This is the 39th Brecht Yearbook. I hope that it possesses use-value.

The volume's first main section collects a series of impressions from the International Brecht Society's 2013 Symposium in Porto Alegre, Brazil. Two keynote addresses open the section. In one, Ingrid Dormein Koudela, one of the foremost Brecht authorities and theater educators in the symposium's host nation, reflects on a decades-long project of researching Brecht's theory and practice and adapting those to theater work in São Paulo and across her country. In the other, Nikolaus Müller-Schöll offers a complex, cogent argument that links the Messingkauf to Fatzer, framing each as a component of Brecht's most forward-thinking project, which unfolded at the intersection of theater, theory, and performance. At first glance, this pair of contributions seems to confirm broad assumptions about the differences between Brecht-work in Europe (a highly specialized, socially remote intellectual undertaking) and South America (a practice-based enterprise seeking direct social impact). What struck me more and more as I worked with each piece, however, was how alive Brecht becomes in both of them, and how the human expression and social context that form the center of gravity in Koudela's text draw their energy in large part from theoretical nuance, even as the theoretical nuance that Müller-Schöll elaborates is meaningless without his carefully established connection between thought, creative action, and context.

The next four articles extend the theoretical, practical, and historical range that the two keynotes establish. Willi Bolle offers an account of his work with young students coming of age in the severely impoverished conditions of the Belém favelas. The source-texts for the theater productions he has developed with them are the novels of Dalcídio Jurandir, a chronicler of life in the favelas; the theater methods draw significantly from Brecht. The result, Bolle argues, is a performance experience that has emotional resonance but also spurs reflection on the part of performer and audience. The audience and its alterity is Florian Vaßen's principal focus, and his contribution explores how the Brechtian dramatist and the spectator can collaborate to resist the theater's tendency to subsume everything in its spectacular performance dimension (alles eintheatern, to use Vaßen's term). There is a textual component to this collaboration, and Kristopher Imbrigotta takes up that idea of artist and audience collaborating via text in his analysis of the Programmhefte of two Berliner Ensemble productions of Katzgraben.