distancing effect

is a style of performance in which the audience is never allowed to forget that they are watching a play, a representation of reality rather than reality itself in an attempt to produce an active, critical engagement in the audience.

Brecht’s famous ‘Distancing Effect’ (sometimes referred to as the ‘Alienation Effect’) generated a style of performance in which the audience is never allowed to forget that they are watching a play, a representation of reality rather than reality itself. In this sense, Brecht’s theatre produces a distancing effect between audience and actors which is analogous to the distancing between reader and text which Barthes seeks to produce in his works on Michelet and Racine. The purpose of Brechtian distancing, or alienation, is also relatable to Barthes’s work on Michelet and Racine in that it seeks to produce an active, critical engagement in the audience (CE: 34–5).

is a form of theater that does not allow us to confuse the theatrical world for the real world. In so doing, it makes us question things which society would have us believe are inevitable.

Brechtian theatre is radical, therefore, since, unlike bourgeois theatre, it does not allow us to confuse the theatrical world with the actual world. It distances the one from the other. In so doing, Brechtian theatre makes us question things which society would have us believe are inevitable, Natural. p.29

distancing effect, n.Definitions

distancing effect