The animation of sameness

It is well known that Bertolt Brecht’s Lehrstücke or “learning plays” were meant to instruct the actors before the eyes of the audience. To achieve this, the actors need to master a particular tension of gazes: they not only need to absorb those gazes directed at them from the audience but also control those that they themselves may return to the audience, all the more if the absorbed gazes are underlaid with affect. This tense thicket of charged glances is Brecht’s provocation of all theatrical conventions. Diderot had defined conventional theater staging as centered on the “actor’s paradox,” which dictates that the actor must induce the audience’s emotions and reactions while suppressing any gazes or displays of affect during the play. Brecht’s returned gaze takes down this “inner fourth wall” of the actor and makes use of an inversion of Diderot’s premise. The social sciences know this inversion as the “observer’s paradox,” according to which the mere presence of the observer’s gaze may influence the observed in their actions. It was Brecht’s innovation to implement the observer’s paradox as a motivating structure at the ground of his Lehrstücke. While this figuration of returned gazes was absent from theater before Brecht, there is, however, one notable older form of the performing arts in which the fourth wall had to be constitutively absent: performances by acrobats, clowns, and other makeshift acts that directly engage with the viewer in streets, building entrances, and other provisional spaces. The returned gaze often initiates such performances, and it is this very constitution of the returned gaze that creates the particular tension and attraction between audience and stage in the Brechtian learning play. Brecht insisted that the instructional character of the actors’ performances must not be interrupted, even if this means that the gaze of the onlookers shall be left unanswered as they are instructed. The fourth wall of the theatrical stage, therefore, does not completely disappear but is made