The one-act play Die jüdische Frau (The Jewish Wife), a scene from Bertolt Brecht's Furcht und Elend des Dritten Reiches (Fear and Misery of the Third Reich), is generally considered an exemplar of Brecht's Epic Theater. Elements of distanciation include the poetic commentary preceding the scene, the extended pantomime at its outset, the one-sided phone conversations the audience witnesses, and the wife's rehearsal of the discussion with her husband prior to his arrival and its subsequent repetition. Set in 1935, the year of the passage of the Nuremberg racial laws, laws that “would provide the legal framework for the systematic persecution of Jews in Germany,” the scene shows Judith Keith packing her suitcase, preparing for her initial exile in Amsterdam. She does so to alleviate the political pressure on her gentile husband, a chief surgeon at a Frankfurt hospital whose job is threatened by his marriage to a Jew. To her friends and relatives, Judith's departure is presented as a short sojourn, though everyone, including her husband, knows that her leave is of a more permanent nature. Both the acquiescence to the political developments in this upper-bourgeois household and the charade put up to veil this fact are cruelly exposed in this scene, which highlights the combination of fear and deceit that characterizes the existence under the totalitarian regime.

Die jüdische Frau is one of twenty-seven scenes Brecht wrote in 1937–38 depicting everyday life in Nazi Germany, and it is one of the few instances in which Brecht addressed Jewish persecution under National Socialism. Even then, however, he is not primarily interested in Nazi racial policies targeting German Jews as a separate group, but in the mechanisms of fascism as pertaining to the German bourgeoisie. As John J. and Ann White have observed, for Brecht, anti-Semitism was “a politically functional phenomenon,” an ideological tool to deflect from class conflict. Die jüdische Frau consequently depicts the persecution of German Jews in the context of “the capitulation of bourgeois intellectuals” and, pointing to the lack of active resistance, of their complicity in the rise of National Socialism.

In its attempt to document everyday life in Nazi Germany, Furcht und Elend des Dritten Reiches is, perhaps, unique among Brecht's dramatic works, in that it presents the author's critique in historically and socially realistic settings rather than in temporally removed locales or in parable form.

To anyone outside the closely knit worlds of theater and cultural politics, the ongoing conflict about the directorial change at the Volksbühne Berlin may seem a little exaggerated. Like a storm in a teacup or like one big fuss, the affair seems all the more incomprehensible because the change in question will take place only after an unprecedented twenty-six years, during which the Volksbühne, also known as Volksbühne am Rosa-Luxemburg-Platz, remained under the reign of Frank Castorf, who, after an already controversial career in pre-unified Germany (both East and West), had been installed as the theater's new head in 1992.

It is worth noting that the two books, which commemorate the past twenty-six years at the Volksbühne, have their focus clearly on Castorf and his dual function as the theater's artistic director and stage director. The title of the first, Republik Castorf (2016), published by Alexander Verlag in Berlin, suggests that the Volksbühne should be regarded as a state of its own, with Castorf as its ruler, while the second, Frank Castorf (2016), by the equally renowned publishing house Theater der Zeit, presents the Volksbühne as Castorf's chef d’oeuvre, with other directors, curators, artistic staff, and dramatic advisers as a supporting cast.

This perspective, although it will offend some, is not entirely removed from the realities of the Volksbühne. The theater on the north side of Rosa-Luxemburg-Platz has never been a democratic institution—neither in its early years, when it played an important role in the political wars of prefascist Berlin, nor in the cultural wars that marked the first twenty or so years after German reunification. Nowhere in the interviews collected by Frank Raddatz for Republik Castorf is it suggested that Castorf should be regarded as a democratic ruler or a director who encouraged the ideal of equal footing or collaborative work. Instead, the recurrent metaphor is that of the more or less benevolent dictatorship (dramatic adviser Carl Hegemann even calls Castorf a “Stalinist”), combined with an artistic egocentrism and a pronounced lack of interest in the administrative or organizational aspects of theater management.

