When watching the Bread and Puppet theatre, I find myself initially engaged. But as the performance jump from one issue to another, albeit related thematically and in the root of their problems, I found it slightly difficult to stay focused. I also grew slightly skeptical of the point of compiling all of these issues into one performance. Even though all theatre and all art, one might say, touches on a multivarious host of questions, there’s usually a focal point.

In the Brecht essay, he situated the lack of total, “self-surrendering” empathy in Chinese theatre. I think perhaps another angle to look at this from is a redefining of empathy, instead of “identifying” but allowing oneself to be moved. As he said, the degree of removal makes the audience retain their sense of self, and even the artist is well-aware he is performing something else. No one is imagining oneself as the hero or heroine. Rather, they allow themselves to be moved by the story of another. It is a “feeling with” that doesn’t venture into filling the interior of the other with an self-sentimentalizing imagination. I think this outline of empathy is better temporary, merely mental imagination of being another person because that can easily be translated into self-pity. If empathy is going to mobilize people, people need to allow themselves to be moved by others.

Process notes: I decided to put these slogans in a circle because they are sayings with circular meaning. They are moving counterclockwise to symbolize they are moving back in time. I was inspired by Layli Long Soldier’s “choose your own adventure” poem; there are several ways you could read this.

While reading Bertolt Brecht’s On Chinese Acting, similarly to Ketaki, I was confronted with an entirely new and fairly opposite conception of effective theater production to my own. Brecht expresses admiration of the alienation effect that he finds present in Chinese theater in which a Chinese actor is said to be “merely quoting the character,” not attempting to bring spectators to feel that they have become the character through empathetic intimacy as in Western theater, but instead creating a distance between the character and the audience that prevents a “self-surrender” and “any empathy on the spectator’s part” (132). As I mentioned Lynn Hunt’s work in a prior reading response, I have tended to believe in the power of empathy and fully “surrendering” by putting yourself in the mind of a presented character. I believe that this empathy allows an individual who may not be able to conceptualize the pain or gain of character to do so with an understanding of their shared internal emotional worlds to make sense of foreign occurrence’s in another’s life. I worried that although Brecht notes that this alienation effect in Chinese theater allows for “criticism” and “protest” on the part of the audience, which seems beneficial to discussing issues of social change, the inability to empathize may lead to ignorant, unnecessarily harmful critiques. However, in reading Brecht’s point that a Chinese actor “makes it clear that he knows he is being looked at,” I see a potential benefit for this type of acting in the realm of social change (130). In the conclusion of Brecht’s piece, he notes that a new theater must see everything from “the social standpoint” in order to rebuild society in such a way that allows for criticism of society and historical reporting. In considering that both the actors and spectators must recognize that they are being seen, everyone must recognize that they are a part of the conversation and are forced to consider their own position in such. The actor must recognize that what they say will be heard and the spectator cannot feel as though their comments are hidden behind a curtain, or computer screen analogously. By recognizing that everyone is seen as their true selves in this dynamic it becomes necessary to enter the mindset of considering the potential societal impact of one’s own statements, responses, and behaviors, which I find to be highly beneficial and vital to discussions of social change.

One thing I took away from both the Brecht and the Schumann reading was the importance of staying objective in performances in order to provoke audiences to have a critical reaction to the work demonstrated. The alienation effect, by refusing to let audience members sympathize with the characters on stage, forces those members to grapple with whether or not the action or not exists as is in the real world, and if they are okay with that. In the same vein, puppetry is extremely alien from audience members, and is already seen as distant from other forms of theater, so it should use that advantage to attack issues in the New World Order. “Objectivity” can be dangerous however, and I think being able to incorporate the experiences of people actually affected should be considered just as important. I feel as if there are significant groups of people who are not aware of how their privilege allows them to avoid thinking about these problems in the first place, and this lack of awareness could lead them to believe that depictions are not as important as the actors would like them to believe, which prevents meaningful discourse and change from occurring. When I was watching the Bread and Puppet Theater, I also had doubts that this would be able to reach out to people who already had right wing views. I feel like a call for empathy might be a more effective way to reach out to enact change, but I am not completely sure if that is due to my western bias.

