-
3. The Actor as Eyewitness to Social Processes: Brecht’s Approach
- University of Michigan Press
- Chapter
- Additional Information
3 The Actor as Eyewitness to Social Processes: Brecht’s Approach “Not This, but That” Stanislavski’s acting technique of psychological realism was meant to ensure that the audience would experience the dramatic situation and the characters as a kind of substitute reality with which they could identify : the more truthful, or true to life, the characters were, the more believable their actions. Whether the audience really had such an experience depended not only on this new way of acting, but also on other, more material, factors, most importantly on the architecture of the theater (see the last chapter of this book). Brecht’s epic theater was meant to be an answer to what he called the “dramatic” or “Aristotelian” theater, which allowed audiences to identify with the fate of the characters on the stage.1 He wanted the audience , instead of being emotionally carried away, to be able to assess a situation, to think about it. Emotions, Brecht maintained, make it impossible for the audience to do that. His concept of epic theater is based on the study of social and political reality. His acting technique is meant to enable the audience to judge the actions of the characters on the stage. This is only possible when an audience can see that there might be alternatives to the way the characters perform their actions. Brecht called this idea the principle of “not this, but that.” The actor has to show, through his actions, the choices the character makes in order to achieve what he wants to 43 achieve: my character does “this,” not “that.” The actor should signal to the audience which choices the character has in the given situation. These choices are not psychological, but rather social, sociological, and sociopolitical. The Actor as Eyewitness: The “Street Scene” In epic acting the actor is not his role, but instead demonstrates him. Rather than hiding the fact that he is acting, the epic actor purposefully shows that this is what he is doing, by creating a distance between himself and the role he is playing. The “not this, but that” principle helps him to create this distance between himself and the role he plays. This doesn’t mean that emotions are excluded from his acting, but it does mean that everything in Brecht’s theater is focused on the character’s— socially de‹ned—behavior, not on his psychological makeup. Rather than becoming his role, the Brechtian actor “reports,” as an eyewitness, on what his character does, on his actions. Feelings and thoughts, inevitably generated in the process, are equally socially de‹ned. In the famous “Street Scene”2 from Der Messingkauf (The Copper Transaction), Brecht shows how he wants to bring this behavior about. The eyewitness to an accident tells the bystanders who have come ›ocking how it happened. While he does so, he demonstrates the incident and the behavior of the parties involved, of the victim just as much as of the chauffeur of the car. The eyewitness is not concerned about a precise or artistic imitation of the behavior of the people involved in the incident, nor about their emotions: he is not an actor, and he is not giving a performance, but he is just an accidental passerby who explains to the bystanders what he thinks has happened. This doesn’t mean that there are no emotions involved; on the contrary: in order to get his story across, he has to show how he observed the emotions of the parties involved. In doing so, he doesn’t identify with the people whose actions and emotions he refers to, he just demonstrates their behavior. The circumstances force him to proceed this way; even an actor would do it this way: he is on the street, it is in real-time reality that the accident took place, and he reports about it in the here and now. The bystanders want to know what exactly happened—with all the details! They are not there to applaud his acting. That’s why he 44 ACTING IN REAL TIME [54.146.154.243] Project MUSE (2024-03-28 22:16 GMT) doesn’t transform himself into the victim or the perpetrator. Yet he is able to vividly revive the accident in a visual and physical manner. He can quote the words of the victim when he saw the car coming; he can indicate the speed of the car by movement and by making the sound of it, just as he can...