Introduction

My aim in this article is to analyze contemporary responses to the Leipzig premiere of Brecht and Weill's Aufstieg und Fall der Stadt Mahagonny in 1930, and reflect on them with reference to a new model of reception theory. The contemporary reception of Brecht's work during the Weimar Republic is an area of Brecht studies that has been somewhat neglected (though the same point applies to other key theatrical or operatic works from this period, such as Krenek's Jonny spielt auf!), and my discussion attempts to rectify that anomaly at least to some degree. I begin by presenting my revised variant of reception theory, in the context of a countercultural perspective on the development of modern art. In so doing, I also seek to provide a theoretical basis for investigating the process of cultural recycling as such, whether Brecht is the recycler or the recycled. Having done the methodological groundwork, I move on to Mahagonny, and begin by contextualizing the Leipzig production in relation to historical and political developments in Germany between 1929 and 1932. I then consider contemporary responses to the Leipzig production, based on analysis of twenty-five reviews in newspapers and periodicals, and round off my discussion with some hopefully provocative and contentious reflections in conclusion.

Recycling, Counterculture, and Reception Theory

There is a case for arguing that all the groundbreaking cultural developments in Germany and Central Europe from the Enlightenment to Postmodernism may be construed as countercultures—not in the perhaps trivial sense that any “new” cultural development is critical of its predecessors, but in the more drastic and fundamental sense that modern German and European culture has been characterized by a series of paradigm shifts, or even caesuras, whereby the conceptual and institutional presuppositions of the prior cultural formation have been decisively rejected. Deploying the category of counterculture as a tool of historical analysis also enables us to rethink contemporary controversies concerning, for example, the relationship between modernism and postmodernism, or the relative priority of the avant-garde—as opposed to countercultural manifestations—in initiating and defining radical artistic movements from the late nineteenth century onward.”

Me-ti is a collection of reported dialogues, aphorisms, and anecdotes prompted by the Chinese philosopher Mê Ti or Mo Di, a critic of Confucius, who Brecht read in Alfred Forke's 1922 German translation. Brecht adapted the Chinese philosophical form to present examples from his reading of Hegel, Marx, and Lenin and to produce mini-narratives in response to the experience of political exile, his discussions with Karl Korsch, doubts about developments in the Soviet Union, and questions of the ethics of personal behavior. Modern figures are given a Chinese disguise and the whole is presented as if it were the record of philosophical discussions in a classical Chinese school. Brecht wrote the passages mainly in exile in Denmark but did not prepare them for publication. Any selection and ordering of the material might have produced different emphases, as a handbook for teaching dialectical thinking, a work on ethics and virtues, a coded discussion of the contradictions of Stalinism, or of Brecht's relationship with Ruth Berlau (Lai-tu).

Editors have produced quite different compilations from the material. Uwe Johnson's 1965 Suhrkamp edition presented the passages in the sequence found in the Bertolt Brecht Archive but starting with a selection compiled by Brecht's collaborator Margarete Steffin. Johnson highlighted its fragmentary nature, established the use of the title Me-ti / Buch der Wendungen and persuaded Brecht's widow, Helene Weigel, to agree to the inclusion of the Lai-tu stories. Klaus Völker's 1967 Suhrkamp edition grouped thematically related texts, collected the Lai-tu stories at the end, and dropped the reference to the work as a fragment. Werner Mittenzwei's 1975 Aufbau edition organized the texts into a teleological sequence of five books, moving thematically from theory to revolution to the establishment of socialism. Jan Knopf and the co-editors of the 1995 volume 18 of the Berlin and Frankfurt edition (BFA) argued against editorial interventions not justified by evidence of Brecht's intentions and presented the texts in chronological order and where texts were of the same date, alphabetically. They dropped Me-ti from the title and insisted on Buch der Wendungen, selected different variants of certain texts from the previous editions and left textual inconsistencies uncorrected.

Der 1. Januar 2027 rückt näher und damit der siebzigste Todestag von Bertolt Brecht, der den weltbekannten Dichter und Theaterdenker gemeinfrei werden lässt. Entsprechend macht sich die Essaysammlung Brecht lesen schon einmal auf den Weg, den von Lehmann prognostizierten unvoreingenommenen Blick auf den Dichter jenseits der orthodoxen Rezeption und der politischen, literarischen und theaterästhetischen Klischees anzutreten, zugunsten einer Aktualisierung der Brechtforschung.

