Engaging with Brecht

Engaging with Brecht
Author: Bill Gelber
Publisher: Springer Nature
Total Pages: 275
Release: 2023-02-14
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 3031203941

This book makes the case for Bertolt Brecht’s continued importance at a time when events of the 21st century cry out for a studied means of producing theatre for social change. Here is a unique step-by-step process for realizing Brecht’s ways of working onstage using the 2015 Texas Tech University production of Brecht’s Mother Courage and Her Children as a model for exploration. Particular Brecht concepts—the epic, Verfremdung, the Fabel, gestus, historicization, literarization, the “Not...but,” Arrangement, and the Separation of the Elements—are explained and applied to scenes and plays. Brecht’s complicated relationship with Konstantin Stanislavsky is also explored in relation to their separate views on acting. For theatrical practitioners and educators, this volume is a record of pedagogical engagement, an empirical study of Brecht’s work in performance at a higher institution of learning using graduate and undergraduate students.

Engaging with Brecht

Engaging with Brecht
Author: Bill Gelber
Publisher:
Total Pages: 256
Release:
Genre: Electronic books
ISBN: 9781350043312

This book provides readers with a practical examination of the work of theorist, playwright, director, and poet, Bertolt Brecht. It offers fresh approaches to theatre professionals seeking new tools for analysis, staging methods, means of collaborating with production teams and ways of politically engaging with society. Engaging with Brecht: Making Theatre in the 21st Century is an essential volume for instructors, scholars and theatre artists, containing lucid explanations and modern examples of Brecht's concepts. Featuring a wide variety of hands-on exercises, it illuminates Brecht's methods for the classroom and the rehearsal hall, equipping readers with tried and tested approaches to theatrical creation. Brecht's wide-ranging interests are reflected in the model for an interdisciplinary course of study that encompasses theatre history, playwriting, dramaturgy, design, acting, and directing. Rather than serving as a prescriptive manual, Engaging with Brecht allows the teacher, student, and theatre practitioner to experiment with the various methods provided in order to realize their own aims in instruction and production, revealing the continued importance and relevance of Brecht's work in today's world. The book offers new examples of and uses for such important Brechtian concepts as Verfremdung, Haltung, Arrangement, Gestus, Historicization, and Figure and applies them to work in the classroom and on stage in order to rethink our analysis and presentation of both classic and new plays.

Brecht in Practice

Brecht in Practice
Author: David Barnett
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Total Pages: 256
Release: 2014-11-20
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 1408186020

David Barnett invites readers, students and theatre-makers to discover new ways of apprehending and making use of Brecht in this clear and accessible study of Brecht's theories and practices. The book analyses how Brecht's ideas can come alive in rehearsal and performance, and reveals just how carefully Brecht realized his vision of a politicized, interventionist theatre. What emerges is a nuanced understanding of Brecht's concepts, his work with actors and his approaches to directing. The reader is encouraged to engage with his method which sought to 'make theatre politically', in order to appreciate the innovations he introduced into his stagecraft. Barnett provides many examples of how Brecht's ideas can be staged, and the final chapter takes a closer look at two very different plays: one written by Brecht and one by a playwright with no acknowledged connection to Brecht. Through an interrogation of The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui and Patrick Marber's Closer, Barnett asks how a Brechtian approach can enliven and illuminate production.

Bertolt Brecht in Context

Bertolt Brecht in Context
Author: Stephen Brockmann
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 676
Release: 2021-06-10
Genre: Drama
ISBN: 1108634141

Bertolt Brecht in Context examines Brecht's significance and contributions as a writer and the most influential playwright of the twentieth century. It explores the specific context from which he emerged in imperial Germany during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, as well as Brecht's response to the turbulent German history of the twentieth century: World Wars One and Two, the Weimar Republic, the Nazi dictatorship, the experience of exile, and ultimately the division of Germany into two competing political blocs divided by the postwar Iron Curtain. Throughout this turbulence, and in spite of it, Brecht managed to remain extraordinarily productive, revolutionizing the theater of the twentieth century and developing a new approach to language and performance. Because of his unparalleled radicalism and influence, Brecht remains controversial to this day. This book – with a Foreword by Mark Ravenhill – lays out in clear and accessible language the shape of Brecht's contribution and the reasons for his ongoing influence.

