LYCOS RETRIEVER 
Bertolt Brecht: Theatre
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From these progressive positions, Brecht deepened further his views on forms of expression and their relation with content. For Brecht, the new socialist content permitted the most diverse forms of expression; indeed he regarded the search for these as indispensable. To this he remained faithful in all his literary work -- in his poetry, in his plays and ... in the theatre itself. And to this he brought his own original research.
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Brecht's term for what theatre should be - an ideal to which his own plays were aspiring. The Epic theatre is a kind of drama which will require wholly new styles of acting and methods of production. The Epic theatre can be reduced to a number of distinctive features or techniques: acting technique; the v-effekt; the Gestus and so on .
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Brecht makes a move which is both critical and postmodern; the ‘fourth wall’ is no longer missing and becomes interpenetrated with dialog between actors and spectators. The ‘fourth wall’ is a reference to the proscenium arch (separating actors and spectators). In epic theatre, a fictional character shows critical awareness of the both medium in which they "exist" and the spectators watching (or reading) that medium. Interrupting the flow of the onstage action with bits of chorus, music, choreography, and simultaneous events happening on stage ... helps to focus the spectators’ reflective aesthetic on systemic forces and to penetrate the fourth wall. In this way, spectators can reflect upon the ways their life is theatrically mediated.
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Brecht's term for the kind of theatre written by Schiller (1759-1805) and Goethe (1749-1832) following the description of dramatic theatre in Aristotle's Poetics. Brecht called his epic theatre “nicht Aristotelisches” (non-Aristotelian). Aristotle, of course, was not a dramatist, and wrote some time after the golden age of classical theatre.
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In 1947 Brecht left the USA and returned to Europe. He stayed in Zurich in Switzerland for more than a year, occupying himself principally with the elaboration and systematization of his theoretical thinking on art and, in particular, with drama and the theatre. He collected these ideas in one of his principal theoretical works, 'Little Organum for the Theatre'.
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Kleines Organon fur das Theater (Little Organon for the Theatre) -- One of Brecht's two extended theoretical works on the theatre. (1948; the original Organon was a work by Aristotle on dialects and logic).
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