Pirated pedagogy: Repurposing brecht’s performance techniques for revolutions in teaching

Abstract

For over twenty years I have employed a teaching strategy in the university classroom and rehearsal hall with repeated success: recycling a performance of Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill's "Pirate Jenny" as demonstration of Brecht's techniques for Epic Theatre. I first performed the song playing Polly Peachum in The Brecht Company's production of The Threepenny Opera in Ann Arbor, Michigan in 1989. Now a professor, I repeat my performance in the classroom to teach Brecht's aesthetics and demonstrate the power of his techniques to raise social consciousness and inspire action towards revolutionary change. Regardless of the course, this performance has been the single most effective method I've employed for teaching Brecht's theories in a quarter century in higher education. Not only does it actively demonstrate Brecht's Verfremdungseffekt (distancing or alienation effect), disrupting classroom norms on multiple levels, it opens up relational dynamics between professor and students, revealing the performative aspects of classroom exchanges. The multiple acts of recycling at work demonstrate the power of layered aesthetic and pedagogical strategies to engage students on many levels and entertain while teaching. Through I originally aimed this exercise to demonstrate Brecht's methods, I have the found that performing in class engages feminist pedagogical strategies in meaningful ways. The intersections between Brecht's theories for the stage and feminist teaching methods open the potential for repurposing Brecht's theories in innovative applications to support new philosophies and practices in an evolving academy.