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Brechtian
Eugen Berthold Friedrich Brecht (10 February 1898 – 14 August 1956), known professionally as Bertolt 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 Kurt Weill and began a life-long collaboration with the composer Hanns Eisler. Immersed in Marxist thought during this period, he wrote didactic '' Lehrstücke'' and became a leading theoretician of epic theatre (which he later preferred to call "dialectical theatre") and the . During the Nazi Germany period, Brecht fled his home country, first to Scandinavia, and during World War II to the United States, where he was surveilled by the FBI. After the war he was subpoenaed by the House Un-American Activities Committee. Returning to East Berlin after the war, he established the theatre company Berliner Ensemble with his wife and long-time collabora ...
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Epic Theatre
Epic theatre (german: episches Theater) is a theatrical movement arising 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 wou ...
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Kurt Weill
Kurt Julian Weill (March 2, 1900April 3, 1950) was a German-born American composer active from the 1920s in his native country, and in his later years in the United States. He was a leading composer for the stage who was best known for his fruitful collaborations with Bertolt Brecht. With Brecht, he developed productions such as his best-known work, ''The Threepenny Opera'', which included the ballad "Mack the Knife". Weill held the ideal of writing music that served a socially useful purpose,Kurt Weill
Cjschuler.net. Retrieved on August 22, 2011.
''Gebrauchsmusik''. He also wrote several works for the concert hall and a number of works on Jewish themes. He became a United States citizen on August 27, 1943.


Family and childhood

Weill was born on March 2, 1900, the third of four childr ...
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Mother Courage And Her Children
''Mother Courage and Her Children'' (german: Mutter Courage und ihre Kinder, links=no) is a play written in 1939 by the German dramatist and poet Bertolt Brecht (1898–1956), with significant contributions from Margarete Steffin. Four theatrical productions were produced in Switzerland and Germany from 1941 to 1952, the last three supervised and/or directed by Brecht, who had returned to East Germany from the United States. Several years after Brecht's death in 1956, the play was adapted as a German film, ''Mutter Courage und ihre Kinder'' (1961), starring Helene Weigel, Brecht's widow and a leading actress. ''Mother Courage'' is considered by some to be the greatest play of the 20th century, and perhaps also the greatest anti-war play of all time. Critic Brett D. Johnson points out, "Although numerous theatrical artists and scholars may share artistic director Oskar Eustis's opinion that Brecht's masterpiece is the greatest play of the twentieth century, productions of ''Moth ...
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Augsburg
Augsburg (; bar , Augschburg , links=https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swabian_German , label=Swabian German, , ) is a city in Swabia, Bavaria, Germany, around west of Bavarian capital Munich. It is a university town and regional seat of the ''Regierungsbezirk'' Schwaben with an impressive Altstadt (historical city centre). Augsburg is an urban district and home to the institutions of the Landkreis Augsburg. It is the third-largest city in Bavaria (after Munich and Nuremberg) with a population of 300,000 inhabitants, with 885,000 in its metropolitan area. After Neuss, Trier, Cologne and Xanten, Augsburg is one of Germany's oldest cities, founded in 15 BC by the Romans as Augusta Vindelicorum, named after the Roman emperor Augustus. It was a Free Imperial City from 1276 to 1803 and the home of the patrician Fugger and Welser families that dominated European banking in the 16th century. According to Behringer, in the sixteenth century, it became "the dominant centre of early cap ...
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Stefan Brecht
Stefan Sebastian Brecht (November 3, 1924 – April 13, 2009) was a German-born American poet, critic and scholar of theatre. Life and career The son of playwright and poet Bertolt Brecht and actress Helene Weigel, Stefan Brecht was born in Berlin. He chose to stay in the United States when his family, who had arrived in Santa Monica, California, in 1941, returned to Europe. He joined the United States Army on September 26, 1944. He studied at UCLA and Harvard on the G.I. Bill, and after receiving a doctorate in philosophy at Harvard he taught philosophy at the University of Miami. He pursued further study of Hegel and Marx at the École pratique des hautes études in Paris. A son, Michael Böhm, was born in Germany in 1954. After moving to New York City in about 1966 with his wife, costume designer Mary McDonough Brecht (now deceased) and their two children born in Paris in the early 60s, he became immersed in the radical theatre just beginning then and started writing what ...
