Throw the Comrade in the Limepit: Brecht and Group Performance

In the Galleries:

HERD
Community and Project Space

(Maura Brewer + Maya Gurantz, Artemisa Clark,
Vanessa Roveto and Melissanthi Saliba)
investigate histories of humans differentiating themselves from each other and nature through site-responsive and timely work activated through audience engagement.

Free Lecture-Demonstration

THROW THE COMRADE IN THE LIMEPIT:
BRECHT AND GROUP PERFORMANCE

Join us as Maya Gurantz presents a public, interactive lecture-demonstration on Bertolt Brecht’s The Measures Taken. Written for workers’ choruses in the 1930s, Brecht’s lehrstuck, or learning plays, marked one of the earliest attempts at what contemporary art would refer to as Social Practice. In The Measures Taken, Agitators attempt to convince a Control Chorus (performed by the workers’ chorus) that they did the right thing by killing a Young Comrade, re-enacting the events leading up to his death to demonstrate that they were operating on behalf of the collective good.