VERFREMDUNGSEFFEKT

The Verfremdungseffekt is the basis of the performance technique of Bertolt Brecht's EPIC THEATRE, and is employed to distance the actor from his or her character in order to shift the spectator's attention away from EMPATHY and identification and towards an engagement with the characters’ social and political circumstances. During Brecht's visit to Moscow in 1936, the Soviet playwright Sergei Tretyakov introduced Brecht to the Russian FORMALIST Viktor Shklovsky's concept ostranenie, or ‘ESTRANGEMENT’, of which Brecht's term is a part translation (dungs is Old German for ‘strange’). The word has been variously translated into English as ‘defamiliarisation effect’, ‘distanciation’ and ‘ALIENATION EFFECT’. Brecht first used the term in his essay ‘Alienation Effects in Chinese Acting’ (1936), where he describes the effect of witnessing the formal distance between the actor and her emotions in Mei Lan-Fang's Beijing Opera Company. In Brecht's method, the actor shows, narrates or quotes his character; the actor would demonstrate the role, often directly addressing the audience, observing his or her character as though in the third person. Stage design, lighting and music also contribute to the Verfremdungseffekt by exposing the fictive, constructed nature of the play. The overall effect would break the hypnotic spell of identification in the minds of the audience, forcing them rationally to consider how the character's plight is fundamentally an aspect not of a self-contained fictive world but of real social, political and economic institutions, and to instill the desire to imagine alternative structures. The influence of the Verfremdungseffekt on both theatre and CINEMA is an aspect of the wide-ranging legacy of epic theatre.

READING

Brecht, Bertolt (1964) Brecht on Theatre: The Development of an Aesthetic, ed. and trans. John Willett. London: Methuen.

Robinson, Douglas (2008) Estrangement and the Somatics of Literature: Tolstoy, Shklovsky, Brecht. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.

VORTICISM

Vorticism was a pan-artistic AVANT-GARDE movement that flourished briefly in London during 1913–15, with an attempted revival in 1919. The main organising force behind the movement was the Canadian-born artist and writer Wyndham Lewis, supported by the considerable energies of the American poet and promoter Ezra Pound, who abandoned IMAGISM for the new project.