Brecht Workshop with Prof. David Barnett (Oxford) - Actors, Playrights, Directors

Over five days, David Barnett offers participants, be they actors, director, dramaturges or other theatre-makers, both an introduction to and a comprehensive experience of Brechtian approaches to making theatre.
On the first days, participants work their way through Brecht’s ideas for a politicized theatre not by speculating on his theories, but by enacting and reflecting on them. Partly through exercises, but mostly through work on scenes and extracts taken from well-known plays, participants engage with a different way of rehearsing dramatic material that actively seeks to expose the power relations inherent in every human interaction.
The workshops as a whole serve to sensitize participants to social issues that sometimes go under the radar. They will become familiar with a detailed and deliberate approach to performance, staging social interactions as a form of choreography. Brechtian theatre intervenes in the dramatic text and changes it fundamentally.
Over the course of the workshop, Barnett equips the participants with a repeatable method and specific ways of looking at the particular problems raised by dramatic extracts.