Chapter 35 - Brecht and Transcultural Theater

Summary

This article examines Bertolt Brecht’s impact on contemporary transcultural theater worldwide.Globalization and migration have increased the importance and impact of transcultural theater in recent decades, leading to new forms of theatrical creation and experience. In the context of aggressive anti-globalization reactions characterized by xenophobia and racism, transcultural theater, as influenced and initiated by Brecht, celebrates hybridity and the fragment, focusing above all on processes of estrangement (Verfremdung) that reject the fantasy of a complete, self-identical, separate cultural sphere.Transcultural theater embraces multiperspectivalism and views the supposedly well-known and obvious self as strange and foreign, while at the same time it invites the self into a process of dialog with other cultures and identities that are equally strange and foreign. It rejects the notion of holistic identities and instead embraces the fragmentary, basing itself on repetition, historicization, and the citability of gestures. Transcultural theater seeks to create theatrical experiences that are adequate to, and also respond in a meaningful way to, the complex and changing world of migration and mobility in which both theater practitioners and theater audiences actually live.