Tropen des Kollektiven

The artistic work in theater is directly cooperative and always involves working on its own form. Theater makers in the Weimar Republic attempted to anticipate a better, non-capitalist society, both realistically and imaginatively, while reflecting on their actions. Why did this attempt end in a celebration of large productions instead of a liberation from them or a naive use of racist stereotypes? Tropes of the Collective addresses these questions by tracing such a failure of utopia through the example of Epic Theater - the Piscator stage, the Group 31, and the experimental group that included Bertolt Brecht. Because the book fundamentally questions the regime of artistic labor, the answers it provides apply not only to the theater avant-garde.