Event

Stefan Brecht’s Queer Theatre

Wed, Sep 30, 2015

6:30 PM

Stefan Brecht, Bertolt Brecht’s son, was a poet, a theater scholar, and a well-known figure in the downtown New York theater scene in the 1960s and 70s. His book Queer Theatre (1978) provided a lyrical and contemporary consideration of its subjects including Jack Smith and Charles Ludlam’s Ridiculous Theater. The book prompts discussion about Bertolt Brecht’s methodology of transparency of the mechanisms of theater in relation to the work of directors and playwrights in the downtown scene who were more interested in entrancing audiences through performance. How does his approach play out in contemporary downtown and queer new york city theatre—for example the immediacy of a Justin Vivian Bond performance versus the hypermediacy of the Wooster Group? Join in a lively discussion with professors and students at the Graduate Center as part of the Mediating the Archive Seminar at the Center for the Humanities for an evening exploring the lasting impact of Brecht’s critical writing on the legacies of this complex scene and its queer aspects. This program is presented in tandem with the exhibition “A World Redrawn: Eisenstein and Brecht in Hollywood” by artist Zoe Beloff, professor at Queens College, CUNY.

This event is presented as part of Mediating the Archive, an interdisciplinary research group that employs public humanities practices and explores narration as a guide for social change. The group is supported by the Mellon Seminar on Public Engagement and Collaborative Research. For more information, email [email protected].

Cosponsored by the Mediating the Archive Mellon Seminar in Public Engagement and Collaborative Research in the Humanities, and the Ph.D. Program in Theatre, The Graduate Center, CUNY.