By CECILIA AZEVEDO*
Article produced as an activity of the Training Sector of the Homeless Workers Movement.
Did you know that during the revolution the workers occupy the factories, the State, the streets, transport, but they also occupy the stages?
Today I'm going to talk a little about an artist, a poet, a playwright called Bertolt Brecht. A person who was both in the theater and in the struggle and who piously insisted on occupying the stage in order to change reality.
Brecht was born at the very end of the 1898th century in 1914 in Germany, a country that only a few years later, in XNUMX, would be one of the great protagonists of the First World War and after the Second World War, with the rise of Nazism. Furthermore, we also cannot forget that at that time, the end of the XNUMXth century and the beginning of the XNUMXth century, Germany was undergoing an intense industrial and capitalist development. With all this, we have already managed to get an idea of what the scenario of Brecht's childhood, adolescence and adult life was like, which would greatly influence his way of seeing and acting in the world.
Bertolt Brecht was a very interested artist. He was very fond of clowning, pantomime, cabaret, he loved Charlie Chaplin. But one of his greatest contributions to world theater was his work on epic theater and the formation of what we know as Brechtian epic theatre. And to have an idea of the impact of this work by Brecht, we just have to think that it is by a man from Germany who came to influence even Brazilian theater. This was a theater that somewhat embraced Brecht's political aspirations and his dissatisfaction with a system that feeds on the exploitation of working people and promotes war.
Brecht built this epic theater so that it would cause an effect, like strangeness, that would awaken the audience. That when seeing a play, people would also see the world, and leave the theater not the way they entered, but with that famous flea behind their ear. It is through this format that he evidenced and highlighted in many of his plays the absurdities of the capitalist system and the struggle of the working people, as is the case of the play The exception and the rule which portrays a situation of exploitation by a merchant over a coolie, a porter.
We can also talk about several other pieces, such as A rozhodão that tells the story of a revolutionary group on a mission, or of Terror and Misery in the Third Reich that portrays the Nazi regime, or the play Mother Courage. Just by listening to the title “Mãe Coragem”, we are already able to visualize many of our comrades in the MTST, mothers, workers, women of struggle. mother courage it's about them. The story of a woman who had to face being a worker and a mother in a war scenario.
Brecht always believed a lot in the revolutionary struggle. Very different from those people who say that those who go to the streets and those who occupy the streets are lazy or violent, Brecht defended the struggle as a necessary reaction to a system that exploits and oppresses. That's why he said: "the river that drags everything is said to be violent, but nobody says violent the banks that compress it".
Bertolt Brecht passed away exactly 64 years ago, on August 14, 1956. It's been a while, but he still remains in the memory of many for being a person who, despite presenting a harsh reality several times, conveys hope and overflows it artistically. A person who even witnessed fascism, Nazism, still had faith in the fight. Brecht wrote Mother Courage while fleeing the Nazis, and continued writing, fighting for a better world. “Do not accept what is customary as a matter of course, because in times of bloody disorder, organized confusion, conscious arbitrariness and dehumanized humanity, nothing must seem natural, nothing must seem impossible to change”. Bertolt Brecht.
* Cecilia Azevedo is a student of Performing Arts and Public Administration and is part of the Homeless Workers Movement (MTST).
