Representation and Reception: Brechtian 'Pedagogics of Theatre' and Critical Thinking

Description

Representation and Reception: Brechtian ‘Pedagogics of Theatre’ and Critical Thinking deploys German playwright Bertolt Brecht’s theory of drama and performance, what he calls "the pedagogics of theatre", to create modes of critical thinking in the classroom. Extrapolating on Brecht’s estranged forms of representation―narrative, story, montage, Verfremdüngseffeckt or alienation, tableaux, ostension (showing), gestus, masks and music―Burney constructs an original "3-R Pedagogy" or "spiral of semiosis"―"Rethinking/Replaying/Re-cognition"―that is designed to create critical thinking and "complex seeing". Her dramatic production of Brecht’s Lehrstück, or learning-play, The Exception and the Rule, for a non-literate, working-class audience in Hyderabad, India, critically analyses how audiences make meaning through image, word and ideology, gesture, memory, collective experience and personal (hi)stories. Cover Table of Contents Acknowledgments Introduction: The Poetics and Politics of Representation and Reception The Learning Play Pleasure/Instruction Past/Present Sign, Myth, and Meaning Orientalism: Representation of the Other Representing Africa Aura and Authenticity Brecht and Derrida Burney’s 3-R Pedagogy New Media Technologies and Representation Chapters References Chapter One: Bertolt Brecht’s “Pedagogics of Theatre”: Image, Ideology, and Meaning Ideology Mimesis and Semiosis Seeing and Doing Everyday Theatre Theatre as Event Selective Inattention Theatre and Sports “Epic Theatre Is the Modern Theatre” Brecht and Piscator Brecht’s Grand Design Montage References Chapter Two: A Theatre with Footnotes: Diacritics and Referentiality/Witnessing and Learning Underlining Pedagogy Punctuating Theatre Acting in Quotation Marks Witnessing and Learning Witnessing as Knowing The Learning-play: Witnessing and Voting References Chapter Three: “The Pregnant Moment”: Ideality, Gestus, and Tableau as Learning Brecht and Eisenstein Gestus as the Pedagogic Moment Ostension as Inference of Meaning Gesture as Intentionality Subjectivity Instant Re-play The Conception and the Reality The Berliner Ensemble’s Performances Brecht as Classical Avant-gardism? Deconstructing the East/West Dichotomy The Intervention of the “Art of Living” References Chapter Four: Theatre as Metaphor of the Street: Brecht in the Basthi Across the Seas Non-literate Working-class Audience The Exception and the Rule The Discourse of Theatre The Production Song, Music, and Dance The Reception Ethnography of Audiences and Reception Complex Seeing Banjara Hills References Chapter Five: Rethinking/Replaying/ Re-Cognition: My 3-R Pedagogy for Critical Thinking What Is Critical Thinking? Critical Thinking and Education My 3-R Pedagogy Rethinking Replaying Re-cognition References Afterword: The Possibility of Critical Thinking: Bringing the World to the Classroom References About the Author Index