Theatre techniques facilitate presentation of performances by actors. Improvisational theatre techniques involve spontaneous enactments of stories on the spot.
Defamiliarization or ostranenie is the artistic technique of presenting to audiences common things in an unfamiliar or strange way so they could gain new perspectives and see the world differently. According to the Russian formalists who coined the term, it is the central concept of art and poetry. The concept has influenced 20th-century art and theory, ranging over movements including Dada, postmodernism, epic theatre, science fiction, and philosophy; additionally, it is used as a tactic by recent movements such as culture jamming.
Epic theatre is a theatrical movement that arose in the early to mid-20th century from the theories and practice of a number of theatre practitioners who respondedical climate of the time through the creation of new political dramas. Epic theatre is not meant to refer to the scale or the scope of the work, but rather to the form that it takes. Epic theatre emphasizes the audience's perspective and reaction to the piece through a variety of techniques that deliberately cause them to individually engage in a different way. The purpose of epic theatre is not to encourage an audience to suspend their disbelief, but rather to force them to see their world as it is.
Mother Courage and Her Children is a play written in 1939 by the German dramatist and poet Bertolt Brecht (1898–1956), with significant contributions from Margarete Steffin. Four theatrical productions were produced in Switzerland and Germany from 1941 to 1952, the last three supervised and/or directed by Brecht, who had returned to East Germany from the United States.
Experimental theatre, inspired largely by Wagner's concept of Gesamtkunstwerk, began in Western theatre in the late 19th century with Alfred Jarry and his Ubu plays as a rejection of both the age in particular and, in general, the dominant ways of writing and producing plays. The term has shifted over time as the mainstream theatre world has adopted many forms that were once considered radical.
Baal was the first full-length play written by the German modernist playwright Bertolt Brecht. It concerns a wastrel youth who becomes involved in several sexual affairs and at least one murder. It was written in 1918, when Brecht was a 20-year-old student at Munich University, in response to the expressionist drama The Loner by the soon-to-become-Nazi dramatist Hanns Johst.
Gestus is an acting technique developed by the German theatre practitioner Bertold Brecht. It carries the sense of a combination of physical gestures and "gist" or attitude. It is a means by which "an attitude or single aspect of an attitude" is revealed, insofar as it is "expressible in words or actions."
Drums in the Night is a play by the German playwright Bertolt Brecht. Brecht wrote it between 1919 and 1920, and it received its first theatrical production in 1922. It is in the Expressionist style of Ernst Toller and Georg Kaiser. The play—along with Baal and In the Jungle—won the Kleist Prize for 1922 ; the play was performed all over Germany as a result. Brecht later claimed that he had only written it as a source of income.
Man Equals Man, or A Man's a Man, is a play by the German modernist playwright Bertolt Brecht. One of Brecht's earlier works, it explores themes of war, human fungibility, and identity. One of the agitprop works inspired by the developments in USSR praising the bolshevik collectivism and replaceability of each member of the collective.
Aesthetic distance refers to the gap between a viewer's conscious reality and the fictional reality presented in a work of art. When a reader becomes fully engrossed in the illusory narrative world of a book, the author has achieved a close aesthetic distance. If the author then jars the reader from the reality of the story, essentially reminding the reader they are reading a book, the author is said to have "violated the aesthetic distance."
'Not / But, or the "not…but" element, is an acting technique that forms part of the Brechtian approach to performance. In its simplest form, fixing the not/but element involves the actor preceding each thought that is expressed by their character in the dialogue or each action performed by their character in the scene with its dialectical opposite. Rather than portraying a thought or action as "naturally" arising from the given circumstances of the scene or "inevitably" following from them, this technique underlines the aspect of decision in the thought or action. "He didn't say 'come in' but 'keep moving'", Brecht offers by way of example; "He was not pleased but amazed":
They include an expectation which is justified by experience but, in the event, disappointed. One might have thought that ... but one oughtn't to have thought it. There was not just one possibility but two; both are introduced, then the second one is defamiliarized, then the first as well.
Conceptualised by 20th century German director and theatre practitioner Bertolt Brecht (1898–1956), "The Modern Theatre Is the Epic Theatre" is a theoretical framework implemented by Brecht in the 1930s, which challenged and stretched dramaturgical norms in a postmodern style. This framework, written as a set of notes to accompany Brecht's satirical opera, ‘Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny’, explores the notion of "refunctioning" and the concept of the Separation of the Elements. This framework was most proficiently characterised by Brecht's nihilistic anti-bourgeois attitudes that “mirrored the profound societal and political turmoil of the Nazi uprising and post WW1 struggles”. Brecht's presentation of this theatrical structure adopts a style that is austere, utilitarian and remains instructional rather than systematically categorising itself as a form that is built towards a more entertaining and aesthetic lens. ‘The Modern Theatre Is the Epic Theatre’ incorporates early formulations of Brechtian conventions and techniques such as Gestus and the V-Effect. It employs an episodic arrangement rather than a traditional linear composition and encourages an audience to see the world as it is regardless of the context. The purpose of this new avant-garde outlook on theatrical performance aimed to “exhort the viewer to greater political vigilance, bringing the Marxist objective of a classless utopia closer to realisation”.