Lehmanns Band versammelt insgesamt einundzwanzig neue und überarbeitete Essays aus den Jahren zwischen 1978 und 2016, die Brecht nicht jenseits, sondern als Teil der literarischen Moderne begreifen. Es gilt, sein Schaffen einerseits in der Ambivalenz zwischen Widerstand und Widerspruch zu perspektivieren, andererseits begreift der Theaterwissenschaftler Brechts Werk auch als Ergebnis taktischer Rücksichten und strategischer Unternehmungen der Allianzbildung. Er sieht dabei in Rekurs auf Adorno eine adäquate Brecht-Lektüre nur möglich, wenn weder die politische Dimension noch die artistische Darstellung ausgeblendet werden (240), eine Balance, die der vorliegende Band einzuholen versucht.

Der Ausgangspunkt der Zusammenstellung verschiedener Aufsätze über Brechts Gesamtwerk ist es, den Fokus stärker auf die lyrischen Arbeiten des Dichters zu lenken. Was zunächst in einem Theater-Band irritieren mag, wird im Hinblick auf den Zielgedanken der Monographie schnell deutlich: Der von der Forschung immer wieder hervorgebrachten Banalisierung und Didaktisierung von Brechts Lehrstücken gilt es durch die Verbindung von lyrischen und dramatischen Texten einen differenzierten und komplexen Blick auf den Autor und sein Wirken entegenzustellen. Hierfür braucht Lehmann die Gedichte, über die er neu auf Brecht schaut, frei nach dem Motto: Wer solche Gedichte schreibt, könne keine banale, belehrende Theatertheorie entwerfen. Entsprechend umfasst der Band ebenso viele Lyrik-Aufsätze (Essays 3–5, 7, 16 und 18) wie Arbeiten zu den Theaterstücken (Essays 6 und 8–12).

Brecht, das macht Lehmann immer wieder deutlich, wollte kein bestimmtes Denken verbreiten, sondern Denkweisen verändern (234). Lehmann jongliert hierfür in einer zugänglichen und teils bildhaften Sprache zwischen Brechts Texten—seien es Gedichte, Lehrstücke oder epische Theatertexte— und zieht intertextuelle Bezüge in einer Weise heran, die wohl nur ein echter Brecht-Kenner leisten kann. Über die Darstellung der schönsten und bedeutendsten Gedichte, aber auch über Fragment gebliebene Theaterstücke hinaus wendet sich Lehmann in weiteren Aufsätzen zentralen Themen wie dem Tod als Aktivum, dem Vergessen und der Verausgabung, der Sexualität sowie den Motiven Wasser oder Herbst zu (Essays 17, 19, 20).

When we think of the many ways in which Brecht's work, ideas, and texts have been and are being received, refashioned and recycled, we should of course think—and perhaps in the very first place, rather than at the end of this volume—of the use and usefulness of Brecht in the creative arts, in literature, and the theater in the first instance, but not just there: also in film, in multimedia dialogue, in the visual arts, and so on. Brecht himself was a restless experimenter, and many since have been inspired by his experiments to go on and continue that method, in sympathy with or, occasionally, in bitter opposition to Brecht's own spirit. As we have seen, Brecht entertained a lively dialogue with a very wide range of literary and cultural traditions, always weighing up what he could take from them, adapt, and develop. His innovations often come about in the process of recycling the old, for example his “Epic Theater” as a form of reception of the theater of antiquity and of the Early Modern. As a writer, Brecht was of course not only an innovator in the theater, but also opened up new (and old) poetic forms, experimented with subject matters and registers previously thought “unliterary.” He experimented with what were then new media: writing poems to be distributed as records, plays for the radio, and film treatments, and he created his own multimedia and cross-genre works, the photo-epigrams of War Primer, and even made a “Proposal to combine architecture and lyric poetry.” What fruitful territory this is! It is hardly surprising that later artists have taken up the challenge to continue and develop the experiments.

It is less easy for a primarily academic conference to reflect this sort of work in practice. But for the Oxford symposium we were determined also to develop a cultural program, and the pieces that follow are the best we can do by way of traces of all such activity—the work that can at least somehow be represented in linear written form. Some of this work also leaves a more lasting trace, in the form of photographs and filmic accounts, on the website of the Symposium: http://brecht.mml.ox.ac.uk/ibs-symposium. When this is taken down, we hope to transfer at least a proportion of the material to an Oxford University media and research archive and/or to the IBS website.

