UNFAMILIARITY AND RECOGNITION IN THE THEATRICAL TEACHING PLAY THE DECISION: attempts to foresee the spectator’s experience in contemporary theater

Abstract

In the teaching play The Decision (Die Massnahme), Brecht seems to propose an interruption in the man’s understanding relations about art/world. From a limit situation — the decision over a man’s killing for the revolution’s better pace ―, the conditions for the emancipation of spectator’s conscience are installed, and the spectator is prompted to create its own questions and answers before the game presented. Thus, we foresee Brecht’s attempts to “des-alienate” the spectator, by the stage opening for creative conditions between the cognitive experience of the viewer and the scene poetry. What is filtered from Brecht’s thought, in an effulgent manner in the play, is the expectation of a shared experience between stage and audience, or, in and expanded idea, between art and world. The creation of a space in art (Tassinari) in the didactic play allows a dual movement of inclusion and exclusion of the viewer. We are not talking about an idealistic vision, where the subject/spectator is known before the experience, and we are neither endorsing the modern project of art autonomy. We glimpse the conformation of a contradiction between unfamiliarity and recognition that would facilitate an experience of exchange. When the play causes unfamiliarity it excludes the spectator from the fictional world, but for another hand, it doesn’t foreclose the spectator’s movement toward the world of the play, and both, face to face interrogate, interpellate, cross each other. Thus, Brecht proposes an arena of exchanges and deviations where the spectator is one of the action poles.