proposes that a new formulation is required of the impacts of new perceptions elicited b...
Applying Brecht's Anti-Spectacular Approach to Staging Fascism
Dramaturgy and History: Staging the Archive, 2024
Written over the course of the 1930s, Bertolt Brecht’s Fear and Misery of the Third Reich (Furcht Und Elend Des Dritten Reiches) illustrates anti-spectacular dramaturgical approaches, understood as staging and narrative techniques that avoid the sensational in order to show that violence also lives ingrained in the fabric of our quotidian existence. These approaches—which range from anti-dramatic and anti-historiographical plot techniques to simple, but not simplistic staging strategies, to nonhierarchical work practices—can be adapted to twenty-first-century realities. This chapter uses the author’s work facilitating a 2021 high school production on teenage anxiety called Success (Jiangsu, China) to demonstrate tactical applications of Brechtian techniques. The anti-spectacular approach empowers participants by granting them the capacity to make choices, while also recognizing large-scale systemic forces.
Theater of Revolution and the Law of Genre-Bertolt Brecht's The Measures Taken (Die Maßnahme
Theater of Revolution and the Law of Genre—Bertolt Brecht's The Measures Taken (Die Maßnahme), 2009
It has been emphasized frequently that Bertolt Brecht's political theater, Die Maßnahme in particular, has been influenced by Carl Schmitt's theory of the sovereign and the state of exception. Although it is indeed remarkable that his learning play seems to record some of the concepts that, in Schmitt, belong to the categories of political theory, this article will return to the role and discourse of the theater in Brecht. The drama of revolution is a political text through and through, but it cannot separate the political from the theater; the drama of revolution is in search of a form, a metatheater, in which the overcoming of an order is first and foremost the attempt to suspend the law of genre. Strikingly, Brecht's learning play brings to the stage all the characteristics that have, since Aristotle, marked tragedy: the pity, the error of a hero, the hero's comprehension of the error, the guilt of an innocent man, the hero's death, the sacrifice, and catharsis. Brecht reproduces the law of the genre he wishes to supersede and entangles his figures in inescapable aporias that have dominated the metadiscourse on drama in revolutionary theater from Büchner's Danton's Tod to Heiner Müller's Mauser .
The Other in the Scene: on the Politics of Brechtian Form
2017
This talk was written in response to an invitation to speak to Utah Valley University's Honors Program students about my research. It is meant to provide students with a basic introduction to Bertolt Brecht's critique of Aristotelean / dramatic theatrical form (that is, it assumes no prior knowledge of the field). In telling them about Brecht's theatrical "revolution," my real aim was to introduce them to the concept of the politics of aesthetic form.
Brecht's interactions with Greek tragedy are central and illuminating indicators of his self-positioning relative to the Western theatre tradition that preceded him. Part of the appeal to Brecht is the status of Greek tragedy as a particularly prominent manifestation of Tragedy, a cultural universal with a distinct set of ideological assumptions (political, social, religious and philosophical) that Brecht opposed vigorously. Brecht's relationship with Greek tragedy, and Tragedy, is both dialogical and dialectical: he needed Greek theatre, both its theatrical product tragedy and the theorising that came with it in the form of Aristotle's Poetics, as vehicles for opposition. As a result, Brecht's reception of Greek tragedy is (characteristically) utilitarian. This article examines various key aspects of this relationship: Brecht's educational background and predisposition towards Graeco-Roman antiquity; his points of contact with Greek tragedy; the use of the mask, a fundamental device of the ancient theatre, in Brecht's work; his ambivalent response to tragic situations and suffering as exemplified in Helene Weigel's 'silent scream' as Mother Courage; and the important methodological distinction between 'genealogical' and 'functional' equivalence. I conclude by setting out why this topic is an important part of any project which attempts to 're-think Brecht'. Brechts Auseinandersetzungen mit der griechischen Tragödie sind zentrale und erhellende Indizien seiner Selbstpositionierung gegenüber der vorausgehenden westlichen Theatertradition. Ein Teil der Anziehungskraft kommt vom Status