Franz Lehár and the „Contradictions” of a Marxist Approach to Operetta Following the import of Soviet musical plays and Socialist attempts at creating contemporary Hungarian ones, the “new cult of ...classical operetta” started with The Count of Luxembourg at the Budapest Operetta Theatre after its nationalization. How was it possible in 1952, a year of the Rákosi regime which presented the inhabitants with a serious challenge in all respects, when Franz Lehár’s and Emmerich Kálmán’s works had been discredited for years? What transformation of the plot, the characters and the music did it require? What interpretation of the story? What change in acting styles from the old stars of operetta? How could an adaptation whose popularity has remained undiminished for almost seventy years be born there and then? My essay seeks answers to these questions, examining the relationship between communist dictatorship and playing operettas through the case study of a legendary production.
The antifascist exile beginning in 1933 led to a cooling among the émigrés of the artistic and literary modernist experiments of the Weimar Republic and to a return to realism and the traditional ...novel form. Epic and Exile examines the Popular Front- oriented cultural initiatives of the 1930s less in terms of their political strategy than in their function as a cultural and literary program for the exiles, implying a specific relationship to questions of artistic form, historical conceptions, and indeed the political as such. A popular front aesthetics is, Bivens argues, realist and modernist at once, and, in its focus on the opacities and contradictions of everyday life as a historical formation, it is particularly concerned with problems of the epic form.
Brecht on Performance Brecht, Bertolt; Kuhn, Tom; Giles, Steve ...
2018, 2018-10-18
eBook
Now available in Bloomsbury Revelations series, Brecht on Performance: Messingkauf and Modelbooks presents a selection of Brecht's principal writings about the craft of acting and realising texts for ...the stage. It crystallises and makes concrete many of the more theoretical aspects of his other writing and illuminates the practice of this hugely influential director and dramatist.The volume is in two parts. The first features an entirely new commentated edition of Brecht's dialogues and essays about the practice of theatre, known as the Messingkauf, or Buying Brass, including the 'Practice Pieces' for actors (rehearsal scenes for classics by Shakespeare and Schiller). The second contains rehearsal and production records from Brecht's work on productions of Life of Galileo, Antigone, Mother Courage and others.Edited by an international team of Brecht scholars and including an essay by director and teacher Di Trevis examining the practical application of these texts for theatres and actors today, Brecht on Performance is a wonderfully rich resource. The text is illustrated with over 30 photographs from the Modelbooks.
El presente artículo busca rastrear de un modo crítico la recepción de Brecht, primero en el cine europeo, para analizar después algunos casos concretos de esta tradición en el cine argentino ...contemporâneo, con especial atención a Los Rubios de Albertina Carri y Teatro de Guerra de Lola Arias. La intención es contrastar las diferentes formulaciones de esta tradición interpretativa para analizar su circulación y las innovaciones, reformulaciones, enriquecimientos o empobrecimientos que se evidencian particularmente en las obras de algunos cineastas europeos y argentinos. En este sentido, el presente artículo busca esbozar una genealogía crítica de la tradición brechtiana, siguiendo la línea que autores como Walter Benjamin y Roland Barthes marcaron en sus estudios sobre Brecht. Palabras claves: Brecht; interrupción y distancia; extrañamiento brechtiano; cine europeo; cine argentino. The present article attempts to trace, critically, the reception of Brecht in European cinema first, to then analyze some concrete cases of this tradition in contemporary Argentine cinema, with a special focus on Albertina Carri's The Blonds and Lola Aria's Teatre of War. The intention is to contrast the different formulations of this interpretative tradition in order to analyze its circulation and the innovations, reformulations, enrichments or impoverishments that are particularly manifest in the works of some European and Argentine filmmakers. In this sense, the present article seeks to outline a critical genealogy of the Brechtian tradition, following the research line that authors such as Walter Benjamin and Roland Barthes opened in their studies on Brecht. Keywords: Brecht interruption and distance; brechtian alienation; european cinema; argentine cinema. Este artigo acompanha de forma crítica a recepção de Brecht, primeiro no cinema europeu, e depois em alguns casos específicos desta tradição no cinema argentino contemporâneo, com especial atenção a Los Rubios de Albertina Carri e a Teatro de Guerra de Lola Arias. A intenção é contrastar as diferentes formulações desta tradição interpretativa a fim de analisar a sua circulação e as inovações, reformulações, enriquecimentos ou empobrecimentos que são particularmente evidentes nas obras de alguns cineastas europeus e argentinos. Neste sentido, este artigo procura delinear uma genealogia crítica da tradição brechtiana, seguindo a linha que autores como Walter Benjamin e Roland Barthes marcaram nos seus estudos sobre Brecht. Palavras-chave: Brecht; interrupção e distância; distanciamento brechtiano; cinema europeu; cinema argentino.
