"Defamiliarization Effect"

19 nov. 2010

Today I really enjoyed the class. We talked a little about the Stanislavski method (naturalism) again and then we moved to Bertolt Brecht with the “Defamiliarization Effect”

Bertolt Brecht's Defamiliarization Effect (sometimes called "estrangement effect" or "alienation effect"; German Verfremdungseffekt) tries to prevent the audience's succumbing to the usual illusion that is inherent in the presentation of a play, by distancing the spectator from what is happening on stage. The element of surprise such as actors moving and speaking from among the rows of the audience, or actors exchanging parts and characters in the course of a play, for example, is meant to confront, and make the audience aware of the usual mimetic presentation in a play and instead make them reflect on what they see.

Bertolt Brecht coined the term "defamiliarization effect" for an approach to theater that focused on the central ideas and decisions in the play, and discouraged involving the audience in an illusory world and in the emotions of the characters. Brecht thought the audience required an emotional distance to reflect on what is being presented.

At the beginning I didn’t really get what was going on but then, when Libby took us to the stage and did some exercise with us I got it. Libby took the scene of Derek and Danie “Art” and Sidingo and Amelia ones “My children my Africa” as examples. She ask both of them to repeat a part of their scene first saying as a reported speech the action they were going to do, then saying their speech. In the first case I didn’t like the result because it made the scene slower and boring. In “My children my Africa” case as far as I’m concerned the scene became better because it made you focus in the single character, their emotion and no more (physical) distraction in the stage.

As we discuss later, this method is very useful because after familiarizing with the play and focusing on the emotions, the connections between the actors in the stage, you also have to break “the 4^th wall”, and create a connection between actors and public. You focus more in yourself and use correctly your body language in order that the audience can always understand what is going on in the stage by looking at “the picture” created by the actors.

Gugu