7. Back to Classroom: Working with text and concepts in action with active intentionality (7 Feb 2024)

We also had a class focusing on exploring concepts—concepts related to Brecht’s experiments in theatre in learning play and epic theatre as new forms responding to the socio-political-cultural scenario in his time, when put in their historical context. However, these were also done through exercises instead of pure discussion. In group works, we were asked to process a text through different lenses, such as its overall structure or different key concepts.

The result was the same text re-presented in different ways, through which some dimensions were highlighted. Besides the “contents”, I can see that the formal elements and dimensions of the text also communicate to readers, and these were things that receivers would either easily miss or be affected by without knowing. I found this experience echoing Brecht’s insight about making theatricality visible to make the audience aware of its effects, so that they can get into a liminal space between the presentation/representation and the reality presented/represented, in which they can reflect on both because neither of them can dominate their consciousness anymore in such state. This was another key learning about how to make spectators reflective.

The collaborative process of searching in the text and re-articulating the text also highlighted two key mechanisms in Brecht’s learning play, namely, learning via action with active intentionality and going beyond one’s own horizon stimulated by others during co-learning. These explain why Brecht wanted to break the traditional audienceship in which audiences were passive and isolated from each other despite being in the same space.