"Some people are born strange": A Brechtian theater pedagogy as philosophical ethnography

Abstract

The article explores the role of a Brechtian theater pedagogy as “philosophical ethnography” in four investigative drama based workshops, which took international students’ intercultural “strangeness” experiences as the starting point for aesthetic experimentation. It is argued that a Brechtian theater pedagogy allows for a productive rather than representational orientation in research, which is underpinned by a love for the aesthetic “re-entanglement” of (dis-embodied) language and ethical concerns about mimetic representational acts. To show how a Brechtian research pedagogy functioned as philosophical ethnography, the article maps the aesthetic transformation of participant Jamal’s verbatim account in the drama workshops—from (a) its emergence in a post-creative-writing discussion in Workshop 2, to (b) its enactment as a body sculpture in Workshop 3, and (c) to its translation into a rehearsal piece in Workshop 4.