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" Showing the Gestus : "
Mumford, Meg
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Latin Dissertation
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| Record Number
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1097198
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TLets502928
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| Main Entry
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Mumford, Meg
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| Title & Author
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Showing the Gestus :\ Mumford, Meg
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| College
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University of Bristol
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| Date
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1997
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| student score
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1997
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| Degree
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Ph.D.
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| Abstract
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Despite Brecht's emphasis on its centrality to his theatre, the concept of Gestushas only recently begun to receive more extensive analysis. This thesis contributes tothe emergent research field through its exploration of several relatively unexploredareas. Firstly, it offers an account of the obscurity and scholarly neglect of the term'Gestus' especially with regard to conceptual, linguistic and translation difficulties.Secondly, it presents original archival research into how Brecht applied his concept ofGestus to acting during his work in Berlin between 1949 and 1956. And thirdly, itinvestigates the role and relevance of Gestus in contemporary Anglo-American theatre.The reconstruction of Gestus is supplemented by a deconstruction of itspotential and limitations as a tool for creating political theatre which resists oppressivediscourses. With regard to 'potential', this study examines those moments when theMarxist Gestus presents an alternative to dominant tendencies within Western theatre.With regard to 'limitations', two main types of constraint are addressed. The first canbe defined as the 'transgression' of the Marxist parameters within which gesticperformance was constructed. The second constraint involves the 'suppression' ofuseful possibilities within and beyond the confines of those parameters.By means of the deconstructive strategy, gestic acting is exposed as a rich siteof contradictions. Chapter One focuses mainly on the tensions between a bourgeoisindividualist and Marxist approach to gesture and an oscillation between the assertion ofGestus as a new Marxist aesthetic principle and as an old rhetorical device. ChapterTwo highlights the contradiction between a mechanistic and dialectical materialism andthe aesthetic interplay between the flux of montage and the stasis of analytical tableau.In Chapter Three the major tension explored is that between an avant-gardeexperimental and a deictic realist approach to gestural style.It is in the final two chapters that the role of gestic acting within contemporarytheatre is investigated. Chapter Four argues that Gestus is the key to the differencebetween Brechtian and Stanislavskian modes of acting and demonstrates the exclusionof the Gestus in recent mainstream British theatre where performance often remainsdominated by a Stanislavskian-derived system. Here the gestic principle is presented ascontinuing to challenge ahistorical essentialist approaches to performance. In ChapterFive the appropriation and modification of the Gestus of showing within materialistfeminist theatre is discussed and Brecht's application of Gestus in Berlin is revealed aspreempting many aspects of recent feminist theory and practice. The study concludeswith a summary of the hierarchical binary oppositions - public/private,inscription/agency, demonstration/experience, stasis/flux, populist materialist/avantgarde- which it maintains underpin and contribute to the complex status of gestic actingas both a reactionary and progressive apparatus for societal transformation.
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University of Bristol
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