En este artículo, se continúa el sinuoso recorrido en el que se ponen de manifiesto las complejas interacciones y complicidades entre el teatro y la historia. A partir de las relaciones entre ...Shakespeare, Brecht y Becket se presenta la idea del teatro como tribunal de la historia, en el que sus personajes y acontecimientos a veces se confunden con los de la realidad. Así, teatro e historia, historia y teatro son para el autor dos dimensiones que se cruzan, se repiten, se convocan y se citan. Desde allí se explicarán las distintas formas del teatro político, el teatro crítico y el teatro experimental que dan cuenta metafóricamente de los convulsionados hechos de la historia colombiana. Una historia trágica y cómica, escrita por las élites a las que el teatro interpela creativamente con estrategias brechtianas de distanciamiento, e irónicamente con distintas formas de lo trágico, lo carnavalesco y lo festivo.
The materialist conception of art understands art in relation to the material conditions within and by which art is produced and consumed. For cultural psychology, the materialist conception of art ...has been useful for developing insights into how individual perceptions are shaped, and are shaped by, culture as a collectively produced and historically embedded site of meaning-making. However, in much of cultural psychology, the relationship between progressive politics and the materialist conception of art remains under-appreciated. In this article, I consider how cultural psychologists might strengthen this relation through artistic shock, that is, a subjective, perceptual, and/or historiographical rupture brought about through the experience of art. In particular, I outline how Bertolt Brecht and Walter Benjamin theorised and practiced artistic shock, and examine what the work of these thinkers could mean for cultural psychologists working with political collectives to grapple with psychopolitical questions related to subjectivity, contradiction, and memory. I conclude by reflecting on how future work that seeks to politicise cultural psychology might engage with the materialist conception of art.
What role do legal trials have in collective processes of coming to terms with a history of mass violence? How does the theatrical structure of a criminal trial facilitate and limit national ...processes of healing and learning from the past? This study begins with the widely publicized, historic trials of three Nazi war criminals, Eichmann, Barbie, and Priebke, whose explicit goal was not only to punish, but also to establish an officially sanctioned version of the past. The Truth and Reconciliation commissions in South America and South Africa added a therapeutic goal, acting on the belief that a trial can help bring about a moment of closure. Horsman challenges this belief by reading works that reflect on the relations among pedagogy, therapy, and legal trials. Philosopher Hannah Arendt, poet Charlotte Delbo, and dramaturg Bertolt Brecht all produced responses to historic trials that reopened the cases those trials sought to close, bringing to center stage aspects that had escaped the confines of their legal frameworks.
Written by Russian playwright Asya Voloshina, the 2013 Antigona : Redukciia is, as the author herself refers to it, 'a political satire with elements of poetry and reduction', which recasts ...Sophocles' title character, Antigone, from an existentialist tragic figure to a political rebel, whose actions of protest become inevitably and ironically performative in the highly mediatised culture of social media influencers and performative post-truth. A radical juxtaposition between the individual and the state, Voloshina's play exhibits deep internal connections with Bertolt Brecht's Die Antigone des Sophokles (1948), which serves as its contextual and analytical entry point. Like Brecht, I argue, Voloshina interprets the tragic conflict of Sophocles' Antigone as highly pragmatic. In her acknowledgement of Antigone's new reality – which simultaneously reminds of George Orwell's 1984 and Suzanne Collins' Hunger Games – Voloshina challenges the premise of the 20th century political tragedy. Her Antigone stands to combat the state-based machine of manipulation with her personal truth. She 'is motivated neither by religion nor by kinship'; for her Creon's law is 'simply a pretext to protest against her country turning into a totalitarian state' (SYSKA 2022: 4); and so eventually she is cancelled out from the history and from the myth. I conclude that Brecht's and Voloshina's plays connect the two centuries together, diagnose their respective dark times, and demonstrate that the cultures of populism produce corrupt moral standards, compromise personal dignity, and cultivate post-truth, all channeled through the role of an autocratic, if not tyrannic, state leader.
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