Prolog: Straßenszene und Mauerschau als Modelle des Erzählens

Mein Vortrag betrifft das Feld wissenschaftlich-künstlerischer Forschung und ist ein Versuch, Erkenntnisse aus der künstlerischen Praxis zu gewinnen, und umgekehrt, in die künstlerische Praxis einzubringen. Brechts Erzählung Die Bestie ist als Vorlage besonders geeignet, weil sie Fragen künstlerischer Gestaltung zum Gegenstand hat. In der Erzählung be schreibt Brecht eine Probensituation im Rahmen einer Film-Produktion—ein Casting besonderer Art. Es geht um die Rolle des Gouverneurs Muratov—verrufen als brutaler “Schlächter” während der Pogrome in Südrussland vor dem ersten Weltkrieg—und die Versuche des ehemaligen Gouverneurs selbst, diese Rolle zu “spielen.” Er bewirbt sich aufgrund seiner “Ähnlichkeit,” wird aber nicht erkannt—infolge seines Alters und seiner inzwischen desolaten und ärmlichen Verfassung; auch das “Bestialische” seines Wesens bleibt in einer banalen Alltäglichkeit verborgen. Die Erzählung stellt Fragen zu dieser Art Banalität und Konventionalität einer Existenz, in der “bestialische” Gedanken, Gefühle und Handlungen zu Hause sind, und Fragen zu den Möglichkeiten der Kunst, beides zu erfassen und zu vermitteln. Dabei geht es um die Opposition von schauspielerischer Gestaltung und der szenischen Rekapitulation von Ereignissen durch Betroffene bzw. verantwortlich Handelnde—aktuell: “Experten des Alltags,” d.h. auch um das Problem der ästhetischen Wirkung von Handlungen und Personen, die so sind, wie sie sind.

Brechts Erzählung entstand 1928. Sie knüpft in der Sache an verschiedene damals aktuelle Filme und Filmerzählungen an. In diesen Vorlagen ist das entscheidende “dramatische” Moment jeweils die Entdeckung der authentischen Person, der “Bestie,” im Verlauf der Proben. Brecht ist an diesem Effekt offensichtlich nicht interessiert. Die Aufdeckung erfolgt beiläufig am Schluss, und zwar ausschließlich für den Leser. Sie erfolgt auch weniger, um Ahnungen zu bestätigen, als um herauszustellen, dass sich hier ein Filmteam intensiv mit einer “authentischen” Person befasst—schlich gesagt: einem Verbrecher, ohne diese Person zu erkennen, selbst da nicht, wo sie sich in der Wahrnehmung von Augenzeugen “sehr naturge treu” verhält. Brecht interessiert dagegen offensichtlich eher die Diskrepanz zwischen Aspekten der Wirklichkeit und den Mitteln der Kunst, sie festzuhalten und zu gestalten.

Dieter Wöhrle hat 1988 die Erzählung als Beispiel “ästhetischer Filmkritik” untersucht und verwendet dort den charakteristischen Be griff “dialektischer Prosa.” Dieser Begriff verweist auf einen immanenten Charakter der Erörterung innerhalb einer Erzählung: ihre Diskursquali tät.

This readable and attractive book is an overview of the relationship between Bertolt Brecht and Lion Feuchtwanger between the year 1919, when the aspiring young playwright Brecht first appeared unannounced at Feuchtwanger's Munich door—he had brought an early draft of the play that later became known as Trommeln in der Nacht, and Feuchtwanger was impressed not only by the quality of the writing but also by the shabbiness of Brecht's outward appearance— and 1947, when Brecht paid a farewell call to Feuchtwanger at the latter's mansion, Villa Aurora in Santa Monica, California, shortly before his trip to the East Coast to be interrogated by the House Un-American Activities Committee. Even after Brecht's departure for Europe the day after his interrogation in Washington, DC, Brecht remained in contact with Feuchtwanger until his death nine years later, in August 1956. Feuchtwanger wrote to Brecht's widow Helene Weigel expressing consternation at his younger friend's death: “es fällt mir schwer, mich zurechtzufinden in einer Welt ohne Brecht. Wenn ich an Rückkehr nach Europa dachte, dachte ich immer zuerst an Brecht. Als er sich hier auf der Terrasse des Hauses von mir verabschiedete und darauf drängte, daß doch auch ich bald käme, war ich sicher, daß wir uns nicht auf lange trennten. Brecht war mir trotz aller Gegensätzlichkeiten sehr nahe” (153).

