Refunctioning () is a core strategy of the
aesthetic
Aesthetics (also spelled esthetics) is the branch of philosophy concerned with the nature of beauty and taste, which in a broad sense incorporates the philosophy of art.Slater, B. H.Aesthetics ''Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy,'' , acces ...
developed by the
German
German(s) may refer to:
* Germany, the country of the Germans and German things
**Germania (Roman era)
* Germans, citizens of Germany, people of German ancestry, or native speakers of the German language
** For citizenship in Germany, see also Ge ...
modernist
Modernism was an early 20th-century movement in literature, visual arts, and music that emphasized experimentation, abstraction, and Subjectivity and objectivity (philosophy), subjective experience. Philosophy, politics, architecture, and soc ...
theatre practitioner
A theatre practitioner is someone who creates theatrical performances and/or produces a theoretical discourse that informs their practical work. A theatre practitioner may be a director, dramatist, actor, designer or a combination of these tradi ...
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 p ...
.
"Brecht wanted his theatre to intervene in the process of shaping society," Robert Leach explains, so in his work:
heduality of form and content was replaced (to over-schematise briefly) by a triad of ''content'' (better described in Brecht's case by the formalist term "material"), ''form'' (again the formalist term "technique" is more useful here) and ''function''. In Brecht's dramatic form, these three constantly clash but never properly coalesce to compose a rounded whole.[Leach (1994, 130).]
References
Sources
* Brecht, Bertolt. 1964. ''Brecht on Theatre: The Development of an Aesthetic''. Ed. and trans. John Willett. British edition. London: Methuen. . USA edition. New York: Hill and Wang. .
* Brecht, Bertolt. 1965. ''
The Messingkauf Dialogues''. Trans. John Willett. Bertolt Brecht: Plays, Poetry, Prose Ser. London: Methuen, 1985. .
* Leach, Robert. 1994. "''Mother Courage and Her Children''. In Thomson and Sacks (1994, 128–138).
* Thomson, Peter and Glendyr Sacks, eds. 1994. ''The Cambridge Companion to Brecht''. Cambridge Companions to Literature Ser. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. .
* Tian, Min. 2012. ''Mei Lanfang and the Twentieth Century International Stage: Chinese Theatre Placed and Displaced''. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
{{Brecht theory
Bertolt Brecht theories and techniques