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Gestus
''Gestus'' (, from Latin meaning "gesture, attitude, carriage") 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."Willett (1964, 42). ''Gestus'', as the embodiment of an attitude, carries at least two distinct meanings in Brecht's theatre: first, the uncovering or revealing of the motivations and transactions that underpin a dramatic exchange between the characters; and second, the "epic" narration of that character by the actor (whether explicitly or implicitly). In the first sense, that of anatomizing the character, a ''Gestus'' reveals a specific ''aspect'' of a character: rather than his metaphysical, subconscious or other psychological dimensions, a ''Gestus'' makes visible a character's social relations and the causality of his be ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Epic Theatre
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 responded to the political 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. History The term "epic theatre" comes from Erwin Piscator who coined it during his first year as director of Berlin's Volksbühne (1924–27).Wiles (1980). Piscator aimed to encourage playwrights to address issues related to "contemporary existence." This new subject matter would then be staged by me ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Latin
Latin ( or ) is a classical language belonging to the Italic languages, Italic branch of the Indo-European languages. Latin was originally spoken by the Latins (Italic tribe), Latins in Latium (now known as Lazio), the lower Tiber area around Rome, Italy. Through the expansion of the Roman Republic, it became the dominant language in the Italian Peninsula and subsequently throughout the Roman Empire. It has greatly influenced many languages, Latin influence in English, including English, having contributed List of Latin words with English derivatives, many words to the English lexicon, particularly after the Christianity in Anglo-Saxon England, Christianization of the Anglo-Saxons and the Norman Conquest. Latin Root (linguistics), roots appear frequently in the technical vocabulary used by fields such as theology, List of Latin and Greek words commonly used in systematic names, the sciences, List of medical roots, suffixes and prefixes, medicine, and List of Latin legal terms ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Fabel
A ''Fabel'' is a critical analysis of the plot of a play. It is a dramaturgical technique that was pioneered by Bertolt Brecht, a 20th century German theatre practitioner. ''Fabel'' should not be confused with 'fable', which is a form of short narrative (hence the retention of the original German spelling in its adoption into English usage). Elizabeth Wright argues that it is "a term of art which cannot be adequately translated".Wright, Elizabeth. 1989. ''Postmodern Brecht: A Re-Presentation''. Critics of the Twentieth Century Ser. London and New York: Routledge. . p.28. A critical term As a critical term, a fabel includes three interrelated but distinct aspects: firstly, an analysis of the events portrayed in the story. In an epic production, this analysis would focus on the social interactions between the characters and the causality of their behaviour from a historical materialist perspective; the ''fabel'' summarizes "the moral of the story not in a merely ethical sense, ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Bertolt Brecht
Eugen Berthold Friedrich Brecht (10 February 1898 – 14 August 1956), 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 (which he later preferred to call "dialectical theatre") and the . When the Nazi Party, Nazis came to power in Germany in 1933, Brecht fled his home country, initially to Scandinavia. During World War II he moved to Southern California where he established himself as a screenwriter, while also being surveilled by the FBI. In 1947, he was part of the first group of Hollywood film artists to be subpoenaed by the Ho ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
John Willett
John William Mills Willett, MBE (24 June 1917 – 20 August 2002) was a British translator and scholar, who is remembered for translating the work of Bertolt Brecht into English. Early life Willett was born in Hampstead and was educated at Winchester and Christ Church, Oxford. He went on to the Manchester College of Art and Dance, and then to Vienna, where he studied music (Willett played the cello) and stage design. Willett began his career as a theatre designer. However, this career was cut short by World War II. He served in Intelligence and the Eighth Army, in North Africa and Italy. Beginning his war in July 1940 as a second lieutenant in the British Army, he ended it just over five years later as a lieutenant colonel. In August 1942 he was transferred to the Intelligence Corps, in April 1944 he was mentioned in dispatches and in June 1945 he was made a Member of the Order of the British Empire (MBE). After being demobilised, Willett worked first for the ''Manch ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Distancing Effect
The distancing effect, also translated as alienation effect ( or ''V-Effekt''), is a concept in performing arts credited to German playwright Bertolt Brecht. Brecht first used the term in his essay "Alienation Effects in Chinese Acting" published in 1936, in which he described it as performing "in such a way that the audience was hindered from simply identifying itself with the characters in the play. Acceptance or rejection of their actions and utterances was meant to take place on a conscious plane, instead of, as hitherto, in the audience's subconscious". These remarks find their precedent in an essay largely devoted to the theory of Brecht’s epic theater, “ The Author as Producer,” written by Walter Benjamin in 1934. This way of formulating the technique would have been familiar to Brecht from his conversations with Benjamin before he met the Russian playwrights Shlovsky or Tretyakov (to whom he later attributed the coinage), insofar as Benjamin wrote the essay with ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Empathy
