From Page to Stage and Classroom to Community: Teaching Brecht in the Twenty-First Century

Summary

Bertolt Brecht wrote many of his works with the intention to educate. His epic theater has stimulated and provoked generations of theatergoers, and the aesthetic principles he developed to foreground educational objectives of his Lehrstücke or learning plays have inspired directors and actors as well as scholars, teachers, and their students. Consequently, Brecht's works and theoretical writings entered the teaching canon of a variety of disciplines dedicated to the study of literature, theater, performance, and cinema. His ideas continue to guide the training of drama students, and Brecht's plays are frequently performed in academic settings not only with the objective to teach acting and directing in events organized by departments of dramatic arts, but also—less frequently, but usually in the German original—in productions that feature undergraduate students enrolled in German studies programs.

Despite the ubiquity of Brecht in the curricula of a variety of disciplines across the arts and humanities at universities worldwide, scholarship on the relevance of Brecht's works and ideas in post-secondary education has remained underdeveloped and fragmented. The bulk of existing work in this area either considers Brecht's educational dimensions from entirely theoretical viewpoints, or it simply provides teaching materials intended for high-school teachers in German-speaking countries. This volume features essays by scholars from four countries with a strong background in Brecht scholarship and an engagement with undergraduate education in the humanities and dramatic arts. While increasing the theoretical understanding of Brecht as a teacher, the volume builds bridges from the theoretical grid into learning environments. Consequently, the essays collected under this focus provide eight critical snapshots into college classrooms and rehearsal spaces that expose students to works and ideas of Brecht. They document learning environments that are based on didactical principles that resonate with his theories.

This collection of essays should not be understood as a teaching manual for the academic Brecht community; instead readers of these pages are urged to consider each of the analyzed learning environments in its specific institutional context and to draw theoretical as well as practical conclusions for their own teaching and scholarship in an eclectic manner. It is our wish that some of the reflections articulated in this volume will inspire readers to rethink their teaching and thus transform their understanding of Brecht.