Brecht's Lehrstücke - Modernist Learning-Plays

In Brecht's essay "The Modern Theatre is the Epic Theatre" (1930), the primary stress is on function and the role of the apparatus. It develops a notion of "refunctionalisation" as a pivot between artistic and social production. Brecht understands art as production rather than reflection (unlike, for example, Lukács and Bloch). He defines two different modes of functioning for the apparatus: one that is functional to social reproduction, and another, which the essay anticipates, in which the theatrical practice transforms the apparatus into an organ in the class struggle. His emphasis falls on audience reception, on the interaction between stage and audience. We can make distinctions within Brecht's work based on the opposition that he provides in a fragment between minor pedagogy and major pedagogy. Most of the works commonly examined in the academy fall under the category of minor pedagogy; the epic theatre. Minor pedagogy indicates a practice where the structure of relations between the author, stage and audience remain more or less as they are within bourgeois theatre. It is thus a critical practice, providing nothing new. Its aim is the elaboration of negativity. Major pedagogy is what epic theatre strives after, where the theatrical practice transforms the structure of relations of the apparatus. It strives for a more democratic mode. It thus connects to the "art for producers" debate, as elaborated in the work of Benjamin and many Soviet theatrical practitioners and cultural theorists. Epic or minor pedagogy is designed to combat bourgeois ideology, whereas the Lehrstücke or major pedagogy is concerned with the transition to a socialist society. The epic techniques developed in the former form the basis for the practice of the latter.

The social bases Brecht draws on for this practice, which he develops from the late twenties into the early thirties, include the communist workers choirs, which had a membership of about half a million people at the time. The project also involves taking theatre into schools or workers' social clubs.

The following features may describe the mode of theatrical performance promoted in these plays. Firstly, the plays have no fixed text. Although the texts have a highly formal, rigorous structure, this is designed to facilitate insertions or deletions [according to the exigencies of the particular project]. The performance of the texts is designed such that there is no actor / audience separation, shifting the emphasis to the process gone through rather than the product achieved. This eliminates the contradiction in bourgeois society and its theatrical apparatus specifically, between the producers, or artistic labourers, and the means of production (the relation is contradictory insofar as the ownership of the latter alienates the labour of the former). The distinction is no longer operative. The primary purpose, intention or goal of these performances is for the actors to acquire attitudes. This relates to his theory of gestus, and his particular mode of mimesis. The relation to reality is a critical one. Mimesis is understood not a simple mirroring, but as a measuring; it always involves some kind of attitude on our part. It is not possible, in Brecht's view, to produce a neutral mimesis. Brecht's poem "On Imitation" elaborates this notion succinctly:

He who only imitates and had nothing to say
On what he imitates is like
A poor chimpanzee, who imitates his trainer's smoking
And does not smoke while doing so. For never
Will a thoughtless imitation
Be a real imitation.

Ideally, the Lehrstücke project tries to set up a whole series of new dialectical relations. Firstly, the relation between form and content is subsumed or synthesised into a higher dialectic of function; "the means have to be asked what the end is." It thus attempts to side step the whole form / content question in favour of one concerning function. The actor / audience interaction is supposed to become dialectical, as is that between the actor and the text. Principles of interaction govern these two relations.

I would like to develop a relation to Walter Benjamin's work as a means of providing a basis for a discussion of the Lehrstück form. The Latvian actress Asja Lacis provides this. She worked in post-revolutionary Russia and at one stage developed a children's theatre there. She co-directed Brecht's early production of Edward II (1923) and was, along with Tretyiakov, Brecht's main mediator with the Soviet avant-garde theatrical practices (from which Brecht took many of his ideas; many of the techniques we now think of as Brechtian originate in earlier Soviet practices). She also introduced Brecht and Benjamin in 1929. The year prior to this meeting, Benjamin wrote an article entitled "Program for a Proletarian Children's Theater," which was not published until the late sixties (mainly as a result of Adorno's responsibility for the posthumous publication of Benjamin's work and the article's divergence from what he approved of). Written the year before Brecht and Benjamin met, the essay is significant for its analysis of children's theatre in the Soviet Union--that is, post-bourgeois theatre--and the remarkable similarity the description bears to Brecht's Lehrstück projects. The few--crucial--differences in the mode of theatrical production described give us a context to discuss the Lehrstüke.

Running swiftly through the main theses of this short article, he maintains that phrases or ideology are empty and have no power over children; with young children, only truth is effective. He proposes to transform the whole structure of proletarian children's education such that theatre becomes its centre. He argues that the total life of the child needs to be affected and the educational process needs to be contained in a circumscribed area. The theatre provides this; it is a process in which the whole individual is involved. The central assumption of this project is that in theatre reality and play are fused. Like the Lehrstücke, performance is not the goal; the performances produced by the children become almost incidental. The tensions of collective work educate. There should be no direct influence from the director, he insists; there is no giving of ideology, only a mediated influence through the material provided or the lessons and performances that they are directed towards. Furthermore, the children's collective takes responsibility for any moral adjustments or corrections; the children take on an active role, determining where they go. The central idea governing this practice is observation. Benjamin understands children's actions and gestures as "signals." The pedagogical process is one of learning to observe more closely those signals among one another; this is understood as a creative, playful process: "It is the task of the director to rescue the children's signals out of the dangerous magic-realm of mere fantasy and to bring them to bear on the material" (1928, 30). Rather than just playing out fantasies, they use their play to engage with the material that has been provided. He discusses the transformation of gestures into forms of expression: making props, paintings, paintings, recitals, dancing, and crucially improvisation. Through improvisation, the genuine "moment" of gesture becomes the most important thing, rather than the immortality of the product produced.