Although the two writers never became close enough friends to use the familiar “du” form of address with each other, preferring instead the more formal “Sie,” they had great respect for each other and also consulted and collaborated with each other on a number of important literary projects. Feuchtwanger's help was crucial for Brecht in his Munich years, when the older, more experienced, and better-known writer helped smooth Brecht's entry into the literary and theatrical world of the Bavarian capital. Together the two writers worked on plays like Leben Eduards des Zweiten von England and, much later, Die Gesichte der Simone Machard. Likewise, Feuchtwanger appears to have been the first to suggest to Brecht that he name his modern adaptation of John Gay's Beggar's Opera (1728) Dreigroschenoper.

In a short piece written in 1937, Brecht turns his attention once again to the Lehrstücke—or learning plays—with which he had been busy until only a few years before. The note is important in understanding Brecht's innovative Lehrstücke for many reasons, including how they reconfigure the relationship between audience and actor and how these plays are to be performed. But the comment is particularly illuminating with regard to how Brecht conceives of the afterlife of this subgenre of his works: “Die Form der Lehrstücke ist streng, jedoch nur, damit Teile eigener Erfindung und aktueller Art desto leichter eingefügt werden können” (The form of the learning plays is strict, but only so that parts that one has come up with oneself or that are topical in nature can be integrated all the more easily). It is the form of these plays that is set in stone, but it is up to the director, should he or she so choose, to insert parts between these scenes. Above all else, Brecht's comment provides a compelling indication that he was aware not only that his plays could be reused and altered, but also that, in being reused and altered, their form would remain intact.

Given his conviction that the theater need respond to the changing shape of reality and social relations (see, for example: “Über Stoffe und Formen,” BFA 21, 302–4), Brecht conceived of a rigorously strong relationship between form and context in his thought and his works. His own efforts at restaging and revising his plays in his lifetime likewise demonstrate how he saw that even written texts would require adaptation to answer alterations in the dialectical composition of the world he inhabited. His Lehrstücke are no exception. These radical experimentations with form from the late 1920s and early 1930s were conceived and executed amid the struggle for a socialist future before the flourishing of Nazism in Germany. His alterations, no matter how light, to Der Lindberghflug (Lindbergh's Flight, 1929–30), culminating in his 1949–50 version of the text as Der Ozeanflug (The Flight Across the Ocean), are a case in point. And in the context of the establishment of a postwar socialist state in the German Democratic Republic (GDR), Brecht recognized that the Lehrstücke would once again be significant in using the theater as a political tool for overcoming the contradictions of a new social reality.

Brecht's Theater of Cruelty

“That was cruel theater, an intrusion into consciousness, an attack on false consciousness, the destruction of illusions,” claimed Heiner Müller and added that this production was the “high point” of the work at Brecht's Berliner Ensemble. The Tutor was a lesson on how to make theater like Brecht. However, if Brecht's work in the theater, as the postwar legend in the second half of the twentieth century would have it, now peaked in the founding of the Berliner Ensemble and if The Tutor at the Berliner Ensemble comprised the culmination of that which was possible, then it makes sense to take a look at this piece today from a theater studies perspective. While numerous essays and a whole book have been written on The Tutor from a literary or socio-historical perspective—a theater studies perspective is still to be developed. After a short recapitulation of that which Brecht attempted with his adaptation of Lenz's play, in an attempt to rehabilitate this notable piece from a theater studies perspective, I would like to examine three aspects: to which extent this production was part of Brecht's professed project of creating a theater for the “scientific generation of scandals” or of “ideology demolition.” Furthermore, I will attempt to follow the specificity of his work in the theater, and finally, I would like to trace the way that Brecht elevated the castration scene to the status of an emblem, before ultimately arriving at a new interpretive hypothesis by going over previous interpretations of this scene.

Brecht's Adaptation of the Historical Material

In The Tutor or the Advantages of Private Education, Jakob Michael Reinhold Lenz picks up on a grievance of his time: because the gentry obstructed their appointments as pastors, young theology graduates—like the protagonist Läuffer in Lenz's play—must hire themselves out as servants to earn a living, are exploited as “tutors,” which means as private teachers dependent on the favor of aristocratic patrons. Läuffer teaches in Insterburg in the service of a major, his precious wife, and their children Leopold and Gustchen. A parallel plot shows how Gustchen's lover Fritz spends his student life in faraway Halle together with other high society sons.

