Brecht put the Epic in Epic Theatre
The title is misleading. It is true that Piscador did invent Epic theatre, but from my standpoint (and many others) it is Brecht that made it known. I first heard about Epic Theatre in my grade 12 drama class. We were actually studying The Threepenny Opera and I have grown to love it ever since. Brecht has become my favourite playwright over the last year because he is fresh and innovative. He believed there needed to be a new way of getting drama across in this new Weimar period, and therefore started what people would later term "Brechtian Alienation". This is the process of distancing the audience from the action going on onstage and destroying the "fourth wall" that theatre of the previous ages created. By changing the action onstage from song to drama to speaking directly to the audience and saying stage directions, Brecht successfully kept his audience's mind working throughout his plays to have them focus more on the thinking rather than the feeling.
Brecht did a whole lot more than just mess around with the dialogue to alienate his audience. He would show all the technical aspects of the show: things like the lights, the microphones and the speakers. He would eliminate the suspense of the scene by stopping before physical combat or when a death would occur. The plays he writes usually do not have a realistic historically accurate setting. He doesn't need it. He would also blatantly change the endings: in The Threepenny Opera he employs the use of a Deus Ex Machina (God in the Machine) to stop Macheath from being hanged. All these aspects help Brecht get his audience out of their "willing suspension of disbelief" and think.
*Our school has put on The Threepenny Opera a couple times in the past, but more recently two years ago. Check out the poster here at the Theatre @ York webpage.
Being a Theatre student, I can easily relate this back to the world of theatre, but so can anyone else because that's what Brecht did: theatre. So instead I will talk about a modern variation of it as I did with photomontage. Although this group of artists do not, I believe, consider themselves as using "Brechtian Alienation", their movies employ many of the same styles and methods of getting the point across. The group is none other then Monty Python. Take, for example, Monty Python and the Holy Grail. This movie, as well as all their other movies, break the action, the feeling, of the movie with cartoons (like the monster in the cave), or musical interludes (like the Camelot song), or something completely different (like an actual intermission or a llama). Their movies are satires and they want their audience to understand what they are satiring. Brecht's work can be viewed as satire as well: he always speaks out against the modern world, like how Mac the Knife in The Threepenny Opera for example is a representation of Hitler. Also, in The Holy Grail, they add in people from different time periods into the setting, like the reporters and the cops at the end. I highly recommend watching some of Monty Python's work.
Brecht did a whole lot more than just mess around with the dialogue to alienate his audience. He would show all the technical aspects of the show: things like the lights, the microphones and the speakers. He would eliminate the suspense of the scene by stopping before physical combat or when a death would occur. The plays he writes usually do not have a realistic historically accurate setting. He doesn't need it. He would also blatantly change the endings: in The Threepenny Opera he employs the use of a Deus Ex Machina (God in the Machine) to stop Macheath from being hanged. All these aspects help Brecht get his audience out of their "willing suspension of disbelief" and think.
*Our school has put on The Threepenny Opera a couple times in the past, but more recently two years ago. Check out the poster here at the Theatre @ York webpage.
Being a Theatre student, I can easily relate this back to the world of theatre, but so can anyone else because that's what Brecht did: theatre. So instead I will talk about a modern variation of it as I did with photomontage. Although this group of artists do not, I believe, consider themselves as using "Brechtian Alienation", their movies employ many of the same styles and methods of getting the point across. The group is none other then Monty Python. Take, for example, Monty Python and the Holy Grail. This movie, as well as all their other movies, break the action, the feeling, of the movie with cartoons (like the monster in the cave), or musical interludes (like the Camelot song), or something completely different (like an actual intermission or a llama). Their movies are satires and they want their audience to understand what they are satiring. Brecht's work can be viewed as satire as well: he always speaks out against the modern world, like how Mac the Knife in The Threepenny Opera for example is a representation of Hitler. Also, in The Holy Grail, they add in people from different time periods into the setting, like the reporters and the cops at the end. I highly recommend watching some of Monty Python's work.
posted by Andrew | 1:40 a.m.
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