Welcome to Burjesta Theatre. 2017 was a particularly busy year for Burjesta with a large adaptation of Shakespeare’s history plays, a major original piece of writing on the momentous events of the Russian Revolution on its 100th anniversary in October as well as performing monologues from Italian wife and husband team Franca Rame and Dario Fo and finishing off the year with a full-scale panto an adaptation of Mother Goose and her Golden Egg from 1806. This saw us perform as usual at our place of residence, The Casa, as well at Liverpool’s Unity Theatre and venturing over to Greater Manchester to perform at Salford Arts Theatre.
As a consequence and following seven years of non-stop activity leading to 20 original productions we’re taking a break for the time being though we are running workshops (see below).
New Series of Workshops – ‘Brecht, Marx & Dialectical Theatre’
Starts 25th July @ The Casa, Hope St, L’pool
‘Art is not a mirror held up to reality but a hammer with which to shape it’.
A new series of weekly workshops, each Wednesday from 7pm looking at the work, theories and influence of the most important modern theatre practitioner, Bertolt Brecht.
Bertolt Brecht wrote some of the most well-known plays of the 20th century, Mother Courage, Threepenny Opera, Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui, The Caucasian Chalk Circle as well as being the most important theoretician of modern theatre, putting forth an alternative to mainstream theatre, which he called ‘Epic Theatre’ and latterly ‘Dialectical Theatre’, itself based on Karl Marx’s revolutionary political philosophy, ‘dialectical materialism’.
We will be looking at Brecht’s key works, as well looking at his theories of theatre (alienation effect). We’ll try out some of his training exercises and introduce some of the key concepts of ‘dialectics’, originating with 19th century philosopher Georg Hegel and transformed by Karl Marx. Finally we’ll be asking how we can make use of Brecht’s ideas for theatre practice today.
All are welcome from total beginners to experience actors, no prior knowledge of Brecht is required. Each session costs £3/£2, pay on the evening.