der griechischen Tragödie als einer besonders bekannten und ungewöhnlich exponierten Form von Tragödie im allgemeinen Sinn, d. h. einer universalen Kulturform mit einer Anzahl von speziellen ideologischen Annahmen (politisch, sozial, religiös und philosophisch), zu denen Brecht in völliger Opposition stand. Brechts Verhältnis zur griechischen Tragödie, und zur Tragödie im allgemeinen, ist dialogisch und dialektisch zugleich. Er benötigte das griechische Theater, sowohl dessen Produkt Tragödie als auch dessen Theorie in Form der aristotelischen Poetik, als Vehikel und Anlass zum Widerspruch. Infolgedessen ist Brechts Rezeption der griechischen Tragödie, wie nicht anders zu erwarten, utilitaristisch. Der Aufsatz untersucht folgende Aspekte des Themas: Brechts Bildungshintergrund und seine Grundeinstellung zur griechisch-römischen Antike; seine BerührungspunkteBer¨Berührungspunkte mit der griechischen Tragödie; den brechtschen Gebrauch der Maske, eines fundamentalen B ¨ uhnenmittels im antiken Theater; seine ambivalente Reaktion auf tragische Situationen und das daraus entstehende Leid, wie es am Beispiel des 'stillen Schreis' von Helene Weigel als Mutter Courage besonders deutlich hervortritt; und die wichtige methodische Unterscheidung zwischen 'genealogischer' und 'funktionaler' ¨ Aquivalenz. Im Schlussteil lege ich dar, warum
A 2009 Sydney Theatre Company production of Shakespeare’s history plays, The War of the Roses (dir. Benedict Andrews), could best be seen as a belated and divergent response to earlier, 1960s Brechtian and neo-Brechtian stagings of these plays as a cycle. I trace the relationship between pathos, sovereignty and sovereign violence from the original Shakespearean text and its contemporary contexts, through this Brechtian tradition and into the recent production. However, where a Brechtian intervention into the plays’ uses of pathos may have invited a materialist reading of their depictions of violence and political machinations, the Sydney production’s theoretical parameters were more closely related to Foucault’s and Agamben’s ‘‘biopolitics’’, in which sovereign authority is secured on the basis of the abject and suffering human body.
Ludic philosophy in Brechts drama and pr
The Brecht Yearbook, Vol. 42, 2018
This essay looks into ways Bertolt Brecht recycles and exploits what could be called “ludic thinking” mainly in his play Schweik in the Second World War (Schweyk im Zweiten Weltkrieg) and in his Stories of Mr. Keuner. The “ludic” is a significant term in that it does not denote something merely amusing, light, unserious, or escapist (“it is just a game”); it rather signifies a structure that through the categories of play, lightness, or amusement actually grasps seriousness, reality and ethics par excellence. In a three-step argument, I show the kind of ludic approach Brecht uses in his works in the frame of his practices of recycling.
REFLEXIVITY AS DIALECTICITY: THE BRECHTIAN DOCUMENTARY
TRAVERSES, la revue de film-documentaire.fr, 2017
Writing about Brecht in relation to the difficulties of visually representing abstractions, Fredric Jameson notes that the industrial labor-taken as "raw material" and a variable in the equation of capitalism as the subject of visual representation-constitutes "a stumbling block for which only documentary seems to offer a solution." (149) No sooner than this proposal is made of the documentary mode as an outlet for Brechtian representation, it is dismissed on account of Brecht's reservations about photographic realism, a property Jameson tacitly posits as innate to visual forms professing non-fictionality. In light of Brecht's statement that a hypothetical photo of the Krupp factory or the AEG does not make apparent any of those institutions' fundamental qualities-which Jameson cites to support his latter remark-it would appear that the unalterably photographic nature of the documentary film, with its inherent emphasis on the "here and now" of the pro-filmic event, indeed places it at odds with Brecht's broad artistic project of using the principle of dialectics to demonstrate that social phenomena are changeable, and exploring the mechanisms of that changeability. Yet Brecht's body of work offers ample evidence of a sustained interest in documents, understood as records of specific times and spaces: the texts on which the vast majority of his own literary output is based on or informed by; the time-textured props whose selection by Helene Weigel as part of her role-crafting process is celebrated in one of the dramaturgical poem; the textual and pictorial cutouts on which the War Primer poems are based. Moreover,