Week 9 Reading Response-Sham

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.

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