How relevant are Bertolt Brecht’s political writings today? Tom Kuhn’s project explored this question through collaboration with Sphinx Theatre and Crisis Skylight, a homelessness charity. A group of Crisis’s clients were invited to attend a series of writing and performing workshops, investigating Brecht’s poetry and using it as a springboard for their own writing. The writing produced in these workshops formed part of two sold-out theatre productions.
At the Old Fire Station in Oxford, Brecht’s poetry was performed alongside poetry written in the workshops. It was also included as part of Alchymy, the North Wall Arts Centre’s festival of new theatre writing.
For Tom, the Fellowship led to two articles about Brecht’s performance poetry, and contributed to his editorial work on a volume of Brecht’s Collected Poems. However, Tom stresses that the Fellowship’s more intangible outcomes were the most important: namely, ‘the impact that the work had on the sense of self-worth of the homeless people with whom we worked, and the impact that this whole experience has had on the way I write about the poetry elsewhere… It was altogether an extremely moving and enlightening experience. The exchange with theatre professionals should be an essential part of the work of anyone interested in performance, and the exchange with such a marginalised and disadvantaged sector of the public was a revelation for me.’
Knowledge Exchange Fellowships Brochure