Empathy is generally described as the ability to take on another person's perspective, to understand, feel, and possibly share and respond to their experience. There are more (sometimes conflicting) definitions of empathy that include but are not limited to social, cognitive, and emotional processes primarily concerned with understanding others. Often times, empathy is considered to be a broad term, and broken down into more specific concepts and types that include cognitive empathy, emotional (or affective) empathy, wiktionary:somatic#Etymology, somatic empathy, and spiritual empathy. Empathy is still a topic of research. The major areas of research include the development of empathy, the genetics and neuroscience of empathy, cross-species empathy, and the impairment of empathy. Some researchers have made efforts to quantify empathy through different methods, such as from questionnaires where participants can fill out and then be scored on their answers. The ability to imagin ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Berliner Ensemble
The Berliner Ensemble () is a German theatre company established by actress Helene Weigel and her husband, playwright Bertolt Brecht, in January 1949 in East Berlin. In the time after Brecht's exile, the company first worked at Wolfgang Langhoff's Deutsches Theater and in 1954 moved to the Theater am Schiffbauerdamm, built in 1892, that was open for the 1928 premiere of ''The Threepenny Opera'' (''Die Dreigroschenoper''). Bertolt Brecht's Berliner Ensemble Brecht's students Benno Besson, Egon Monk, Peter Palitzsch, and Manfred Wekwerth were given the opportunity to direct plays by Brecht that had not yet been staged. The stage designers Caspar Neher and Karl von Appen, the composers Paul Dessau and Hanns Eisler, as well as the dramaturge Elisabeth Hauptmann, were among Brecht's closest collaborators. After her husband died in 1956, Weigel continued managing the Berliner Ensemble until her death in 1971. The Berliner Ensemble achieved success through long and meticulo ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Heiner Müller
Heiner Müller (; 9 January 1929 – 30 December 1995) was a German (formerly East German) dramatist, poet, writer, essayist and theatre director. His "enigmatic, fragmentary pieces" are a significant contribution to postmodern drama and postdramatic theatre."With Beckett's death Müller becomes the theatre's greatest living poet." ''The Village Voice'', quoted on the backcover of Müller's ''Theatremachine'' (1995). The phrase "enigmatic and fragmentary pieces" comes from the article on Müller in ''The Cambridge Guide to Theatre'' (Banham 1995, 765). Among others, Elizabeth Wright assesses Müller's contribution to a postmodern drama in ''Postmodern Brecht'' (1989). Biography Müller was born in Eppendorf, Saxony. He joined the Social Democratic Party of Germany in 1946 which was in the course of the forced merger of the KPD and SPD subsumed into the Socialist Unity Party of Germany (Sozialistische Einheitspartei Deutschlands, SED). He was soon expelled for lacking enthusia ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Cliché
A cliché ( or ; ) is a saying, idea, or element of an artistic work that has become overused to the point of losing its original meaning, novelty, or literal and figurative language, figurative or artistic power, even to the point of now being bland or uninteresting. In phraseology, the term has taken on a more technical meaning, referring to an Phraseme#Clichés, expression imposed by conventionalized linguistic usage. The term, which is typically pejorative, is often used in modern culture for an action or idea that is expected or predictable, based on a prior event. Clichés may or may not be true. Some are stereotypes, but some are simply truisms and facts. Clichés often are employed for comedy, comedic effect, typically in fiction. Most phrases now considered clichéd originally were regarded as striking but have lost their force through overuse. The French poet Gérard de Nerval once said, "The first man who compared woman to a rose was a poet, the second, an imbecile." ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Historical Materialism
Historical materialism is Karl Marx's theory of history. Marx located historical change in the rise of Class society, class societies and the way humans labor together to make their livelihoods. Karl Marx stated that Productive forces, technological development plays an important role in influencing social transformation and therefore the mode of production over time. This change in the mode of production encourages changes to a society's economic system. Marx's lifetime collaborator, Friedrich Engels, coined the term "historical materialism" and described it as "that view of the course of history which seeks the ultimate cause and the great moving power of all important historic events in the economic development of society, in the changes in the modes of production and exchange, in the consequent division of society into distinct classes, and in the struggles of these classes against one another." Although Marx never brought together a formal or comprehensive description of ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
A Short Organum For The Theatre
"A Short Organum for the Theatre" ("Kleines Organon für das Theater") is a theoretical work by the twentieth-century German theatre practitioner Bertolt Brecht.Brecht, Bertolt. 1949. "A Short Organum for the Theatre". ''Brecht on Theatre: The Development of an Aesthetic.'' Ed. and trans. John Willett. London: Methuen, 1964. . pp. 179–205. It was written while in Switzerland in 1948 and published in 1949.Willett, John. 1964. "Note". In ''Brecht on Theatre: The Development of an Aesthetic'' by Bertolt Brecht. London: Methuen, 1964. . p.205. 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". Against ''Poetics'' Returning in the history of theater to the ''Poetics'' of Aristotle and taking as an example ancient tragedies and comedie ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