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Lehrstücke
The (; singular ) are a radical and experimental form of modernist theatre developed by Bertolt Brecht and his collaborators from the 1920s to the late 1930s. The ''Lehrstücke'' stem from Brecht's epic theatre techniques but as a core principle explore the possibilities of learning through acting, playing roles, adopting postures and attitudes etc. and hence no longer divide between actors and audience. Brecht himself translated the term as ''learning-play'', emphasizing the aspect of learning through participation, whereas the German term could be understood as ''teaching-play''. Reiner Steinweg goes so far as to suggest adopting a term coined by the Brazilian avant garde theatre director Zé Celso, ''Theatre of Discovery'', as being even clearer.Steinweg, ReinerTwo Chapters from "Learning Play and Epic Theatre"/ref> Definition Although the texts have a highly formal, rigorous structure, this is designed to facilitate insertions or deletions (according to the exigencies of t ...
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Marxist
Marxism is a left-wing to far-left method of socioeconomic analysis that uses a materialist interpretation of historical development, better known as historical materialism, to understand class relations and social conflict and a dialectical perspective to view social transformation. It originates from the works of 19th-century German philosophers Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. As Marxism has developed over time into various branches and schools of thought, no single, definitive Marxist theory exists. In addition to the schools of thought which emphasize or modify elements of classical Marxism, various Marxian concepts have been incorporated and adapted into a diverse array of social theories leading to widely varying conclusions. Alongside Marx's critique of political economy, the defining characteristics of Marxism have often been described using the terms dialectical materialism and historical materialism, though these terms were coined after Marx's death and their tenets ...
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Hanns Eisler
Hanns Eisler (6 July 1898 – 6 September 1962) was an Austrian composer (his father was Austrian, and Eisler fought in a Hungarian regiment in World War I). He is best known for composing the national anthem of East Germany, for his long artistic association with Bertolt Brecht, and for the scores he wrote for films. The Hochschule für Musik "Hanns Eisler" is named after him. Family background Johannes Eisler was born in Leipzig in Saxony, the son of Rudolf Eisler, a professor of philosophy, and Marie Ida Fischer. His father was an atheist of Jewish origin and his mother was Lutheran. In 1901, the family moved to Vienna. His brother, Gerhart, was a Communist journalist, and his sister, Elfriede, was a leader of the German Communist Party in the mid-1920s. After emigrating to America, she turned into an anti- Stalinist, writing books against her former political affiliation, and even testifying against her brothers before the House Un-American Activities Committee. At age 14 ...
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Weimar Republic
The German Reich, commonly referred to as the Weimar Republic,, was a historical period of Germany from 9 November 1918 to 23 March 1933, during which it was a constitutional federal republic for the first time in history; hence it is also referred to, and unofficially proclaimed itself, as the German Republic. The period's informal name is derived from the city of Weimar, which hosted the constituent assembly that established its government. In English, the republic was usually simply called "Germany", with "Weimar Republic" (a term introduced by Adolf Hitler in 1929) not commonly used until the 1930s. After the end of the First World War (1914–1918), Germany was exhausted and sued for peace in desperate circumstances. Awareness of imminent defeat sparked a revolution, the abdication of Kaiser Wilhelm II, formal surrender to the Allies, and the proclamation of the Weimar Republic on 9 November 1918. In its initial years, grave problems beset the Republic, such as h ...
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Theatre Practitioner
A theatre practitioner is someone who creates theatrical performances and/or produces a theoretical discourse that informs his or her practical work. A theatre practitioner may be a director, dramatist, actor, designer or a combination of these traditionally separate roles. ''Theatre practice'' describes the collective work that various theatre practitioners do. The term was not ordinarily applied to theatre-makers prior to the rise of modernism in the theatre. Instead, theatre praxis from Konstantin Stanislavski's development of his system is described through Vsevolod Meyerhold's biomechanics, Antonin Artaud's Theatre of cruelty, Bertolt Brecht's epic, and Jerzy Grotowski's poor theatre. Contemporary theatre practitioners include Augusto Boal with his Theatre of the Oppressed, Dario Fo Dario Luigi Angelo Fo (; 24 March 1926 – 13 October 2016) was an Italian playwright, actor, theatre director, stage designer, songwriter, political campaigner for the Italian left wing ...
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