BRECHT – HARDCORE MACHINE

The Andraš Urban’s performance Brecht – the hardcore machine is his third one at this year’s 42Bitef08. This time, the actors concentrate on the physical; they discard the last grain of intellectual thought from their bodies and from their brains. This process creates the essence of distance characteristic for Brecht’s theatre.
The bodies that are moving or marching sometimes, perfectly function as parts of a mechanism. They get transformed into a fabricated marching that creates an atmosphere of war decay, a decomposed social system, and those are the things Brecht was obsessed with right after the First World War. They achieve the lowest instinctive expression through voice mutations. A body tortured in several images eventually gets branded like cattle. Labeling, uniformity – nowadays, those are the common words. Repression over body can be seen not only as an inevitable means of military manipulation, which is present nowadays as well as at Brecht’s time, but as a means of modern industry too. Having a perfect and healthy body is just an approach of fashion industry. Human body is a tool for destruction in the military regime. It gets tortured and after a while it disappears. In the fashion industry, the body is exposed to hunger and it gets destructed in order to survive. It seems that destruction is the only way of survival.
Andraš Urban offers a range of interpretations. Historical reminiscence (opposing Stalinism) becomes universal. Using Brecht’s Buckow Elegies, Urban seems to revive Brecht’s last thoughts, endowing the performance with irony. A combination of certain images and words enhances the irony. Brecht wrote them at the end of his life and this performance has a certain quality of presenting his whole life and work. Despite his typical approach, Andraš Urban creates a play significantly different from his earlier opus and shows a wide range of his artistic sentiment.
At the round table, the excellent actors and the director could not precisely explain the process of creating the performance. The director did not show inclination towards philosophical interpretations and the actors have tried to use some abstract notions to describe their approach to Brecht, which made it quite clear that they could not entirely interpret the theatre vortex they were thrown into. As if they had encountered a moment of Brecht’s Verfremdungseffekt. This temporary handicap of the participants proves the rich theatre meaning and experience of the performance.

Ana Isakovic