Wooster Group and Berthold Brecht

Wooster Group’s La Didone

Some Notes on Brecht’s Alienation Effect by Jaquelyn Peters

Brecht encourages his audience to think rather than becoming over concerned with the plot. Brecht invites his audience to identify with the issues faced by the characters and not the characters themselves. The play is a form of debate rather than an illusion. Brecht’s concept of Alienation involved the idea of, ‘making strange’. He aimed to take emotion out of the production and persuade the audience to distance themselves from the make believe. He also encouraged the actors to disassociate themselves from their roles; all of this would make the political truth easier to comprehend.

In order to detach and alienate his audiences from the story and force them to concentrate on the issue or argument, Brecht used a series of techniques to make the action strange.

Setting stories in unfamiliar locations, in different times.

Use of a chorus to sing the story, as well as narrators who were completely outside of the action.

Unrealistic speech, masks.

Diagetic and non-diagetic music.

Visible stage machinery.

Scene by scene summary of the action often using large signs.

Acting in the third person as well as actors sitting in the audience when not in a scene.

Most importantly Brecht used a technique called, ‘Breaking down the fourth wall’. This meant that the audience was not simply a spectator, but instead became mentally involved in the issues presented {Stephen Berkoff}.

Stage/mis-en-scène

Brightly lit at all times, no need for mood lighting.

No elaborate props, use of placards with instructions written on them.

Musicians on stage and often announced before playing.

Use of non-naturalistic techniques such as montage {series of still images}.

Brecht believed that epic theatre enables the audience to see things differently to how they had originally perceived them. Therefore by seeing the ‘truth’ they can begin to change things in the real world. Furthermore, he believed that by showing the suffering of those on stage, audiences could avoid it. The suffering he portrays is political. Brecht’s ideology is consistent with Marxism in that all human evil is a result of unjust social institutions.

Brecht no longer wanted audiences to be reduced to passivity but instead to be awakened to the truth of what he believed to be a highly formulated and constructed society.

Julio Cortázar, Hopscotch

Chapter 7

I touch your mouth, with one finger I touch the edge of your mouth, I draw it as it if it came out of my hand, as if your mouth was for the first time just barely open, and closing my eyes is enough to undo it and start over. Each time I create the mouth I desire, the mouth that my hand chooses and draws for you on your face, one mouth chosen from all, chosen by me with sovereign freedom to draw with my hand on your face, and for some random chance I seek not to understand, it perfectly matches your smiling mouth, beneath the one my hand draws for you.

You look at me, you look at me closely, each time closer and then we play cyclops, we look at each other closer each time and our eyes grow, they grow closer, they overlap and the cyclops look at each other, breathing confusion, their mouths find each other and fight warmly, biting with their lips, resting their tongues lightly on their teeth, playing in their caverns where the heavy air comes and goes with the scent of an old perfume and silence. Then my hands want to hide in your hair, slowly stroke the depth of your hair while we kiss with mouths full of flowers or fish, of living movements, of dark fragrance. And if we bite each other, the pain is sweet, and if we drown in a short and terrible surge of breath, that instant death is beauty. And there is a single saliva and a single flavour of ripe fruit, and I can feel you shiver against me like a moon on the water.

from Hopscotch by Julio Cortázar

Now reread this passage and pay close attention to the sensations your body is experiencing as you read.

Writing about art

I cannot figure out who actually said this. Some say it was Steve Martin. Others say the proper quote was “writing about music is like dancing about architecture” and it has been attributed to Frank Zappa, Elvis Costello, and Laurie Anderson.

Regardless, writing about art (or music) and dancing about architecture are wonderful ideas! But I’m a better writer than dancer…

Neurology

Now reading: Mirroring People: The New Science of How We Connect With Others by Marco Iacoboni

I think the implications of mirror neurons for how we understand art may be profound…

Christian Bök

Terrific performance by Christian Bök. His “reading” of a Hugo Ball poem reminds me of the overtones of Inuit Throat Singing…

From ubuweb:

In this seven-minute sound poetry tutorial, Christian Bök takes the most difficult things and makes them pleasurable and completely understandable. Produced by Curtis Fox for the Poetry Foundation, Curtis tries — and botches — a snippet of sound poetry. He then hands the mic over to Christian who makes it soar. Bök then goes on to precisely explain the piece and its historic context. I can’t imagine anything better to use as a teaching aid to explain and demonstrate this art form.

Direct link to audio:

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/download-file?file=/audio/StopMakingSense_PoetryOffTheShelf050409.mp3

From the Poetry Foundation

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/journal/audioitem.html?id=1608

John Cage

My father was an inventor. He was able to find solutions for problems of various kinds, in the fields of electrical engineering, medicine, submarine travel, seeing through fog, and travel in space without the use of fuel. He told me that if someone says “can’t” that shows you what to do. He also told me that my mother was always right even when she was wrong.

from John Cage, An Autobiographical Statement

Irony and Winnipeg

Being from Winnipeg (see post below), I deeply appreciate irony. I enjoy the way it prompts one to rethink received truths and to tinker with them. While irony became an overused concept in the mid- to late 90s (after the publication of Douglas Coupland’s Generation X) and subsequently fell out of fashion, it continues to offer the possibility for critique (and humor) in ways that I hope will be soon be vigorously revisited. I also value the fact that irony is difficult to deploy in the name of branding and/or marketing, because it is slippery and unreliable in terms of eliciting the kind of consumer response the rhetoric around “The American Dream” does. Ironists are not the most dependable or predictable consumers.

Rae Armantrout

DARK MATTER

1

Who am I
to experience a burst
of star formation?

I know this—

after the first rush
of enthusiasm

any idea
recedes and dims.

2

Each one
is the inverse
shape of what’s
missing.

3

One might try
summing
the matter up

in a single
Judas kiss,

all bitter-sweet
complicity

and feigned ignorance

— Rae Armantrout

from thisrecording

I imagine long, drawn out breaths every time the writer hit “enter” on the computer keyboard.

Hanne Darboven on Today Crossed Out

“I both write and draw…because ‘no more words’ is a writing process, it’s not a drawing process. The writing fills the space as drawing would.”

- Hanne Darboven as quoted in C. Van Bruggen, “Today Crossed Out,” Artforum XXVI/5 (Jan. 1988): 72.

Sol LeWitt

“If words are used, and they proceed from ideas about art, then they are art and not literature; numbers are not mathematics.”

- Sol Lewitt, possibly inspired by Hanne Darboven’s Konstruktion drawings