17. Concluding Reflection on Key Discoveries (this time more formal...)

From the experiential exploration, reading and hands-on learning in this course, my main learnings can be summed up as the followings:

1.      Brecht’s ideas/insights can be learnt much better if it is not taught merely as theory or concepts, in a purely intellectual and verbal manner via lectures or reading-and-discussion. The learning requires experiences as a base for further reflection, and such experiences can only come via action/praxis, doing and making, with components of active searching and intentionality, in both (seemingly) “natural” context of social reality (e.g., on the street) and particular spaces/scenarios that are, or presented as, “isolated” (e.g., museum/exhibition)—these are learnings outside classroom and theatre (except these two places are consciously treated as such artificially isolated spaces).

2.      In the former (i.e., “natural”) learning situation, attention should be guided to the tendency/mechanism of self-concealing of performativity that make it appear “natural”, and therefore strategies of explication and/or disruption/interruption are needed in such context. In the latter (i.e., "isolated") learning situation, attention is to be paid to the artificiality of the explicit or even heightened presentation through which certain things get charged with extra-ordinary significance, as well as on the conditions of such presentation that are usually marginalized or even hidden. Such conditions include the materiality, labor and the whole infrastructure behind.

3.      However, just by putting people in action in real lives or making spectators actors in theatre cannot ensure or is not sufficient for achieving awareness, understanding and reflection. Some kind of facilitation is usually required because an intentionality of active searching, awareness and reflection may not come automatically in most cases.

4.      For the learning process to merge from experience, contradiction and strangeness are to be highlighted to induce a realization of dialectics (a paradoxically unsettling duality/contradiction) and the dialectical thinking that follows. Such act of highlighting can be achieved by various strategies that make things appear a bit “off” or “odd”, like presenting the things with an unusual manner, putting them in a context/place that seems a bit “wrong”, or changing their size and/or shape, especially to the point that the things’ original usefulness or function starts to vanish. These are means of interruption that creates Verfremdungseffekt, which activates reflection as dialectical thinking.

5.      A sense of humor and playfulness are required for these because they bring a flexibility and openness of the mind to learn from active experiences, and they provide also the sensitivity to discover the strangeness in the usual/familiar (hence clowning can be a useful means for these). Furthermore, it brings pleasure/enjoyment/fun, which motivates and sustains learning.

6.      Even the most conceptual and symbolic things have their materiality and dependence on an apparatus for the making of their actualizations in concrete existence or representation. The materiality and the apparatus are conditioning this process but each is also conditions on its own. All these conditions constitute the historicity of ideas or symbolic beings. Therefore, thoughts have a material dimension and hence are historical.

7.      Theatre as an apparatus and an artificially separated space of representation and presentation, through which people can experience not only by passive reception but also by active participation, can be used as a pedagogical means to achieve all of the above. However, it needs to be “re-functionalized” in such a way that the spectators become actors/producers while the actors/producers take charge of and own the apparatus. This central to Brecht’s idea of the learning play.

8.      However, the actual experiments of Brecht’s learning plays almost a hundred years ago may not fully embody his ideas, or may not be the best examples for his vision, probably due to all sorts of limitations in his historical context, or his own developmental stage in his theatrical research and experiment. Although learning plays are a more radical form of the theatre revolution that calls for participation, compared with his epic theatre that remains as a Schaustück (show piece), it seems that there is much to learn from Brecht’s later epic Schaustück regarding a kind of dialectical dramaturgy.

9.      Principles and strategies contemporary applied theatres (e.g., drama-in-education, Theatre of the Oppressed, drama therapy, etc.) can be utilized to enrich and refine the actualization of Brecht’s vision of the learning play, especially regarding facilitation of participation, while. conversely, the lack of dialectics in their current states are to be modified by Brecht’s dialectical dramaturgy exemplified in his epic theatre.

10. As theatre is a cultural apparatus and constituted by many apparatuses with their materiality and artificiality, to create a learning play, we need a bottom-up thinking and experimental process to go together with a top-down mind.

11. The facilitation of interactions between participants is as important as the facilitation of the participation of each participant.

12. Dialectical thinking cannot be achieved just by highlighting strangeness, contradiction, or paradox here and there. These have to be linked into a flow for a process of accumulation and also some moments when they are put together and held with tensions between opposites for the generating of dialectical dynamics that drives reflection. These are what a dialectical dramaturgy should consider.

13. Combining people’s participation and the use of gestus appears to be important for the happening and deepening of their learning via action for awareness and reflection, but it requires further research on how to do so. The use of gestus during participation may serve as an important thread to understand the design of Brecht's actual experiments of the learning play better although they may not be directly suitable for the historical context nowadays, because how imitation and action can bring critical awareness and reflection is key to the idea of the earning play.

14. To me, the whole experiential, exploratory and experimental process of this course itself can also be considered as a model of a learning play that facilitates sociological, embodied and dialectical learning. This helps me fill the gaps in Brecht’s or Brechtian scholars’ theoretical texts and put the concepts in context to imagine the real possibilities of their actualization. Especially if we consider Brecht's ideas and vision as an unfinished project, or even an "unfinishable" project, as well as his emphasis on the historicity of theatre, we can see that exploration and experiment will never end and experience has a primacy in any learning based on exploration and experiment instead of passive reception and mere obedience.