BRECHT & EPIC THEATRE
This German playwright and theatrical reformer developed epic theatre from the 1920s onward
Who is Bertolt Brecht?
This theatrical effect reminds audiences that they are watching an artificial performance
What is the alienation effect?
An epic is a long narrative poem recounting these
What are heroic deeds?
This ancient Mesopotamian hero searches for a way to escape death after his friend Enkidu dies
Who is Gilgamesh?
This concept describes feeling estranged or separated from one’s surroundings, work, products, or self
What is alienation?
Brecht wanted theatre to appeal primarily to this part of the audience rather than relying on emotional identification.
What is the intellect?
This movement uses distortion, exaggeration, fantasy, and intense visual or verbal effects to express subjective experience
What is Expressionism?
These traditional phrases helped oral poets describe recurring ideas while fitting poetic meter
What are verbal formulas?
This Old English epic, written down in the 8th century, grew from Germanic heroic traditions
What is Beowulf?
This Marxian concept describes work that is compelled, uncreative, controlled by others, and separated from the worker’s fulfillment
What is alienated labour?
This form of drama uses loosely connected scenes and interrupts the storyline with analysis, argument, or documentation
What is epic theatre?
This theatre movement of the 1950s and early 1960s reflected the idea that human existence is absurd and lacks inherent purpose
What is the Theatre of the Absurd?
This term means adding new phrases to express more recurring concepts and metrical possibilities in an oral tradition
What is scope?
This French epic transforms the Basques who attacked Charlemagne’s rear guard into Saracens
What is the Chanson de Roland?
This 16th-century religious revolution led to Protestantism and is traditionally dated from Luther’s Ninety-five Theses in 1517
What is the Reformation?
Brecht collaborated with this director in 1927, whose technical experiments helped shape epic theatre
Who is Erwin Piscator?
In this Samuel Beckett play, two characters wait in a circular, nearly actionless structure for someone who may never arrive
What is Waiting for Godot?
This term describes eliminating redundant formulas that duplicate phrases already in the traditional stock
What is economy?
These two Japanese national chronicles, compiled in 712 and 720, preserve material derived from oral traditions
What are the Kojiki and Nihon shoki?
These two Latin principles summarize Luther’s emphasis that Scripture alone is authoritative and justification comes through faith
What are sola scriptura and sola fide?
Brecht and Kurt Weill collaborated on this successful satirical ballad opera in 1928
What is The Threepenny Opera?
This German term names the socially critical blend of Expressionism and realism associated with George Grosz and Otto Dix
What is Neue Sachlichkeit (New Objectivity)?
These Greek performers, known as “stitchers of songs,” recited famous Homeric works for large audiences
Who were the rhapsodes?
This Japanese epic recounts the Gempei War and uses the Heike family’s downfall to illustrate the Buddhist transience of all things
What is the Heike monogatari?
This French lawyer published Institutes of the Christian Religion in 1536 and later developed a disciplined religious community in Geneva
Who is John Calvin?