Getting to know Bertolt Brecht-

Bertolt Brecht is best known for his plays and poems, in which he embraced anti-bourgeois themes and being forced from his native Germany.Bertolt Brecht was born February 10, 1898 in Germany, he began writing plays while working at an Army hospital. Brecht's work fit nicely with the Dadaist and Marxist movement of the time. The increased dissatisfaction with society after World War I fit Brecht's anti-bourgeois writing. He fled Nazi Germany and settled in the US, until setting in Berlin following World War II.

Gestus is socially encoded expression that is consciously employed by an actor. It is inspired by Charlie Chaplin and his ability to express social types through silent physical movement and mime.

Brecht felt that traditional theatre focused too much on facial expression and so gestures dried up. He wanted people to investigate their body own body language as well as the body language of a social class, their mannerisms and customs included. As Brecht was uninterested in traditional, psychological drama that presents the mental attitudes and actors of its protagonists as God-given or unknown forces, he wanted to display a character’s actions as choices a person makes because of the social factors affecting them. For example, a ‘peasant’ would lick their plate not because they were a peasant but because that is how they had been brought up to behave in a less wealthy climate.