Marxist theory essentially says that societies social norms, common sense, morals and human nature are all results of the time in which they are formed from all parts of society clashing and interacting to form what Marx called a dialect, it is key that we understand this to be a man-made construct and not one of natural formation. To bring this back to Brecht and his theatre then he would see it as his duty to highlight and almost shame these social constructs for what they are and not necessarily conform to them. One issue with this was that theatre at the time was concerned with single people and their immediate lives and family, It didn't overly care for the large social groups that impact the world and as such Brecht had to birth a new theatre which dealt with these large issues, this is what he dubbed Epic Theatre. One aspect of this new movement was episodic scenes, scenes that exist within their own confines but then move onto something else and transverse socio barriers in between their transition, this is because Brecht was asking the audience to believe that something that they were very aware was staged, was real and the transitions helped to do this because the audience then has to participate and infer the journey in between. Interestingly Brecht famously said that "art is not a mirror with which to reflect reality, it is a hammer to shape it" in other words his goal was not just to make people aware of the social world around them it was to engage them to change it and to mould it into a better one, or what he viewed as a better one. Epic Theatre differed from standard and realist cinema as it often took huge time leaps in narrative and had a more disjointed feel in order to juxtapose one scene saying one thing against another that displayed different ideals. In the early 1920s Brecht completely abandoned psychologically complex characters and praised early silent films for their focus on the physical instead of the 'bourgeois psychology motives'. It is of note at this point that this is extremely other end of the spectrum to home Stanislavsky viewed acting. Brecht inspired a large movement across Europe which saw many directors using huge casts and genuine machinery to shift focus away from personalities to the forces which create them, so the focus was from the character as a worker to the system he worked for (for example). Brecht then took this further and used props heavily and insisted they be used and real, this then acted like a painting on a bare wall when they were added on stage, they filled a gap that was otherwise dull and as a result were scrutinised, this awareness meant that Brecht made sure his props had something to say to the audience. Projection technology also advanced at this point in history and they began projecting images and cartoons on screens above the performance, the most famous of these is probably the stock exchange prices being shown over a group of actors who are starving. the beauty in this is that it takes their starvation away from being a personal plight and makes it a wide spread issue that is brought to the audience's attention.
(So important was Brecht that he has a statue in Berlin)
As behaviour manipulating people's lives became a more widely accepted thesis, Epic Theatre sort to highlight the conditions by which this happens but not in a realistic way, you see, for Brecht to highlight the ideologies of the world he would have to take people out of the world otherwise the message would be rooted in the ideologies of the time and this was the opposite of what Brecht sought after. Brecht's venture away from character was only to be a temporary one and he soon returned to character focus, however, he was still not concerned with the "bourgeois science" of psychology but instead sought to make his characters a microcosm of whatever aspect of society incased them, trough their external actions, as Brecht believed focusing on psychology simply limited the externals of a character. This then revolved around what is referred to as gastric acting, the most obvious case of which is social movements to convey status or other such social constructs, this is acts like bowing or changing tone to speak to certain people. But deeper than this Brecht used repeated gestures and such like to create meaning, the example I have studied is from Mother Courage
In this production whenever the main character concludes a business deal she snaps shut her purse to signify she is happy with the deal. In the conclusion of the piece then when she is paying for the funeral of her final child she pays for it and returns one coin to her purse before snapping it shut one last time to remind the audience of all of her previous deals and how she came to be here. On a wider scale this is not to signify the characters progression but rather to show how the capitalist world has destroyed her life but she doesn't realise because she is so wrapped up in it, we can see this because even at her daughters funeral she is pleased with her deal even though she is down to her last coin, she is essentially in poverty but the system tell her to be happy because of a good deal done and so she is. On top of that in this one gestic action we can see her social standing and ideologies thus she serves as a microcosm for her social group of people.
Gestus acting and Stanislavskian acting are not mutually exclusive as gests can be the result of the personality that an actor has created to make the character 'real' however, I do not feel the Brecht and Stanislavsky can co-exist in a performance as Brecht wants his actors to represent something bigger and remove from the perceived realism, whereas Stanislavski aims to create a realistic, mainly internalised character, whereas Brecht is purely external. To sum this up in terms of how it may serve me in my project as it felt a little more like a history lesson than an analysis of theory, I think the key thing to take from this is the idea of gestic acting and how actions can shape a character's use, in particular when the character is a symbol, then anything they do is therefore also symbolic and this two is something to bear in mind. The other thing to consider, and I suppose this can be in conjunction with building a character in the Stanislavskian sense, is what does the character represent and what purpose does it serve within what I am trying to say in the piece.
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