New York-based artist Zoe Beloff talks with people from the past: rather than dead objects of study, they become her comrades and collaborators, she writes (6). In A World Redrawn, Beloff thus converses with Bertolt Brecht and Sergei Eisenstein, who both spent time in Hollywood but left without seeing their ambitions realized. Invited by Paramount Studios in the wake of the success of his Battleship Potemkin (1925), Eisenstein stayed for six months in 1930. The studio rejected all of his ideas. Brecht, on the other hand, arrived as a refugee from Nazi Germany and worked in the Dream Factory for six years, between 1941 and 1947. Of his many film treatments, only one was turned into a film: he co-wrote the script for Hangmen Also Die. Beloff's conversation with the two takes their experiences in Los Angeles as points of departure. The overall result is a quirky, smart, and thought-provoking book whose release follows an exhibition of the material and artwork compiled in A World Redrawn at the James Gallery at the Graduate Center, City University of New York in 2015.

Unlike a conventional academic, Beloff engages with Brecht and Eisenstein creatively. Not only does she analyze their ideas on art and politics, she adopts them in her films. A World Redrawn includes scripts to three of her short movies: Two Marxists in Hollywood; The Glass House, based on one of Eisenstein's ideas; and A Model Family, which draws on Brecht's notes for a play. In addition, the book offers three substantial academic essays: Beloff's A World Redrawn presents an in-depth look at her creative research process and practice. Hannah Frank pens a fascinating cross-cultural history of Russian and American animation in “The Potential of Pochta: Unlikely Affinities between American and Soviet Animation, 1929–1948.” A delightful drawing of an Eisenstein-inspired character accompanies the pages of Esther Leslie's essay, “Those in Glass Houses Laugh,” on the role of laughter in explicitly political art: for the span of twelve pages, A World Redrawn turns into a cheeky flipbook. The anthology also includes film stills and poster reproductions that are part of Beloff's visual oeuvre, and archival material, such as handwritten notes and sketches from the Bertolt Brecht Archive in Berlin and the Russian Archive for Literature and Art (RGALI) in Moscow. Beloff's unorthodox approach ultimately succeeds in demonstrating the acute timeliness of Brecht's and Eisenstein's thought.

In this paper, I argue that between the late 1960s and early 1970s, Brechtian theater in India should be understood as the name for a form of political theater that instilled the ideal and the practice of political aesthetics into the fabric of Indian theater. I propose that this politicization of Indian theater was the result of the creation of a new “theatrical idiom” of Gestic Realism through the implementation of Brechtian aesthetics. The idiom of Brecht's Gestic Realism goes beyond a photographic reproduction of an immediate reality and it encourages the activity of unmasking society's hidden causal complexities. In contrast to realism and naturalism, where ideology is hidden or covert, Brecht's Gestic Realism makes ideology visible by “revealing the causal complex of society/unmasking the ruling viewpoints as the viewpoints of the rulers/writing from the standpoint of the class that has in readiness the broadest solutions for the most urgent difficulties besetting human society/emphasizing the factory of development/concretely and making it possible to abstract.” In the Indian context, this idiom of Gestic Realism was significant on two counts. First, it differed from the prevalent conventions of political theater in India, which were either Socialist Realist (content-based) or naturalistic (mimetic). Second, the “unstageability” of certain aspects of Gestic Realism provided both a resistance to the bourgeois institution of theater, which according to Brecht “can stage anything: it ‘theatricalizes’ it all,” and a sense of recognition to the Indian audience. If this resistance was due to the aesthetics of Gestic Realism, which got produced in the psyche of the activated audience rather than onstage, then the recognition was primarily because of a connection between Gestic Realism and the “poetic realism” of traditional Indian theater. I analyze one such instance of Brechtian aesthetics—that is, of Gestus, a Brechtian device that establishes a “visible connection” between “the actor's body” and its relationship with “social contexts.” Besides highlighting the formation of a new theatrical idiom through this analysis of Gestus, I argue that the device of Gestus is dependent on the social and political contexts of the target audience, which means that the Indian version of Brechtian theater will continue to be different from its European counterpart. Importantly, the Indian production requires a new Gestus that remains comprehensible to the local audience.