Report by Ella Ziel (Theatre and Dance)
With the aid of the CALL Uehiro Travel Award, I had the opportunity to participate in and present at the International Brecht Society Symposium, held this year at the University of Victoria in Victoria, Canada. The topic of the conference was Brecht in the Anthropocene, focusing on the intersection of Brecht’s experimental political works and contemporary climate activism. Victoria was an apt location for the conference, as the beauty of the natural landscape was undercut by air pollution from nearby Vancouver wildfires, providing a concrete context for the conference.
I attended a variety of panels, keynotes, book roundtables, and performances in line with this topic. Some highlights included a workshop performance involving conference-goers creating short staged pieces centered around climate catastrophe survival, a panel on the transcultural adaptation of Brecht’s The Caucasian Chalk Circle, a lecture-recital of Brecht and Eisler’s Hollywood Elegies, and keynotes on the Brechtian potential of certain Indian and Native American performance forms. I presented my own paper concerning an eco-critical approach to Brecht’s play The Exception and the Rule in a panel alongside two prominent Brecht scholars, Nikolaus Müller-Schöll and Aldo Milohnić, moderated by the director of the Bertolt Brecht Archive in Berlin, Noah Willumsen.
As the youngest presenter at the conference, I met, connected with, and received feedback on my work from a large number of accomplished Brecht scholars. It was also incredibly invigorating to be surrounded by scholars much further in their careers, with wealths of knowledge and unique perspectives. The connections I made at the conference will be vital to my development as a Brecht scholar, and I will be submitting the paper I presented for publication in the Brecht Yearbook’s selection of conference proceedings. The conference concluded with a nearby hike along the coast, where we were lucky enough to spot a humpback whale in the wild. We shared an experience that reminded us of the real-world implications of the scholarship we pursue.