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Epic Theatre : The Alienation Effect In Epic Theater
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According to Bertolt Brecht, the Alienation Effect is an aspect of epic theater that is vital to allowing the audience to think critically about the message that the play is trying to convey. Epic theater is not like the newer, dramatic theater, which focuses on “plot, feeling, and growth of character,” but rather it focuses on “narrative, reason, and a montage of events,” (Willett, 135). The Alienation Effect is directly related to epic theater in that it is very hard to produce the Alienation Effect in a way that does not seem forced in a dramatic script, as the audience will find an easier time immersing themselves in the story of a dramatic play. When using the Alienation Effect, Brecht prompts many actions to be taken including the following: for the theater to be erased of all “magical qualities,” (Willett, 136), for “the actor [to] not allow himself to become completely transformed into the character he is portraying,” (Willett, 137), and for the actors to speak their lines “like a quotation,” (Willett, 138). All these and more are so that the audience will be less immersed in the production and therefore able to think more critically about the message of the production, given that emotions tend to cloud ones judgement. The Alienation Effect prompts the audience to do exactly what Brecht believes to be the purpose of the audience in theater: to become activists in a certain area due to them thinking about the performance during the performance. Brecht wants the viewer to develop a “critical consciousness” such that they do not miss the meaning of the performance that they are seeing and expand upon that critical consciousness to make use of their newfound knowledge. He believes that they only way that they can do this is to be completely un-immersed from the action. However, the Alienation Effect only prompts the viewer to think about the play; it does not necessarily tell them the message of the play ‒ that is up to the viewer to decide. To circumvent this external variable, Brecht added the inclusion of signs at the end of every scene in the script of The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui to tell the audience how the play is an allegory to the rise of Hitler so that they could more easily latch onto the
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- Bertolt Brecht
- Epic theatre
- Theatre
- The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui
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