Presented by the Goethe-Institut and the Bertelsmann Foundation.
Join us for an evening of music, theater, and poetry from Bertolt Brecht, the German artist who straddled the categories of popular and elite culture. It is the third event in the program
The Elite and the Popular in the Arts.
The evening will feature excerpts from Brecht's play,
The Resistable Rise of Arturo Ui, presented by
SCENA Theatre. There will also be selections from
The Threepenny Opera, which recently appeared on stage at
Catholic University. Poet
Joshua Weiner will read some of Brecht's most intriguing and provocative verses. And there will be a couple surprises as well from the Brecht repertoire.
RSVP
The Goethe-Institut Washington is proud to partner with the Bertelsmann Foundation for The Elite and the Popular in the Arts, a web project and an event series that takes a closer look at the complex relationship between popular culture and elite culture across art forms and throughout history. Historically, elitism and popular culture have often been viewed as diametrically opposed, as though elitism co-opts and looks down upon the popular culture that initially formed it – and as though an art form, once "elite-ified," cannot again return to pop culture.
Bertold Brecht’s
Arturo Ui is a tale of the meteoric rise of a small-time Brooklyn hoodlum who takes over the Cauliflower racket in 1930’s Chicago. Ui ruthlessly disposes of his competitors to enrich himself and gain power. Both entertaining and provocative, this play is a powerful parable to Hitler’s rise to power in Germany.
Founded in 1987 under the leadership of Artistic Director Robert McNamara and Managing Director Amy Schmidt,
SCENA Theatre produces an annual season of plays, embassy events, and a workshop series of staged readings aimed at developing bold new plays from around the globe.
Joshua Weiner is the author of three books of poetry (all from University of Chicago Press). His
Berlin Notebook, reporting about the refugee crisis in Germany, was published by
Los Angeles Review of Books in 2016. He has received Whiting, Guggenheim, and Rome Prize fellowships, as well as the Amy Lowell Traveling Scholarship, which took him to Berlin for 2012-13. He teaches at the University of Maryland, and lives in Washington, DC
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