The Wardrobe Project (Week 5)

We began the week looking at Brecht and how different his ideas were from Stanislavski, for the biggest difference is the style which is Epic Theatre, which is Brecht, and Dramatic Theatre, who Stanislavski is seen as a key practitioner for.

 

"Epic Theatre"



Brecht in 1946

Epic Theatre looks at the narrative or storytelling, and it turns the spectator of the show, the audience, into an observer, which makes the audience an outsider from the show so they are able to study it, this can arouse capacity for action. The production creates problems which is not solved in the show, and therefore leaves the audience forced to make the decision for themselves, as they spend the whole show studying the moves and decisions that the characters make. Epic theatre is montage of key moments in the characters, which isn't linear is curves and jumps through time.

After college I did some more research, so that I could understand it more and also to pick up anything I had missed or forgotten. From this I had learnt that,

"Brecht’s goal of creating an epic theatre was closely linked to his political commitment to Marxism. Brecht became drawn to communism around 1926 and proclaimed himself a Marxist in 1928." (1) 

I has also learnt that Brecht used music in order to distance the audience from the plot, which was an aspect of his theory of "Epic Theatre", which he contrasted in 1930 with "Dramatic Theatre" in the program notes for "The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny". The nineteen contrasts he outlined involve many of Aristotle's elements of the theatre.

 

Many people were concerned with the competition between feeling and reason, others were concerned with the plot and how unlike most theatre being linear, "Epic Theatre" was not continuous through time, in fact they were worried about the shows stories being discontinuous, jumping, weaving and curving through time, instead of it being stuck to the of time flowing through perfectly. Brecht saw his characters as alterable, and able to be altered because he said,

"“the human being is the object of inquiry,” and “he is alterable and able to alter.”" (2)   

The Greek word for actor is hypocrites, and there is a great deal of anxiety in modern drama about hypocrisy, the pretence to be someone other than who one really is. Brecht's solution to the actor's potential hypocrisy, was to ensure that the actor was always aware of, and to make audiences aware of, the distance between the actor and the role.

Essentially the term "Epic Theatre" refers to episodic theatre, where the audience is not given incremental storyline, but they are given one that build up in the most usual narrative manner. Instead the audience see a series of possibly unconnected scenes.
 

Brecht was also interested in Chinese and Japanese acting styles, which were not mimetic, which is the imitative representation of nature and human behaviour in art and literature. Or naturalistic, which refers to theatre that tries to create a perfect illusion of reality by the use of a range of dramatic and theatrical strategies. He was interested in these because they were not like traditional western acting styles around the time.