Abstract
The designs for Mother Courage in 2015 were based on Brecht principles and were intended to create the sense of Verfremdung: producing a montage effect by juxtaposing separated design elements to confront spectators with contrasting and even contradictory information. The 2015 team looked closely at the text for its ideological and socio-economic underpinnings and took a position towards them. That is, the events of the play were funneled through the attitude of the team, who saw each moment as reflecting a deeper structure of sociological relations. The attitude towards the material was a skeptical one; that is, every aspect of the plot was to be questioned and underlying sociological structures revealed through the Fabel and the effects of the structures on people.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Notes
- 1.
Keith Johnstone, Impro for Storytellers (New York: Routledge, 1999), 219.
- 2.
At times during his career, Brecht would interchange the words “gestus” and “Haltung”: Marc Silberman notes: “Especially in his work on the Lehrstucke [Learning Plays] Brecht himself did not clearly differentiate his own use of the terms Gestus and Haltung.” See Marc Silberman “Brecht’s Gestus or Staging Contradiction,” The Brecht Yearbook Volume 31, Stephen Brockmann et al., (Pittsburgh: The International Brecht Society, 2006), 324. Silberman goes on to note, “Both Haltung and Gestus are generated in and by the body, and Gestus, as the smallest element of Haltung, condenses the dialectic of balance and movement.” Silberman, “Brecht’s Gestus,” 324.
- 3.
Barnett, Brecht in Practice, 97–100. Meg Mumford offers the word “comportment” as a synonym and defines “Haltung” as “the socially conditioned relation to time, space and people of a thinking body.” Mumford, Bertolt Brecht, 54.
- 4.
Silberman, “Brecht’s Gestus,” 326.
- 5.
Silberman, “Brecht’s Gestus,” 326.
- 6.
See: “What’s wise about the wise man is his stance,” Bertolt Brecht, Stories of Mr. Keuner, trans. Martin Chalmers (San Francisco: City Lights Books, 2001), 1.
- 7.
The staging of each scene, using Arrangement, will be discussed in the next chapter.
- 8.
BOP 262.
- 9.
This was still a difficult mission to accomplish, as Helene Weigel was such a skilled and charismatic actor. As Carl Weber noted, the audience tended to forgive Courage’s actions despite her faults because of the playing of the lead actress: “Weigel’s performance was so strong, inevitably the audience has to fall in love with her as a character.” Branislav Jakovljević et al., “The Voice from the 10th Row: Carl Weber and the Berliner Ensemble,” The Drama Review Vol. 62, No. 3, T239 Fall 2018, 63.
- 10.
John Willett, Caspar Neher: Brecht’s Designer (London: Methuen, 1986), 106.
- 11.
Keith Johnstone, Impro: Improvisation and the Theatre (New York, Routledge, 1979). The first chapter is devoted to status, how Johnstone applied it in playwriting workshops and as an improvisational tool.
- 12.
Notes from “10 Days with Keith,” a workshop I attended by Keith Johnstone held in Calgary, Canada July 11–20, 2017.
- 13.
Notes from “10 Days with Keith.”
- 14.
See Bertolt Brecht, Mr Puntila and His Man Matti in Collected Plays: Six, eds. John Willett and Ralph Manheim (London: Methuen Drama, 2009).
- 15.
Johnstone, Impro, 36.
- 16.
Notes from “10 Days with Keith.”
- 17.
Carl Weber, “The Actor and Brecht, or: The Truth Is Concrete: Some Notes on Directing Brecht with American Actors,” in Brecht Performance: Brecht Yearbook 1984, eds. John Fuegi, Gisela Bahr, John Willett, and Carl Weber (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1984), 73. Weber’s emphasis.
- 18.
This is a stage direction in Brecht’s original script and also appears in Kushner.
- 19.
See Johnstone’s description of three different types of teachers. Johnstone, Impro, 35–36.
- 20.
For a fuller list of behaviors, see Keith Johnstone’s Impro: Improvisation and the Theatre and Impro for Storytellers.
- 21.
Notes from “10 Days with Keith.”
- 22.
Max Stafford-Clark, Letters to George (London: Nick Hern Books, 1989), 25–7. During development workshops for Timberlake Wertenbaker’s Our Country’s Good, Stafford-Clark used playing cards to designate a range of numbers. When an actor pulled a card, that was the actor’s status during improvisations.
- 23.
Marilyn Monroe is a classic example, but there are many others.
- 24.
Johnstone, Impro for Storytellers, 221–2.
- 25.
Johnstone offers a list of behaviors to project high status and low status in Impro for Storytellers, Appendix 1: “Fast-Food Stanislavsky Lists,” 352–3.
- 26.
Keith Johnstone, Don’t Be Prepared: Theatresports for Teachers Volume 1 (Calgary: Loose Moose Theatre Company, 1994), 124.
- 27.
Keith Johnstone refers to the “see-saw effect” throughout Chap. 1 of his book Impro: Improvisation and the Theatre, 33–74.
- 28.
Carefully, and with respect for the other actors.
- 29.
Jean Benedetti, Stanislavski and the Actor, (New York: Routledge, 1993), 3.
- 30.
Meg Mumford, Showing the Gestus: A Study of Acting in Brecht’s Theatre (Unpublished PhD thesis, University of Bristol, 1997), 15.
- 31.
At the Berliner Ensemble, Courage curtsied. BOP 246.
- 32.
As Brecht pointed out, these could still vary. For example, a worker could just as well become stronger through manual labor rather than be broken by it. Barnett, Brecht in Practice, 96.
- 33.
In Commedia dell’arte, for example, the servants even found ways to beat their masters!
- 34.
Johnstone, Impro, 36.
- 35.
Notes from “10 Days with Keith.”
- 36.
BOT 247.
- 37.
Impro, 33.
- 38.
Impro, 33.
- 39.
Impro, 33.
- 40.
Wekwerth, Daring to Play, 66–67.
- 41.
Parker, Bertolt Brecht, 212.
- 42.
Tatlow, Bertolt Brecht’s Me-Ti, 158.
- 43.
He, in turn, infantilizes her. See Kushner, Mother Courage, 46–48.
- 44.
(Image 5.1) Fisher-Waits interview with the author
- 45.
Brecht, Collected Plays: Five, 376.
- 46.
Brecht, Collected Plays: Five, 375.
- 47.
Kushner, Mother Courage, 55.
- 48.
Hans Bunge, quoted in John Fuegi, Bertolt Brecht: Chaos, According to Plan, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: The University Press, 1994), 155.
- 49.
Fuegi, 155. Reichel also rushed about the stage, gesticulating feverishly as she ordered her servants about.
- 50.
Fuegi, 155.
- 51.
Fuegi, 155.
- 52.
David Richard Jones, Great Directors at Work: Stanislavsky, Brecht, Kazan, Brook (Berkley: University of California Press, 1986), 132.
- 53.
Jones, Great Directors, 132.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2023 The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Gelber, B. (2023). First Rehearsal: Tools for Actors, Status, and Haltung. In: Engaging with Brecht. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-20394-7_5
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-20394-7_5
Published:
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-031-20393-0
Online ISBN: 978-3-031-20394-7
eBook Packages: Literature, Cultural and Media StudiesLiterature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)