| Good afternoon, everyone. |
| As you know, this set of lectures will look at various theatrical movements of the twentieth century. |
| And today, we will be looking at a theatrical movement arising in the early to mid-20th century namely Epic Theater. |
| Now, to understand what is unique about Epic Theater, |
| we need to first look at the term Naturalistic Theater. |
| Remember last week when we talked about Naturalism. |
| We learned that Naturalism is a movement in European drama |
| and theater that developed in the late 19th and 20th centuries. |
| It refers to theater that attempts to create an illusion of reality |
| through a range of dramatic and theatrical strategies. |
| As a matter of fact, in Naturalistic Theater, |
| the audience empathizes with the lives of the characters onstage. |
| The audience forgets their own lives for a while and escapes into the lives of the actors. |
| When Naturalistic Theater was at its height, |
| one theatrical practitioner named Bertolt Brecht wanted to use it as a force for change. |
| Brecht wanted to make his audience think. |
| He believed that theater should be capable of provoking social change |
| while still providing entertainment. |
| For example, in Naturalistic Theater, when an audience cries for a character |
| or feels emotion through the events happening to them, |
| it's called "catharsis". |
| Brecht was against "catharsis". |
| He believed that while the audience believed in the action onstage |
| and became emotionally involved, |
| they lost the ability to think and to judge. |
| He wanted his audiences to remain objective and distant from emotional involvement |
| so that they could make rational judgements about any social comment or issues in his work. |
| His kind of theater was called Epic Theater |
| and the act of distancing the audience from emotional involvement |
| is called the Verfremdungseffekt or alienation effect. |
| To achieve the alienation effect, Brecht used a range of theatrical devices or techniques |
| so that the audience was reminded throughout the performance that they were watching theater. |
| First, narration is used to remind the audience that they're watching a presentation of a story. |
| Sometimes the narrator will tell us what happens in the story before it's happened. |
| This is a good way of making sure that the audience doesn't become too emotionally involved in the upcoming action. |
| Second, a placard is used. |
| A placard is a sign or additional piece of written information presented on stage. |
| Using placards might be as simple as holding up a card, a banner or a slideshow. |
| In the musical, Miss Saigon, for example, |
| a highly effective slideshow is used to demonstrate the loss of lives in the Vietnam War. |
| Third, a montage effect is achieved. |
| As we learned in Chapter 4: "Movie Editing Introduction", |
| a montage is a technique in film editing |
| in which a series of short shots are edited into a sequence to condense space, time, and information. |
| Brecht consciously borrowed the idea from this. |
| In Epic Theater, each scene is treated as an episode |
| and is self-contained in the story. |
| The events of an episode are not necessarily a result of the preceding episode. |
| This juxtaposition of scenes employing multiple locations and time frames creates a montage effect. |
| Of course, there are many other techniques involving lighting, gesture and space |
| used to achieve the alienation effect. |
| Instead, I'd like everyone to do some research on Epic Theater techniques and... |
| write a short essay about these techniques. |
| Next time, we'll share your essays and discuss the additional techniques |
| that attribute to the alienation effect. |