1. Before the class, my questions were...

I came to this course with a big interest in Brecht, a very famous but mysterious figure…and I came with an awareness that many prevailing information and representation about Brecht are highly problematic, including lots of misunderstanding and clichés…

I brought with me also a great curiosity particularly about Brecht’s Learning Plays, an area lacking research, because of my background as a practitioner in drama-in-education, applied theatre and drama therapy…

Especially, more or less at the same period of time, Brecht was a pioneer, besides Moreno (the founder of Theatre of Spontaneity, Psychodrama, Sociodrama and Sociometry, an important root for many other applied theatres and action-methods in the latter half of the 20th century), proposing to put spectators into action, making them to experience drama/theatre as “spect-actor” (a term used by Boal later) for an in-and-out exploration leading to change—a change that has implications more than merely individual change, leading towards socio-political-cultural changes…

The main questions in my mind were:

1)      Can Brecht’s idea/vision/theory/experiment of the learning plays inspire contemporary practices of applied theatre and any other theatre practices that do not satisfy with being an isolated pure art?

2)      Can the accumulated practical experience and theorization of contemporary applied theatre practices contribute to Brecht’s vision/project of Learning Play, or be considered as an extension of this plan?

3)      Can both Brecht’s learning play, as a critique and attempt to reform/revolutionize the mainstream theatre at his time, and different contemporary applied theatres inspire/inform my practices of theatre in the “art field” or “art industry”, now often constructed as something separated from the “applied field”?