Mr Puntila and His Man Matti is an epic comedy by the German modernist playwright Bertolt Brecht. It was written in 1940 and first performed in 1948.
"A Short Organum for the Theatre" is a theoretical work by the twentieth-century German theatre practitioner Bertolt Brecht. It was written while in Switzerland in 1948 and published in 1949. In a diary note from the time he refers to it as a "short condensation of the 'Messingkauf'"; when it was re-published in 1953 he identified it as a "description of a theatre of the scientific age"; later still he augmented it with some appendices and linked it to his notes for a "dialectical theatre".
The Baden-Baden Lesson on Consent is a Lehrstück by the German dramatist Bertolt Brecht, written in collaboration with Slatan Dudow and Elisabeth Hauptmann. Under the title Lehrstück it was first performed, with music by Paul Hindemith, as part of the Baden-Baden festival on 28 July 1929, at the Stadthalle, Baden-Baden, directed by Brecht, designed by Heinz Porep.
Round Heads and Pointed Heads is an epic parable play written by the German dramatist Bertolt Brecht, in collaboration with Margarete Steffin, Emil Burri, Elisabeth Hauptmann, and the composer Hanns Eisler. The play's subtitle is Money Calls to Money and its authors describe it as "a tale of horror." The play is a satirical anti-Nazi parable about a fictitious country called Yahoo in which the rulers maintain their control by setting the people with round heads against those with pointed heads, thereby substituting racial relations for their antagonistic class relations. The play is composed of 11 scenes in prose and blank verse and 13 songs. Unlike another of Brecht's plays from this period, The Mother, Round Heads and Pointed Heads was addressed to a wide audience, Brecht suggested, and took account of "purely entertainment considerations." Brecht's notes on the play, written in 1936, contain the earliest theoretical application of his "defamiliarization" principle to his own "non-Aristotelian" drama.
Coriolanus is an unfinished German adaptation by the modernist playwright Bertolt Brecht of the English 17th-century tragedy of the same name by William Shakespeare. Brecht wrote it sometime between 1951 and 1953. This adaptation reveals the influence of Mao Zedong on Brecht's social thought especially the idea of primary and secondary contradictions which Mao discussed in his treatise On Contradiction. Brecht alluded to this text and discusses his development on the original and his ideas for its staging in an essay entitled "Study of the First Scene of Shakespeare's Coriolanus", which is written in the form of a dialogue with his collaborators at the Berliner Ensemble theatre company. The play was first staged by Heinrich Koch at the Frankfurt Schauspielhaus theatre, where it opened on 22 September 1962. It was later staged by the Berliner Ensemble in September 1964. Ruth Berghaus became famous for her staging of the battle scenes in this production. The play was published in an English translation by Ralph Manheim in volume nine of Brecht's Collected Plays.
Galileo is a 1975 biographical film about the 16th- and 17th-century scientist Galileo Galilei, whose astronomical observations with the newly invented telescope led to a profound conflict with the Roman Catholic Church. The film is an adaptation of Bertolt Brecht's 1943 play of the same name. The film was produced by Ely Landau for the American Film Theatre, which presented thirteen film adaptations of plays in the United States from 1973 to 1975. Brecht's play was recently called a "masterpiece" by veteran theater critic Michael Billington, as Martin Esslin had in 1960. The film's director, Joseph Losey, had also directed the first performances of the play in 1947 in the US — with Brecht's active participation. The film is fairly true to those first performances, and is thus of historical significance as well.
Eugen Berthold Friedrich Brecht, known as Bertolt Brecht and Bert Brecht, was a German theatre practitioner, playwright, and poet. Coming of age during the Weimar Republic, he had his first successes as a playwright in Munich and moved to Berlin in 1924, where he wrote The Threepenny Opera with Elisabeth Hauptmann and Kurt Weill and began a life-long collaboration with the composer Hanns Eisler. Immersed in Marxist thought during this period, Brecht wrote didactic Lehrstücke and became a leading theoretician of epic theatre and the Verfremdungseffekt.
Estrangement or Estranged may refer to:
