ArteActa 2020, 4:53-68 | DOI: 10.62804/aa.2020.004

Buying Brass. A Method Re-Examined

Anders Carlsson, Alice Koubová, Kent Sjöström

This article is an account of a lecture-performance presentation held in the context of "Contradictions as a Method," an international Bertolt Brecht symposium which took place in November 2019 at the Academy of Performing Arts in Prague. As three speakers engaged with theatre in different ways, we were inspired by the dialogical structure of Brecht's play Buying Brass and staged a similarly structured conversation. This conversation imitated and transposed the form in which thespians and the philosopher meet in Brecht's original text. However, we decided not to perform characters from the play, but to speak from our own professional perspectives. Consequently, we focused on the current problems in theatre that we have met within our professional engagement, not specifically problems mentioned in the original play. Yet, during the rehearsals it came to light that there were many overlaps between the themes and characters of Brecht's Buying Brass and the discussion of our live conversations. Therefore, we decided to use explicit references to some parts of the original Buying Brass play in our staged lecture-performance.

Keywords: Bertolt Brecht, Buying Brass, Contradictions as a Method, lecture-performance

Published: December 15, 2020  Show citation

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Carlsson, A., Koubová, A., & Sjöström, K. (2020). Buying Brass. A Method Re-Examined. ArteActa, 3(4), 53-68. doi: 10.62804/aa.2020.004
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    References

    1. Tom Kuhn - Steve Giles - Marc Silberman (eds). Brecht on Performance. Messingkauf and Modelbooks. London: Bloomsbury Methuen Drama, 2014.
    2. Martin Puchner. Drama of Ideas. New York: Oxford University Press, 2010. Go to original source...
    3. Jacques Derrida. Of Hospitality. Translated by R. Bowlby. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000.

    This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License (CC BY-NC 4.0), which permits non-comercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original publication is properly cited. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.


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