Playing Brecht: Creative Appropriation in the Foreign Language Classroom

Summary

Introduction

While Brecht's best-known theatrical device may be the Verfremdungseffekt, his most consistent theatrical device—one that spans the entirety of his career—was that of appropriation and recombination. In Die Dreigroschenoper (The Threepenny Opera) alone, he and composer Kurt Weill mixed gruesome crime reports with eighteenth-century ballad opera, contemporary dance melodies with Rudyard Kipling, medieval French poetry with the Bible, and the list goes on throughout the piece and throughout his career. Sampling (and arguably stealing) at will from myriad genres, authors, and cultural traditions, Brecht's plays often work in highly original ways precisely because he was not entirely original, and his considerable productivity stemmed at least in part from his artful borrowing techniques. Yet Brecht's works, like many dramatic texts, are often treated in the classroom as finished, polished products, with the messiness of their creation and performance history tucked away in the endnotes.

To drive the students in my Modern German Drama course to pull at the sutures of the bound text and to engage with the valuable cultural material that is often glossed over in purely textual discussions, I turned to Brechtian practice itself for inspiration. Specifically, I designed an assignment that required students to imitate Brecht and Weill themselves, who employed a mixture of cultural appropriation, translation, and combinatory creativity to generate the songs of Die Dreigroschenoper. For instance, their “Zuhälterballade” (Pimp's Ballad) was almost entirely a modern German translation of a medieval French poem, set to an original melody by Weill. Because the origin story of the “Zuhälterballade” is so well known, it was an excellent candidate for a sound design assignment in which students had to create a replacement for the original song by following an analogous creative process: translating an older German poem into contemporary English and setting it to a melody that was foreign to the source material. By asking the students to enact the same process as had been used by the artists they were studying, the assignment staged a revealing, productive encounter between the course material, the language acquisition process, and performance practice.

Learning Environment

To give some context for the learning objectives that generated this assignment, I will briefly explain how it was embedded in my course and what sort of students actually undertook it.