Minor Project: Brecht- Alienation or the Verfremdungseffekt

For the sake of ease, I will refer to this as the Alienation effect as the other name for it is a little complicated and unnecessary in my opinion, so without further ado, here is what I found and interpreted to do with the alienation effect and Brecht. Firstly, allow me to explain what the alienation effect is when the creator of a text deliberately doesn't let the audience get too lost in the narrative, this is done so that they remain a critical observer, this means they constantly analyse and respond to what they are seeing on stage or screen. The first step towards the alienation effect is to make the stage seems strange, to have the audience start by questioning the set up in front of them and why it is the way that it is. When I studied Stanislavksi and viewed how he dealt with Stage fright, I found that this is quite the opposite, Brecht almost encourages this fright in order to separate character and actor, this allows the audience to forgo their preconceived perceptions of the character and view it a fresh with a new critical eye because they aren't seeing a typical performance that they have grown used to.

If we take the analogy of a football match, imagine that a player has rounded the keeper, approaches the goal line but then all of a sudden he puts his shot wide, what are the reactions of the fans? A sense of inevitability and a passive viewing of the event? No, of course not, they all have an opinion on how it went wrong and what they would have done, they are constantly in a state of criticism and judging. Imagine then that the team in question lose the game by a single goal, the audience are then even more critical and even more emotional about the events. This was Brecht's aim for the viewers of theatre, to have them constantly being critical of the actions of characters but to also have them engage on a lager scale that deals with the actions of the characters and also motivates them into thinking of the context being presented. As we know Brecht had an agenda which meant he wanted to showcase politics and engage audiences with said politics, to do this he would have to make them care about the events they were seeing in a manner that was deeper than just passive viewing.

The alienation effect was also to do with splitting character perceptions, Brecht uses the example of someone's wife who is also someone else's mother, in order for these two perceptions to be portrayed we need the alienation effect, this is because they are two very different roles, despite being able to fill the same body space. A mother is a family member and is to do with being a care giver and guardian. A wife however, is an object of desire, she's a prize, almost an object of sorts (traditionally of course, I am not trying to demean women). These two differing discourses are how the alienation effect occurs. In terms of acting this means that the actor must almost separate into two different characters on stage, this is useful for audience engagement as it gives them a reason to think about why the portrayal changes when the discourse changes.