When this process finally is distilled and produces a performance, he understands that as a momentary release of all the tensions created in the educational process. He discusses the movement from educational training into the performance as "the radical release of play" (31). He stresses that the proletariat cannot pass class interests onto the younger generation "through the unfair means of an ideology which is geared to suppress the child's suggestibility" (32). Society should begin to discipline the children only when they are adolescents; the ideological class education begins with puberty. Thus: "Proletarian education proves its superiority by guaranteeing to children the fulfillment of their childhood" (32). He draws an analogy between the children and their performances and the ancient cults and their carnivals. The moment of the performances are carnivalesque because an inversion of roles takes place, whereby the children "educate their attentive educators" (32). Benjamin claims that through this process of performance children grow "to be free" and fulfill their childhood "through playing" (32). Finally, he suggests that such a project represents an advance not only on current theatrical practices, but also on the raising of class consciousness as practiced by the Marxists of his day; it is what we might term a messianic practice that is an instantiation of what Marx calls "the future in the present":

In this children's theater lies a power which will overthrow the pseudo-revolutionary behavior of the recent bourgeois theater. For what is truly revolutionary in effect is not the propaganda of ideas that here and there excites actions which cannot be consummated, and which are dismissed at the theater exit in the first sober moment of reflection. What is truly revolutionary in effect is the secret signal of what will come to be, which speaks from the gesture of children. (32)

What I would like to suggest is that the Lehrstücke present discussions; the text is only a pre-text or starting-point for further development. Brecht later suggested that the plays were unusable for other times and were full of errors. In light of this, do we consider them recipes for action or exercises in the teaching of dialectics as a method (and thus a moment of the interaction of theory and praxis designed to make reality manageable)?

A good example is the couplet The Yes-Sayer and The No-Sayer (1929-30). Like The Exception and the Rule, these plays were performed in schools. The former ends with a child sacrificing himself in the interests of the collective. When Brecht took this to one group of children, they objected to the conclusion. In response, Brecht wrote the second play. Instead of just being an inversion of the theses of the first play, however, Brecht changed the emphases in certain crucial ways. It was thus more of a supplement that expanded or complicated, rather than simply contradicted, the first play. He claimed that the children teaching him better.

Brecht's attitude to revision is significant to this question. Unlike Beckett, for example, Brecht is quite happy to chop and change things around and for subsequent directors of his plays to do this (although there is a rather silly debate currently occurring about whether the model-books for his productions at the Berliner Ensemble amount to statements similar to those Beckett made about his texts). Heiner Müller's comment to the effect that to use Brecht without criticising him is to betray him is apposite here, since the whole point to Brecht's project is the development of a critical attitude.

Another point of reference is Augusto Boal who has perhaps taken (along with Müller, though in a different direction) the idea of the Lehrstück and tried to realise it. His theatre of the oppressed and forum theatre's plays are very like Lehrstücke. One goes into a community with a play about that community containing particular lessons or issues of concern to them, and during the performance an audience member can stand up and say that they disagree with what is being presented, and get up on stage and perform the part differently; thus turning the performance into a testing of reality--Boal speaks of forum theatre as a "rehearsal for the revolution." At one point he became something like a mayor in a city in Brazil, and he used this Lehrstück-form (though in more of a liberal-democratic ethos) to facilitate the development of civic policies. They would travel into the slums and present the plays as a discussion of what they needed; thus producing a direct link between the civic institution and theatrical institution, where the latter becomes functional to the former in order to produce new policies.

There are other issues that Brecht's essays and the Lehrstücke raise: the relation to popular culture and the relation to technology (insofar as the early Lehrstücke attempted to refunction the radio) being two of the most prominent. In addition to the question of the role of discipline, however, the second question I would like to raise concerns the truth-claims that Brecht makes in the essays about the plays. Carl Weber has suggested that the plays presuppose a more bodily-based epistemology; a different kind of understanding is produced by acting out the issues than that produced by being told them and interrogating them with one's mental faculties alone. I would suggest that in the Lehrstücke Brecht is not providing truth, but rather opinions--and a method with which to interrogate them.
 

Additional Works Cited

Benjamin, Walter. 1928. "Program for a Proletarian Children's Theater." Trans. Susan Buck-Morss. Performance 1.5 (March / April 1973): 28-32. Trans. from Über Kinder, Jungend und Erziehung. Edition Suhrkamp, 391. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1969.