Puppetry, as Schumann describes it, is the purest embodiment of “show, don’t tell” of the art forms we’ve studied this quarter, by quite a wide margin. As he writes, “the puppets themselves are mutes,” which means that their appearances and actions convey information while they themselves do not. The differential between, as he describes it, “legitimate theater” and “puppet theater,” however, means that puppetry is not taken seriously as an art form, but it allows puppetry to embrace a rule as a more activist form of expression, the role that it takes in Schumann’s writing. Similarly to the Verfremdungseffekt mentioned by Brecht, the distance from more commonly viewed art forms provided by poetry allows us to ingest its message more effectively.

The relative lack of spoken language in puppetry mentioned by Brecht and practiced by Bread and Puppet Theater allows for a much more form of communication than other theater: through motion and image more than through dialogue. For instance, in Bread and Puppet, around the 40 minute mark, although both characters (I forget their names, but they represent capitalism and communal living) are speaking, far more information is conveyed through their appearances and the non-speaking characters’ movements than through their dialogue, which is mostly throwaway jokes.

Process Notes: I was going to write a pamphlet on how to know if you are a lesbian, but then I checked the Super Tuesday polls and subsequent discussions on Sanders and socialism and was reminded of the fervent declaration made by other candidates on their loyalty to capitalism. Gender equality and feminism, but more importantly feminist movements are often discussed as if they can only survive in a “liberal” environment, so I wanted to do something that offends that aesthetic. Originally the plan was to put Mao’s quote on one side and his face the other, but then I realized people are probably not going to be familiar with his saying and the language betrays its origin from outside the contemporary feminist movement.

Paradoxically, painting this was a really soothing process that quelled some of my anger. It’s making me think artists catharsis like theatre is political in their message but also in how they help its participants work though sentiments.

Process Notes:

I was originally going to make a poster or banner of some kind that had a kind of Giving Tree vibe about a mom and greedy children. However, the whole nature-is-a-mother-we-are-taking-advantage-of form of environmental awareness is so played out, especially in my writing. 

I thought the Bread and Puppet Theatre stuff we looked at was awesome, so I tried my best shot at making a how-to kind of like the one we read. Deciding what “how to’s” I wanted to add was the most difficult part of making this because I wanted issues/guides that felt relevant, but I could still write in a sort of sarcastic tone. I wanted to have a mix of drawings and words so that it still felt like a visual poem rather than something I could have just typed up. 

(Hopefully the file uploads properly. Fingers crossed.)

HowYouCanSaveThePlanet

The alienation effect – or at least the attempt to create it – is a very new way of thinking about looking at / depicting the world for me. Rather than trying to imitate life and the attitudes we have about it like pretty much every movie I have ever seen, this technique looks at situations from a viewpoint that most might overlook. In this way, an attempt to achieve the alienation effect is an attempt to defamiliarize. By defamiliarizing everyday life, we can bring about political discourse from a myriad of angles, from “the man” looming over head to the little things that tick us off on our way to work. When we take a second look at everything, even the the mundane, we can bring about discussions that have been swept under the rug or have never even seen the light of day. 

The way Brecht described the alienation effect, I understood a large aspect of it to be looking at the world with an unfamiliar eye. When talking about social change, I think this aspect is very important. This forces us out of complacency. It reminds us to look at our society from (for lack of a better term) an outsider’s point of view. This forces us to see the things we put up with regularly as they truly are, worms and all. 

I understood “the old art of poetry” to be a kind of call to action. The book invites people to start looking at the world through the eyes of people such as the Chinese actors, Brecht and Schumann. This is done by discussing the silence of puppetry in parallel with political complacency. The reader must look at their own views on the world and if they are the views they really want to have.