You might already know a bit about Brecht’s theory of alienation in performance, or Verfremdungseffekt, or in English-language theory, A-effect. In theater intro classes, the go-to example is audience interaction — breaking the fourth wall, removing the audience from complete narrative immersion. If you saw Urinetown this season, you've experienced it firsthand via Officer Lockstock and Little Sally's discussions of musical cliches.
Alienation effect, in short, consists of turning the familiar into the unfamiliar. This is especially useful to us in creating political theater, and Brecht’s writings on the subject present two particular tenets in aid of this: |
"The audience can no longer have the illusion of being the unseen spectator at an event which is really taking place." (Alienation Effects in Chinese Acting)
"A representation that alienates is one which allows us to recognize its subject, but at the same time makes it seem unfamiliar." (A Short Organum for the Theatre)
The spectacle was typical of the kind of stage management Goebbels was to perfect over the coming years. Watching the march in a Berlin street, [a young boy] happened to be standing at the spot where the stormtroopers paused to exchange their guttering torches for new, freshly lit ones. Scanning their faces as the evening went on, he began to notice the same men appearing in front of him again and again. ‘There,’ said his father to him, ‘you can see the con trick. They’re constantly marching round in a circle as if there were a hundred thousand of them.’
Isolated devices in Arturo Ui as a text are recognizably alienating, such as the Master of Ceremonies’ direct address to the audience, and the central premise itself: Brecht has taken the familiar (the Nazi Party) and applied to it an unfamiliar filter (gangsterism). Any visceral reaction audiences might have had to an actor dressed as Hitler is removed because they are not being shown Hitler. The strangeness of a gangster in Hitler’s place allows an audience to examine Hitler critically, and perhaps coldly. In practice, typical alienation allows the mechanics of theater to to be seen — to do away with illusion, to allow the audience to hear cue calls and see run crew. An audience expects stage magic that lights a realistic sky within an indoor space, or transforms an actor physically. What they don’t expect is a dozen twentysomething-year-old women playing gangster analogs to some of the worst men in human history. |