Engaging with Brecht
Engaging with Brecht

Author: Bill Gelber

Publisher: Springer Nature

Published: 2023-02-14

Total Pages: 275

ISBN-13: 3031203941

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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:

Published: 2023

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9783031203954

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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. Bill Gelber is a Professor of Theatre in Acting, Directing, and Pedagogy at Texas Tech University, USA. He has been published in the Brecht Yearbook, Communications of the International Brecht Society, Southern Theatre, Texas Theatre Journal, and Early Modern Literary Studies and was recently inducted into the Texas Tech Teaching Academy. .

Engaging with Brecht
Engaging with Brecht

Author: Bill Gelber

Publisher:

Published:

Total Pages: 256

ISBN-13: 9781350043312

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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

Published: 2014-11-20

Total Pages: 256

ISBN-13: 1408186020

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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.

Brecht on Theatre
Brecht on Theatre

Author: Bertolt Brecht

Publisher: Macmillan

Published: 1964

Total Pages: 346

ISBN-13: 0809005425

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Essays of Brecht translated and edited to explain his theories and discussion of his dramatic works.

After Brecht
After Brecht

Author: Janelle G. Reinelt

Publisher: University of Michigan Press

Published: 1994

Total Pages: 250

ISBN-13: 9780472084081

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

Brecht and Tragedy
Brecht and Tragedy

Author: Martin Revermann

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2021-12-16

Total Pages: 491

ISBN-13: 1108489680

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Explores Brecht's complex relationship with Greek tragedy and the tragic tradition, including significant archival material not seen before.

Bertolt Brecht in Context
Bertolt Brecht in Context

Author: Stephen Brockmann

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2021-06-10

Total Pages: 676

ISBN-13: 1108634141

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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.

Brecht at the Opera
Brecht at the Opera

Author: Joy H. Calico

Publisher: University of California Press

Published: 2019-10-22

Total Pages: 300

ISBN-13: 0520314263

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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.

The Partnership
The Partnership

Author: Pamela Katz

Publisher: Anchor

Published: 2015-12-08

Total Pages: 498

ISBN-13: 0307744167

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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.