After Brecht

After Brecht
Author: Janelle G. Reinelt
Publisher: University of Michigan Press
Total Pages: 250
Release: 1994
Genre: Drama
ISBN: 9780472084081

How contemporary British political theater has evolved and expanded from the legacy of Bertolt Brecht

The Partnership

The Partnership
Author: Pamela Katz
Publisher: Anchor
Total Pages: 498
Release: 2015-12-08
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 0307744167

This fascinating portrait of two of the most brilliant theater artists of the twentieth century—and the women who made their work possible—is set against the explosive years of the Weimar Republic. Among the most outsized personalities of the sizzling, decadent period between the Great War and the Nazis’ rise to power were the renegade poet Bertolt Brecht and the avant-garde composer Kurt Weill. These two young geniuses and the three women vital to their work—actresses Lotte Lenya and Helene Weigel and writer Elisabeth Hauptmann—joined talents to create the theatrical masterworks The Threepenny Opera and The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny, only to split in rancor as their culture cracked open and their differences became irreconcilable. The Partnership is the first book to tell the full story of one of the most important creative collaborations of the last century, and the first to give full credit to the women who contributed their enormous gifts. Theirs is a thrilling story of artistic daring entwined with sexual freedom during the Weimar Republic’s most fevered years, a time when art and politics and society were inextricably mixed.

Brecht and the Writer's Workshop

Brecht and the Writer's Workshop
Author: Bertolt Brecht
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Total Pages: 399
Release: 2019-01-10
Genre: Drama
ISBN: 1474273297

Brecht was never inclined to see any of his plays as completely finished, and this volume collects some of the most important theatrical projects and fragments that were always to remain 'works in progress'. Offering an invaluable insight into the writer's working methods and practices, the collection features the famous Fatzer as well as The Bread Store and Judith of Shimoda, along with other texts that have never before been available in English. Alongside the familiar, 'completed' plays, Brecht worked on many ideas and plans which he never managed to work up even once for print or stage. In pieces like Fleischhacker, Garbe/Büsching and Jacob Trotalong we see how such projects were abandoned or interrupted or became proving grounds for ideas and techniques. The works collated here span over thirty years and allow the reader to follow Brecht's creative process as he constantly revised his work to engage with new contexts. This treasure-trove of new discoveries is also annotated with dramaturgical notes to present readable and useable texts for the theatre. The volume is edited by Tom Kuhn and Charlotte Ryland, with the translation and dramaturgical edition of each play provided by a team of experienced writers, scholars and translators.

Brecht On Art And Politics

Brecht On Art And Politics
Author: Bertolt Brecht
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Total Pages: 421
Release: 2015-04-06
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1474243347

This volume contains new translations to extend our image of one of the twentieth century's most entertaining and thought provoking writers on culture, aesthetics and politics. Here are a cross-section of Brecht's wide-ranging thoughts which offer us an extraordinary window onto the concerns of a modern world in four decades of economic and political disorder. The book is designed to give wider access to the experience of a dynamic intellect, radically engaged with social, political and cultural processes. Each section begins with a short essay by the editors introducing and summarising Brecht's thought in the relevant year.

Brecht at the Opera

Brecht at the Opera
Author: Joy H. Calico
Publisher: University of California Press
Total Pages: 300
Release: 2019-10-22
Genre: Music
ISBN: 0520314263

From an award-winning author, the first thorough examination of the important influence of opera on Brecht’s writings. Brecht at the Opera looks at the German playwright's lifelong ambivalent engagement with opera. An ardent opera lover in his youth, Brecht later denounced the genre as decadent and irrelevant to modern society even as he continued to work on opera projects throughout his career. He completed three operas and attempted two dozen more with composers such as Kurt Weill, Paul Hindemith, Hanns Eisler, and Paul Dessau. Joy H. Calico argues that Brecht's simultaneous work on opera and Lehrstück in the 1920s generated the new concept of audience experience that would come to define epic theater, and that his revisions to the theory of Gestus in the mid-1930s are reminiscent of nineteenth-century opera performance practices of mimesis.

Brecht and Tragedy

Brecht and Tragedy
Author: Martin Revermann
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 491
Release: 2021-12-16
Genre: History
ISBN: 1108808085

This wide-ranging, detailed and engaging study of Brecht's complex relationship with Greek tragedy and tragic tradition argues that this is fundamental for understanding his radicalism. Featuring an extensive discussion of The Antigone of Sophocles (1948) and further related works (the Antigone model book and the Small Organon for the Theatre), this monograph includes the first-ever publication of the complete set of colour photographs taken by Ruth Berlau. This is complemented by comparatist explorations of many of Brecht's own plays as his experiments with tragedy conceptualized as the 'big form'. The significance for Brecht of the Greek tragic tradition is positioned in relation to other formative influences on his work (Asian theatre, Naturalism, comedy, Schiller and Shakespeare). Brecht emerges as a theatre artist of enormous range and creativity, who has succeeded in re-shaping and re-energizing tragedy and has carved paths for its continued artistic and political relevance.